Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sublinear 806 days ago
I don't know enough about the other disciplines, but the SWE one would be the other way around and serially dependent. The architecture comes first and then the implementation details can be handed off to the prompt engineer.

Then the code review will still require a human senior developer and maybe the architect. The testing after that can be fuzzed by AI but will still need to be confirmed by a human senior QA specialist.

In other words, AI can lower the bar for entry level work (not by much), but it does not eliminate or create any new jobs. It's very similar to what search did for entry level work. Search results "powered by AI" are also over a decade old.

2 comments

This has been my impression overall with AI so far as someone with Senior in their title.

AI is very good at doing things that can be unit tested, or doing small implementation details.

It falls flat on its face when you ask it to understand architectural patterns, or even reference other classes/modules in a broader codebase.

The hard part about coding is rarely the code, more often it is understanding the human side of things, and how you can fulfill real world needs of users.

I think it actually replaces an army of junior engineers or your offshore development house. The real engineering continues while the grunt work is farmed out to AI. It also kills the junior engineer since there will be years where they are less valuable than something with a marginal cost close to zero.