llm/0c2f997f-ee88-4da1-8587-79dca97bbc3f/topic-17-6abecd50-7c68-4c75-9686-782ecb6c6a66-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Future of Software Engineering Jobs COMMENTS: 1. Pandora's box is open; we're moving towards a world where white collar workers will be working 24/7 and they'll be expected to do so. It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in. I'm a heavy LLM user. On a daily basis, I find LLMs extremely useful both professionally and personally. But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful. 2. This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped. The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it. 3. It would be a deep irony if LLMs ended up ushering in the social rupture that never arrived in the industrial era. When the pigs turn hogs and refuse to share even the scraps, they shouldn’t be surprised if the system they depend on becomes their undoing. 4. This is a complete fantasy. If LLM's got to this point of sophistication there would be a total revolution in almost every industry. Society would be radically different. Since LLM's are nowhere near this, I'm not so sure we even have Pandora's box, let alone opened it. 5. Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign. This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion. For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist. Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable". I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accoun 6. > I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign. Yeah I've sort of noticed this on X for the brief time I was on there this weekend. The Claude Code creator was hyping it up to the moon, and when people called him out for it he said he would feel the same way if he wasn't making 1000 racks a year with it. Sure mate. What people don't realise is if tech progresses to the point where everything is automated, the marginal cost of everything will basically go to zero. It would be better to give away food and shelter for free if it keeps things peaceful. And if not, people have revolted for far less. That being said it's a complete utopia and once this bubble pops we are basically going to be where we were, but with excellent natural language parsing and generation, with some useful code generation and introspection tools, writing assistants, etc. Which will be great, but not world changing. 7. >> only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable the thing most (especially non-devs) don't understand is that if software can be automated - 99% of all knowledge work will be replaced, as software is the ultimate automation. There would be absolutely no issues automating accountants/lawyers/etc etc etc. Sure few will be left but 99% can be automated when software is that advanced. Not only knowledge work, also a massive amount of blue collar jobs. AI already can guide you how to fix a lot of things or analyze issues with plumbing/electricity/you name it. So if software goes down - everyone will go down. 8. > white collar workers will be working 24/7 Where we're going, there's no "white collars workers" anymore. Only white collars Claude agents. 9. You still need humans to supervise them. Just a lot less. 10. Yeah, there's no way we have these careers in 30 years. The best we can do is wrestle the control away from hyperscalers and get as much of this capability into the open as possible. Stop using Anthropic products and start using weight available models. (I'm not talking ICs - I mean the entire startup / tech ecosystem.) 11. Or, use the best tools to make the best products you can and stake your claim before all the low hanging fruit is picked 12. I don’t think doing that will change anything. Only real options - without a career shift - that I’ve identified are to work for companies building something that’s never been built before, or building a SaaS that serves a niche. 13. It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems. I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary. In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology wil 14. I've been writing software for 30 years, a part of it had success in the sense of being widely known and adopted for a long time. Writing software is difficult, consumes time and is difficult as you get older to focus the needed time away from other matters like a professional life and family. With LLM, my productivity suddenly went up x25 and was able to produce at a speed that I had never known. I'm not a developer any more, instead feels like project manager with dedicated resources always delivering results. It isn't perfect, but when you are used to manage teams it isn't all that different albeit the results are spectacularly better. My x25 isn't just measured on development, for brainstorming, documentation, testing, deployment. It is transformative, in fact: I think software is dead. For the first time I've used neither a paper notebook nor even an IDE to build complex and feature-complete products. Software isn't what matters, what matters is the product and this is what the 15. Using Claude code Pro with a maxed subscription and ChatGPT Codex with the business subscription. The code is written in Dart and never wrote a line of DART in my life, I'm a veteran expert around Java, C++. The reason for choosing DART is simply because it is way readier for multi-platform contexts than Java/C++. The same code base now runs on Linux, Android, iOS, OSX, Windows and Web (as static HTML). Plus the companion code in C++ for ESP32 microcontrollers. It also includes a CLI for running as linux server. Don't ask me for a hard analysis and data proving x25 performance increase, what I know is that an off-grid product was previously taking me two years of research/effort to build in Android/Web and get a prototype running. Now in about a month went far above all previous expectations (cached maps with satellite imagery, bluetooth mesh, webRTC, whatever apps) and was able to release a product several times per day that works as envisioned. Iterating quickly and getting direct 16. You'd be surprised what you can do with Claude Code. Pick any mature programming language, including niche ones like Ada and treat the project seriously. Write detailed agent files, features spec files, start from the bottom with CI/CD and set up a test suite, coding guidelines, static analysis. Be careful to create a consistent architecture and code base early. You'll get a lot further and faster than you'd expect. Things will probably plateau as you master the new tech, but it's possible you'll not write a ton of code manually along the way. Oh, your general software development experience should help with debugging the weird corner cases. I imagine it's really hard to do this with 0 software dev experience, for example. Yeah, you'll build some simple things but you'll need and entire tech education to put anything complex in prod. 17. If you think the profession has enough time to organize reasonable unions, you’re an optimist. Pessimists are changing careers altogether as we speak. Either way it’s been a fun ride. 18. Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology. I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here: LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs). The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications. For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate. ... