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by crop_rotation 347 days ago
HN is so weirdly optimistic that SWE jobs will not decline terribly in the age of LLMs. Yes claude code can not write a new web browser from scratch or even some innovative project, but almost nobody is doing that. Most of non big tech is writing the same CRUD apps with trivial differences. Even 90% of big tech (outside the core infra) is just writing CRUD apps. I have worked at two big tech companies in fairly senior levels and almost everyone is doing CRUD work, not that there is anything wrong with it.

But the comments saying Claude can't replace some genius are irrelevant. The amount of SWEs at big tech itself is so high that law of averages dictate most people are not rockstars (and this is validated in my observations). Most SWEs just write internal RPC to internal RPC wrappers. I am seeing that everyone is relying a lot on these tools, and the new SWEs seem to utterly depend on them. HN users will always have some edge case pointed out but most of software is crud apps low scale (even big tech most internal tool is low scale) and these tools are definitely doing better than the median SWE I have encountered.

1 comments

> HN is so weirdly optimistic that SWE jobs will not decline terribly in the age of LLMs.

I mean, this is about the fourth "this will massively reduce the need for programmers" thing in the last 20 years. And it increasing feels like the previous ones; lots of hype, lots of marketing, very little empirical evidence that it's doing anything much.

For CRUD stuff _in particular_, people have been promising CRUD without icky programmers any day now for longer than most users of this website have been alive.

Yes. "No code" was the hot topic last decade. I think LLMs will make individual programmers more productive, but demand for software is very elastic. Medium-term (next 10-20 years), I think we'll just be producing more software.