Nah. C-suite has (a) money and (b) legal and fiscal obligation. You literally need a human being certain legal operations, like incorporation, salary, and lawsuits.

I wouldn't count on lawyers being deemed necessary by the law for as many actions as they have been so far.

Maybe. Or maybe the C-suite salary will be cut to $50K/yr. That would make them marginally more expensive than AI, but for that price the shareholders get an extra layer of insulation should things go awry (and they won't be held personally responsible for corporate malfeasance).

> I wouldn't count on lawyers being deemed necessary by the law for as many actions as they have been so far.

Maybe, but that's pretty far down the road and would require restructuring the whole jurisprudence system.

I know the software engineering world like to think the C-Suite are disposable, but that is only because you really have no idea what they really do.

The death of SaaS could also be a thing in the (not so distant) future.

Just because it's faster and cheaper and requires less skill, doesn't mean it's instant and free and requires no skill.

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what software can do if it’s completely custom built, specifically for individuals or small businesses who could’ve never afforded it, pre-ai. Home automation, health and disease management, all sorts of administration, conversational ai over your life’s data - most people have no clue what’s possible once it’s custom built. With close attention, good design, creativity, and without giving away privacy or independence.

In my limited spare time I’m building up this tapestry of custom services for myself and my loved ones, and having a great time doing it, while trying to learn how I can offer this as a service.

Judging by the reactions I get when showing people what I can do with my phone, and no that’s not available on Google play, I think the demand will be there.

Not to say you shouldn’t! But it’s worth being realistic about income compared to (current) software salaries.

reading HN these days feels like constant gaslighting. this is so far from my reality that i wonder what folks who are saying this are working on

I don't use AI that much. When I do, it's often surprisingly competent in the topics I'm a specialist in, and it can do a lot of good work quickly. But other people in other organizations still continue building upon my work instead of asking AI directly. Apparently because they don't know what to ask.

Nobody knows how long this will last. Hopefully long enough that I can afford to retire, because I'm old enough that I would face ageism if I had to find a different job.

And if we get there, we will probably have a serious political debate on how many digits should there be in the wealth tax rate.

I just had fable 5.2 (high effort) review a change. It hallucinated 2 problems that I was only able to correct because I also understand the code.

LLMs can do any job _in theory_. It’s not a very interesting argument. Their effectiveness at various jobs is much more interesting.

and the product, the team, and (no matter how shallowly) the organizational pressures and politics. Whether we like it or not, those are part of the problems developers solve. Even something as rudimentary as knowing what is feasible to test given your deadline isn't something you can encode in a model[1]. Code does not exist in a vacuum.

I say this even with the latest models, it seems as soon as your development practice falls out of the ideals written up in blogposts of the previous ZIRP decade, you have to course correct. I use this term because the AI is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but practically useless, if not also irresponsible.

Recent anecdote (literally today): we've been having Claude write exhaustive test suites to eat at the coverage backlog. Lately, we noticed that tests in develop are even more flakier than usual. Our whole suite runs in 30-40min but lately it could exceed an hour and then fail.

It seems Claude took "exhaustive tests" to mean "exhaust the compute resources of the Jenkins node". What's worse is it wrote those tests for features that have been disabled and would soon be rewritten anyway.[1] I've always said that LLMs are great for generating test suites and this is the first time an LLM "failed" this assignment for me.

Code is cheap. The right code (or lack thereof) for the right situation takes meatspacebrainpower.

[1] The solution here is to run your company/team 100% as agents so they have the full context of project timelines, resources, customer feedback, etc. ala stevey and gtan but my reasons why I don't believe in that has already been articulated elsewhere.

Then who directs the swarm to create the most value? An executive can’t. They have other things to do so they delegate. That person will be an engineer and their attention is finite too so they will delegate. To other engineers.

Here’s the best part. You write back and say I’m wrong. Guess what? That’s engineering too. Some people have to sort out all this nonsense and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been and now engineers are supposedly not relevant.

But yeah when you get everything under control, what’s the day to day look like? Pretty freaking cushy. And then it relies on intelligence to figure out what next. Clients always want things done and having those conversations won’t get much easier with AI. Keeping up to date. Jesus I’ve exhausted myself writing all this. So much work!!