[simonw]

> LLMs are eating specialty skills. There will be less use of specialist front-end and back-end developers as the LLM-driving skills become more important than the details of platform usage. Will this lead to a greater recognition of the role of Expert Generalists? Or will the ability of LLMs to write lots of code mean they code around the silos rather than eliminating them?

This is one of the most interesting questions right now I think.

I've been taking on much more significant challenges in areas like frontend development and ops and automation and even UI design now that LLMs mean I can be much more of a generalist.

Assuming this works out for more people, what does this mean for the shape of our profession?

[petcat]

Code is, I think, rapidly becoming a commodity. It used to be that the code itself was what was valuable (Microsoft MS-DOS vs. the IBM PC hardware). And it has stayed that way for a long time.

FOSS meant that the cost of building on reusable components was nearly zero. Large public clouds meant the cost of running code was negligible. And now the model providers (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) means that the cost of producing the code is relatively small. When the marginal cost of producing code approaches zero, we start optimizing for all the things around it. Code is now like steel. It's somewhat valuable by itself, but we don't need the town blacksmith to make us things anymore.

What is still valuable is the intuition to know what to build, and when to build it. That's the je ne sais quoi still left in our profession.

[rawgabbit]

From https://annievella.com/posts/finding-comfort-in-the-uncertai...

“Ideas that surfaced: code as ‘just another projection’ of intended behaviour. Tests as an alternative projection. Domain models as the thing that endures. One group posed the provocative question: what would have to be true for us to ‘check English into the repository’ instead of code?

The implications are significant. If code is disposable and regenerable, then what we review, what we version-control, and what we protect all need rethinking.”

[simonw]

> What is still valuable is the intuition to know what to build, and when to build it. That's the je ne sais quoi still left in our profession.

Absolutely. Also crucial is what's possible to build. That takes a great deal of knowledge and experience, and is something that changes all the time.

[Rover222]

yes, agreed that coding (implementation), which was once extremely expensive for businesses, is trending towards a negligible price. Planning, coordination, strategy at a high level are as challenging as ever. I'm getting more done than ever, but NOT working less hours in a day (as an employee at a product company).

[HPsquared]

Like column inches in a newspaper. But some news is important and that's the editor's job to decide.

[softwaredoug]

I’d say the jury might be out on whether code is worthless for giant pieces of infrastructure (Linux kernel). There, small problems create outsized issues for everybody, so the incentive is to be conservative and focused on quality.

Second there’s a world of difference still between a developer with taste using AI with care and the slop cannons out there churning out garbage for others to suffer through. I’m betting there is value in the former in the long run.

[neebz]

I've faced the same but my conclusion is the opposite.

In the past 6 months, all my code has been written by claude code and gemini cli. I have written code backend, frontend, infrastructure and iOS. Considering my career trajectory all of this was impossible a couple of years ago.

But the technical debt has been enormous. And I'll be honest, my understanding of these technologies hasn't been 'expert' level. I'm 100% sure any experienced dev could go through my code and may think it's a load of crap requiring serious re-architecture.

It works (that's great!) but the 'software engineering' side of things is still subpar.

[crystal_revenge]

A lot of people aren’t realizing that it’s not about replacing software engineers, it’s about replacing software.

We’ve been trying to build well engineered, robust, scalable systems because software had to be written to serve other users.

But LLMs change that. I have a bunch of vibe coded command lines tools that exactly solve my problems, but very likely would make terrible software. The thing is, this program only needs to run on my machine the way I like to use it.

In a growing class of cases bespoke tools are superior to generalized software. This historically was not the case because it took too much time and energy to maintain these things. But today if my vibe coded solution breaks, I can rebuild it almost instantly (because I understand the architecture). It takes less time today to build a bespoke tool that solved your problem than it does to learn how to use existing software.

There’s still plenty of software that cannot be replaced with bespoke tools, but that list is shrinking.

[noelsusman]

This is the thing a lot of skeptics aren't grappling with. Software engineering as a profession is mostly about building software that can operate at scale. If you remove scale from the equation then you can remove a massive chunk of the complexity required to build useful software.

There are a ton of recipe management apps out there, and all of them are more complex than I really need. They have to be, because other people looking for recipe management software have different needs and priorities. So I just vibe coded my own recipe management app in an afternoon that does exactly what I want and nothing more. I'm sure it would crash and burn if I ever tried to launch it at scale, but I don't have to care about that.

If I was in the SaaS business I would be extremely worried about the democratization of bespoke software.

[PaulHoule]

Tools for the non-professional developer to put their skills on wheels have always been part of the equation since we've had microcomputers if not minicomputer, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

[selridge]

But they’ve always basically required that you essentially become a programmer at the end of the day in order to get those benefits. The spreadsheet is probably the largest intruder in this ecosystem, but that’s only the case. If you don’t think that operating a spreadsheet is programming. It is.

What people are describing is that Normies can now do the kinds of things that only wizards with PERL could do in the 90s. The sorts of things that were always technically possible with computers if you were a very specific kind of person are now possible with computers for everyone else.

[judahmeek]

Only a fraction of the population will care at first

But the entire "software for startups or other software developers" ecosystem is going to get thrashed by churn (not unlike the Javascript ecosystem)

William Gibson's quote that 'The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed' is only going to become even more real

[PaulHoule]

That's partially true.

Languages like BASIC and Python have always been useful to people for whom programming is a part-time thing. Sure you have to learn something but it is not like learning assembly or C++.

On the other hand, it is notorious that people who don't know anything about programming can accomplish a little bit with LLM tools and then they get stuck.

