[yoaviram]

I just finished writing a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. It is much closer to proper engineering.

Like an engineer overseeing the construction of a bridge, the job is not to lay bricks. It is to ensure the structure does not collapse.

The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything.

https://nonstructured.com/zen-of-ai-coding/

[skydhash]

> I just finished writing a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying.

It was never that. Take any textbook on software engineering and the focus was never the code, but on systems design and correctness. I'm looking at the table of contents of one (Software Engineering by David C. Kung) and these are a few sample chapters:

  ...
  4. Software Requirement Elicitation
  5. Domain Modelling
  6. Architectural Design
  ...  
  8. Actor-System Interaction Modeling
  9. Object Interaction Modeling
  ...
  15. Modeling and Design of Rule-Based Systems
  ...
  19. Software Quality Assurance
  ...
  24. Software Security

What you're talking about was coding, which has never been the bottleneck other than for beginners in some programming languages.

[shinycode]

Our CEO, an expert in marketing has discovered Claude Code and is the one having the most open PR of all developers and is pushing for us to « quickly review ». He does not understand why review are so slow because it’s « the easiest part ». We live in a new world.

[imiric]

In what world do these new tools help with "laying bricks", but not with ensuring that the structure does not collapse? How is that work any more difficult than producing the software in the first place? It wasn't that long ago that these tools could barely produce a simple program. If you're buying into the promises of this tech, then what's stopping it from also being able to handle those managerial tasks much better than a human?

The seemingly profound points of your marketing slop article ignore that these new tools are not a higher level of abstraction, but a replacement of all cognitive work. The tech is coming for your job just as it is coming for the job of the "bricklayer" you think is now worthless. The work you're enjoying now is just a temporary transition period, not an indication of the future of this industry.

If you enjoy managing a system that hallucinates solutions and disregards every other instruction, that's great. When you reach a dead end with that approach, and the software is exposing customer data, or failing in unpredictable ways, hopefully you know some good "bricklayers" that can help you with that.

[MattDaEskimo]

Accountability then

[yoaviram]

Anticipating modes of failure, creating tooling to identify and hedge against risks.

[sjajzh]

If we could do this it would have been done already. Outsourced devs would be ubiquitous.