Re:Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
by hatthew on Monday May 11, 2026 @02:44PM
(#48099008)
In no particular order
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Re:Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
by PizzaBorsch on Monday May 11, 2026 @03:03PM
(#48099241)
AI can do everything you listed except chats with coworkers and slacking off.
I just don't think you've utilized the most recent versions of codex or claude.
Re:Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
by hatthew on Monday May 11, 2026 @08:46PM
(#48102780)
It's definitely theoretically possible, but not there yet. I use cursor, claude (opus 4.7), and several proprietary LLMs/LLM frameworks at my job. The institutional knowledge I have wouldn't fit in the context window, and AIs lack my mental index/intuition of where to look for answers. When my AI makes a PR, I generally have to make some important changes, without which it's solution would be fundamentally broken. AI also cannot be trusted to make the right business tradeoff decisions.
Re:Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
by Shocka1 on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @04:19PM
(#48113947)
Many things at my software engineering job are like this, which require constantly changing human institutional knowledge that is almost always undocumented, or changing so quickly that it isn't relevant anymore. By the time you decide to automate it, the process changes. Tribal knowledge used to be something I hated seeing senior engineers keeping to themselves, but now it seems like an asset.
Re:Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
by throwaway2037 on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @02:29AM
(#48104910)
> Slacking off
I laughed when I read this, but there is something to it. I like to say "intellectual relaxation" or take a break. Sometimes getting up from your desk to do some mindless admin task like photocopy a document for HR can free up your mind. If we were line workers at a factory, this would be mandated breaks. Business/Financial newspapers and factory executives love the old quote: "With robots, they never need a break, never need holiday, and can work 24x7." With the advent of agentic LLMs, a tiny fraction of that reality is leaking into the white collar world.