I often read here comments along the lines of "there will be plenty of jobs for AI-unfuckers" [1], but I fear the truth may be closer to "sometimes things are broken, are then fixed with a broken solution, and will remain broken till the end of time".

In my last round of job search this year no one asked me questions about good software practices but they did ask me how proficient I was with AI agents. And let's not forget that we are part of an industry whose motto is "move fast and break things". Sure, NASA has a zero-bugs approach to software dev, but they don't have room for all of us.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44646820

I'm am certainly an "ai believer" and have been since I saw the tragectory we were on.

It was pretty simple to project the compounding effects and headroom that we had. I go back and forth on this all the time.

There probably won't be much demand for "un-fuckers". Up until recently I thought knowing what to build for a given context would give you quite a bit of runway.

I still think knowing what you should build will be important for the next 12-24 months.. but I have to be honest.. after that.. I don't know.

I don't know how to feel myself. I'm certainly an "ideas" guy as well as a nitty gritty build it guy. I just think my technical side is depreciating very rapidly.

Completely agree. Saying this as someone who loves handcrafting code and has been doing it professionally for decades, it looks like a dead end at this point. LLM generated code might not be pretty, but these damn models are already so good at handling complexity, that they can actually work fine with a byzantine code base (which honestly would also describe most human-derived codebases I have worked with). I am still reeling from this realization and trying to figure out what it means.

> these damn models are already so good at handling complexity, that they can actually work fine with a byzantine code base

Not really. They're only as good as whatever they are prompted for. If you prompt them for the wrong thing, they'll do it. Great tools, human error

> I still think knowing what you should build will be important for the next 12-24 months.. but I have to be honest.. after that.. I don't know.

I'll bet we'll all still work in software in 24 months

I used to think there'd be space for unfuckers. Now I'm doubftul.

Yeah I could do management and all that crap but I was Eng Manager for 5 months and hated it.

Some of us are like huskies, we need to run on the Siberian Permafrost in order to thrive, else we get depressed.

That's me.

You're misunderstanding. There is space for people who aren't so stupid that their prompts are stupid and their output is stupid and they sling and spam their stupid shit all over your system and attempt to get it committed and screw everything up.

SV echo chamber here it seems. No, most businesses globally don't work in idiotic and often amoral mode of 'move fast and break things' (and unlawful on top of that, but who has time for some boring stuff like that when greed fully takes over).

Banks will not work like that for next 10 years at least. The tiny amount of money one could save on those big banking projects by using llms aggressively will bite back immediately when shit just doesn't work, clients leave for good and regulators will fine you to the ground (or remove your banking license). Many other businesses who are not race to the bottom and realize how crucial reliable IT is to their business also won't go that way anytime soon.

World is not ending, there is some transformation and thats about it. Its true there will be much less jobs for devs but its mostly affecting newcomers. Statistical models are not making code better than experienced humans, and won't for some time if ever.

> most businesses globally don't work in idiotic and often amoral mode of 'move fast and break things'

Not sure what business you are in but the non tech industries (corporate IT, in house apps) have not, in general, been associated with quality. Cost cutting, outsourcing to the lowest bidder: yes. Quality: no.

Mostly banking but dipped my feet in many other areas in the past (telco, insurance, municipalities, army etc).

Its true budgets are often the problem, but not much 'move fast and break things' mantra of SV, rather 'move as much as low budget and corresponding quality and bureaucracy allows you to'

There's a lot of distortion on this forum. Some people don't consider anything less than being overpaid by venture capital furnaces as worthwhile work.

> I often read here comments along the lines of "there will be plenty of jobs for AI-unfuckers"

That's not what I've said though.

> "sometimes things are broken, are then fixed with a broken solution, and will remain broken till the end of time".

That's true of a lot of software. But the big bucks things right now have too much money riding on them to be broken and remain broken. Every big tech co right now is talking about and sharing solutions for how to handle the wave of AI generated code that hits their systems from internal devs every day. Reliability is not at levels it was before. Change safety is far more challenging. Move fast and break things was shelved long ago at these companies. It's only popular in the public imagination.

That's not to say these companies will stop using AI. Absolutely not. It's a great tool, but like all tools it needs an ecosystem built around it. It needs evals, debugging, maintenance, telemetry, etc. It ultimately needs goals and directions driven by human beings who understand the domain well enough to steer. And that's why devs like OP are important now and will remain so for quite a while bc the rise of AI is the rise of many new and challenging engineering problems.

> In my last round of job search this year no one asked me questions about good software practices but they did ask me how proficient I was with AI agents

So what? How does this change anything I said? Being proficient with AI agents is far easier if you have the domain knowledge about what they should produce and far harder if you have no idea.

And anyways, what you're asked in interviews is not a mirror of the job. I see many people every day at work who are lauded and praised for using their knowledge to course correct and improve AI agents and other AI workflows. The idea that there will come a point where they work perfectly and don't need to be messed with, well that's also true of software and services. But it doesn't mean big tech companies with quite stable main services just stopped hiring people years and years ago

This is what’s know as “cope”. People are not being hired on the basis of how well they know how to not use AI. That is the basis of what people were hired on before AI, because no alternative existed.

> People are not being hired on the basis of how well they know how to not use AI.

Oh look a thing I never said being refuted

> pre-AI taste

You pretty clearly did say this.

Look at the COBOL devs. They are been called in their retirement years. You don't want that to be you. Life is short

Have you seen what they charge per hour? Let’s just say it’s not Upwork rates.

my uncle is 70+ years old and he's one of those haha

I saw him starting at a monitor at midnight, back all hunched up and thought "nope, not what I envision"