Ask HN: What is the current trajectory of a senior engineer?
I've been thinking about when the need for a human in the design loop ceases. Given that LLMs are RL'd to the max with everything that can be given a wrong/right answer (code/maths), what's stopping Anthropic, OpenAI et al. from internally building and maybe buying datasets of good and bad architecture, and RL'ing that? Given that LLMs were a fancy autocomplete back in 2024, and now people are talking about building 'software factories' with agents, what in your mind is the stop to this development? Why would software architecture be hard for agents still in a year or two? I see more and more examples of software developers ignoring this and saying 'humans still have a place in guiding the agents and designing the architecture'. I think (businesswise) the need for actual software programmer skills is 90% out in a few years, and product lead etc people will be favored more as they have more people skills. It was a good run.
- dimbletimbers
I think devs and people on HN way overestimate how much the average person knows about or cares about or desires to interact with a computer. Whatever the job becomes, if you like talking to the computer and know how to get it to do anything besides show an email or youtube, you’re ahead of the curve and can likely stay there.
- RugnirViking
I'll suggest more focus on performance, testing, and observability.
Human understanding + quality/maintainability is where the money is at. Learn to make those things with agents.
I don't think engineers will truly go extinct, though there may well be less of them. I think the recent discussion around "AI usage is a skill" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063427 captures my feeling - there are things to learn, and likely will continue to be, to get the best out of these tools. That means some people will be paid to do it. See to it that you are one of those
- bradfa
Before we had LLMs, we had product managers, project managers, scrum leaders, etc as roles on software engineering teams. I think as LLM-enabled development progresses we'll start to see these roles and the crossover to engineering continue to meld.
It's not like engineers didn't know that project management, voice of the customer, and organizing tasks as an intermediary between engineering and management was a thing that could/should/needed to be done. It was just a delegation of tasks before because there was more work than one person could do. Now, all of these roles can be partly offloaded to LLMs, but still having a human in the loop to guide engineering and interface to the business/customer will still be valuable.
Knowing what to build overall, what to build next, what's coming later, and how the product relates to the business goals is still very much a human endeavor.
- gregwebs
Senior engineer and all SWE positions will become more like a technical lead.
If you can direct AI and produce more value per $/time spent then a non software engineer directing AI to develop software then you still can produce a lot of value.
This should be the case now for most things that are not a prototype. The job has changed from "writing code" to "shipping software". A technical lead.
Software products making ever more intelligent AI software development accessible will continue to reduce the need for software engineer involvement. But there’s also going to be 1000x more software. So there may continue to be opportunities for those that adapt.
- apimade
Because sometimes bad architecture is the correct architecture, and good architecture is the wrong choice.
You think we’d have Carmack’s DOOM with “best practice”? Hell no.
I’ve worked for incredibly talented people who choose the wrong technology, approach and design for problems they could have predicted or anticipated, had they seen it or a similar problem before, or had context about the organisation, customer or size of team managing the proposed solution. But they don’t.
AI is great at giving textbook and “Enterprise grade” solutions; but as code production cost reduces — I think the value of simple, digestible solutions will grow. TDD et al can also be helpful, but at a certain point it becomes too abstracted, too complicated, too hard for any one person to grasp.
At that point I think test managers who understand user journeys will be worth their weight in gold, and the real value in any solution becomes good, represented testing.