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anythin 19. I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction? Consider "Uber, but for X" This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber. I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ??? Maybe something like (just spitballing) The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things? Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work? Hmm Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding? 20. > Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding? Yeah, this feels right. It's like a process of condensing: new ideas brought to life condense metaphors into more compact forms and so make language more dense and expressive. This idea reminds me of Julian Jaynes's description of metaphor condensation in Origin of Consciousness. A lot of hard work goes into novel products, but once that work has been proven, it is substantially more trivial for human or machine to copy. Groping around in the darkness of new, at the edge of what-could-be is difficult work that looks simple in hindsight to others who consider that edge a given now. > The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things? Yeah, I think that naming and grouping things, then cond 21. If programmers think they can just learn a trade, they’ll bein for a rude awakening when Elon comes for their jobs next. Optimus will be doing your plumbing by the time you graduate from trade school and get your paper and internships. 22. Which suggests we should get into robotics. That was my conclusion too just yesterday while thinking about this. 23. Somebody needs to be able to repair our new overlords until they can repair themselves. 24. So 105 reasons for management to move as many jobs to AI as possible, as soon as possible. Got it. 25. Two things: 1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody. Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators? 2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place. Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate producti 26. The difference here is, you type a command into your phone at 3pm. Put it down to go play with your kid for 3hours. Type a new one in at 9pm before bed where you’ve been binging your wife’s favorite show. Then you wake up at 10am to a holistic transformation in your business that would’ve taken months previously in your career. But whatever, another command and it’s off to 11am frisbee. 27. More like you'll manage 20 agents and will be reading, reviewing and testing in between builds. Race to the bottom. 28. > It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in. I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight. A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, w 29. No thanks. I'm so glad I'm getting closer to retirement age. From a young age, all I wanted to do was program computers. _I_ wanted to do it. Not have some tool do it for me. There's no fun or interest or ... anything that comes from that. I want to solve the problems. I want to write the code. It's what I am good at and it's incredibly enjoyable to me. Why the fuck would I ever give that up? But, the world is changing. Y'all can have it... in a few short years. ;) 30. You can do that if you want. Ill refuse. Ill take a manual labor job doing basically anything else for 40 hours a week over what your describing. 31. An LLM send may send the work ticket or work order lol but i get your point 32. Are there really that many “things to do” that anyone, let alone everyone, will need to work that way? 33. In many countries, these and other jobs show you cannot. If you don't, others will and so you won't have a job very soon. Especially if these types of jobs lose their shine/prestige and are basically call center quality/pay like jobs in 5-10 years. 34. I'd love to believe that, but unless our timeline is disrupted (world war / climate change / regulation re: power generation and consumption), I unfortunately can't imagine a future different to the one I described - and I've tried! 35. This was the end game with or without AI. It was always going to result in a zero-sum game because the factories that are open around the clock can output more products - which is exactly why a lot of manufacturing has non stop shift work. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table and a competitor will gladly take it. When you saw 996 being talked about it should have set a few alarm bells off, because it started a countdown timer until such a work culture surpasses the rather leisurely attitude of the West in terms of output and velocity. West cannot compete against that no matter how many “work smarter, not harder” / “work to live don’t live to work” aphorisms it espouses. This should be obvious by now (in hindsight). You can blame LLM or capitalism or communism but the hard matter is, it’s a money world and people want to have as much of it as they possibly can, and you and your children can’t live without it, and every day someone is looking to have more of it than you are. 36. This has been like this forever. Change is that software engineers, historically spoiled and expensive is going to have a brutal reality check - aka we will work just everyone else. 37. You have a profound amount of certainty about such an absurdly dystopian vision. Why is that? 38. > it was weird to me that people were comfortable operating on a codebase that they don't have locally, that they can't directly interact with. I have a project where I've made a rule that no code is written by humans. It's been fun! It's a good experience to learn how far even pre-Opus 4.5 agents can be pushed. It's pretty clear to me that in 12 months time looking at the code will be the exception, not the rule. 39. If you are already paying $200-500/m… and you are doing the work of 10 people… I can totally see the value. I’ll check the Terragonlabs option. Lots of options for startups right now, selling pickaxes! I’m waiting for a better terminal experience, personally. I can’t deal with 30+ poorly named windows. I need to be able to search for that one thread I was working on yesterday… 40. What kind of things people are building that can be almost completely automatically built like this? 41. From my perspective: tons of very simple, duplicated software. The bad thing is - there is a lot of space on different markets for such software. Here in Poland you can earn for pretty decent life being lame programmer, but building simple automations for small companies. I was raised in a way I still don’t have courage to switch to such approach, but doing this for 3-4 such entities I can see how you can make living from that. With LLMs you can automate 90+% of the job if not more. 42. Will we still use "batch jobs" agents in 2027? Checking a Java program and downloading a 10mb program used to be slow things which now happen faster than the blink of an eye. 43. I did much similar with Tailscale over summer. But anthropic has since launched the ability to “teleport” sessions to mobile. (Claude Code is baked into the app). The iOS experience has been smooth for the most part. People keep saying things like “2026 is the year of background agents, sandboxes, etc” but imo the harness will eat the entire platform stack. It already is. It will only get better. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Future of Software Engineering Jobs
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