It's part of what is so irksome about the slop blog posts about AI coding that HN is saturated with now. If you've accomplished something with AI coding it is because of: (1) your familiarity with the domain you're working in and (2) your general knowledge about how programming environments work. With (1) and (2) you can recognize the different between a real solution and a false solution and close the gap when something "almost works". Without it, you're going to go around in circles at best. People are blogging as if their experience with prompting or their unscientific experiments about this model and that model were valuable but they're not, (1) and (2) are valuable, anything specific about AI coding 2026-02-18 will be half-obsolete on 2026-02-19; so of course they face indifference.

[skydhash]

A lot of people don’t care about software other than the fact that the ones they use work well. They don’t want to create it, to maintain it, or to upgrade it. That’s what the IT department is for.

[3vidence]

This seems like a big HN / VC bubble thing thinking that average people are interested in software at all... they really aren't.

People want to open Netflix / YT / TikTok, open instagram, scroll reddit, take pictures, order stuff online, etc. Then professionals in fields want to read / write emails, open drawings, CADs, do tax returns, etc.

If anything overall interest in software seems to be going down for the average person compared to 2010s. I feel like most of the above normal people are going to stop using in favor of LLMs. LLMs certainly do compete with Googling for regular people though and writing emails.

[layer8]

It just means that they want the software they use to work well, even if they aren’t particularly aware that what they use is software.

[munk-a]

I absolutely believe in that value proposition - but I've heard a lot about how beneficial it will be for large organizationally backed software products. If it isn't valuable to that later scenario (which I have uncertainty about) then there is no way companies like OpenAI could ever justify their valuations.

[chickensong]

> I've heard a lot about how beneficial it will be for large organizationally backed software products

It's a generic interface to anything, which allows people to communicate in their own way, and the LLM is pretty good at figuring it out. For non-technical people or customers who don't fully understand the product, it's going to be very helpful. RIP outsourced call centers, we won't miss you.

Manual search and navigation might be on the chopping block soon. Knowing how to navigate big software is often a bespoke skill. Now you can just talk to the computer and tell it what you're trying to do. Al down in the shoe dept doesn't have to figure out how to right click or what a context menu is. It's a fundamental UI change.

[crystal_revenge]

> there is no way companies like OpenAI could ever justify their valuations

The value proposition isn't really "we'll help you write all the code for your company" it's a world where the average user's computer is a dumb terminal that opens up to a ChatGPT interface.

I didn't initially understand the value prop but have increasingly come to see it. The gamble is that LLMs will be your interface to everything the same way HTTP was for the last 20 years.

The mid-90s had a similar mix of deep skepticism and hype-driven madness (and if you read my comments you'll see I've historically been much closer to the skeptic side, despite a lot of experience in this space). But even in the 90s the hyped-up bubble riders didn't really see the idea that http would be how everything happens. We've literally hacked a document format and document serving protocol to build the entire global application infrastructure.

We saw a similar transformation with mobile devices where most of your world lives on a phone and the phone maker gets a nice piece of that revenue.

People thought Zuck was insane for his metaverse obsession, but what he was chasing was that next platform. He was wrong of course, but what his hope was was that VR would be the way people did everything.

Now this is what the LLM providers are really after. Claude/ChatGPT/Grok will be your world. You won't have to buy SaaS subscriptions for most things because you can just build it yourself. Why use Hubspot when you can just have AI do all your marketting, then you just need Hubspot for their message sending infrastructure. Why pay for a budgeting app when you can just build a custom one that lives on OpenAIs server (today your computer, but tomorrow theirs). Companies like banks will maintain interfaces to LLMs but you won't be doing your banking in their web app. Even social media will ultimately be replaced by an endless stream of bespoke images video and content made just for you (and of course it will be much easier to inject advertising into this space you don't even recognize as advertising).

The value prop is that these large, well funded, AI companies will just eat large chunks of industry.

[mikkupikku]

Similar experience for me. I've been using it to make Qt GUIs, something I always avoided in the past because it seemed like a whole lot of stuff to learn when I could just make a TUI or use Tkinter if I really needed a GUI for some reason.

Claude Code is producing working useful GUIs for me using Qt via pyside6. They work well but I have no doubt that a dev with real experience with Qt would shudder. Nonetheless, because it does work, I am content to accept that this code isn't meant to be maintained by people so I don't really care if it's ugly.

[AutumnsGarden]

I’ve become the same way. Instead of specializing in the unique implementations, I’ve leaned more into planning everything out even more completely and writing skills backed by industry standards and other developer’s best practices (also including LOTS of anti-patterns). My work flow has improved dramatically since then, but I do worry that I am not developing the skills to properly _debug_ these implementations, as the skills did most of the work.

[mjr00]

IMO debugging is a separate skill from development anyway. I've known plenty of developers in my career who were fully capable of writing and shipping code, especially the kind of boilerplate widgets/RPCs that LLMs excel at generating, yet if a bug happened their approach was largely just changing somewhat random stuff to see if it worked rather than anything methodical.

If you want to get/stay good at debugging--again IMO--it's more important to be involved in operations, where shit goes wrong in the real world because you're dealing with real invalid data that causes problems like poison pill messages stuck in a message queue, real hardware failures causing services to crash, real network problems like latency and timeouts that cause services which work in the happy path to crumble under pressure. Not only does this instil a more methodical mentality in you, it also makes you a better developer because you think about more classes of potential problems and how to handle them.

[selridge]

No one will hire expert generalists at any kind of scale worth caring about. They are WAY too hard to evaluate as such and basically no pipelines exists to do so. Big software companies with cutesy riddles thought they were hiring for this, but they just got specialists with a culture fit.

Expert generalists are also almost impossible to distinguish from bullshitters. It’s why we get along so well with LLMs. ;)

[heathrow83829]

isn't it just one more step up the hierarchy. 10 years ago most developers have forgotten how to code in machine language because you didn't need to know it. Now, we're jsut going one step higher.