[yoaviram]

Yesterday I wrote 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/

[raincole]

> wrote

Quite a heavy-lifting word here. You understand why people flagged that post right? It's painfully non-human. I'm all for utilizing LLM, but I highly suggest you read Simon's posts. He's obviously a heavy AI user, but even his blog posts aren't that inorganic and that's why he became the new HN blog babe.

[0]: I personally believe Simon writes with his own voice, but who knows?

[fragmede]

How paranoid do you want to get? Simone's written enough, such that you could just feed his blog to AI and ask it to write in his voice. Which, taken to the logical extreme, means that the last time he went to visit OpenAI, he was captured, and locked in a dungeon, and his online presence is now entirely AI with the right prompt. In fact, that's happened to everyone on this site, and we're all LLMs just predicting the next word at each other.

There's no actual way to determine if any words are from a silicon token generator or meat-based generator. It's not AI, it's human! Emdash. You're absolutely right!

system failure.

[hollowturtle]

We have the entire web built on technical debt and LLMs mostly trained on that, what could go wrong? Cost will reside somewhere else if not on code

[hresvelgr]

> It is much closer to proper engineering.

I would not equate software engineering to "proper" engineering insofar as being uttered in the same sentence as mechanical, chemical, or electrical engineering.

The cost of code is collapsing because web development is not broadly rigorous, robust software was never a priority, and everyone knows it. The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.

I think the externalities are being ignored. Having time and money to train engineers is expensive. Having all the data of your users being stolen is a slap in the wrist.

So replacing those bad worekrs with AI is fine. Unless you remove the incentives to be fast instead of good, then yeah AI can be good enough for some cases.

[6LLvveMx2koXfwn]

Indeed, it's like those complaining self-driving cars occasionally crash when their crash rates are up to 90% less than humans . . .

[PunchTornado]

You didn't write that and you shouldn't believe that you did.

[offbynull]

This is such a strange take. Your words remind me of past crypto hype cycles, where people pushed web3.0 and NFT FOMO hysteria.

Engineering is the practical application of science and mathematics to solve problems. It sounds like you're maybe describing construction management instead. I'm not denying that there's value here, but what you're espousing seems divorced from reality. Good luck vibecoding a nontrivial actuarial model, then having it to pass the laundry list of reviews and having large firms actually pick it up.

[xXSLAYERXx]

> This is such a strange take. Your words remind me of past crypto hype cycles, where people pushed web3.0 and NFT FOMO hysteria.

Thats a little harsh. I think most everyone would agree we're in a transformative time for engineering. Sure theres hype, but the adoption in our profession (assuming you're an engineer) isn't waning.

[mpalmer]

It's not pleasant to read this.

    The claim here is profound: comprehension of the codebase at the function level is no longer necessary

It's not profound. It's not profound when I read the exact same awed blog post about how "agentic" is the future and you don't even need to know code anymore.

It wasn't profound the first time, and it's even dumber that people keep repeating it - maybe they take all the time they saved not writing, and use it to not read.

[jplusequalt]

Stop putting forth your AI generated blog posts as your own work.

[edelans]

Agree. This is a transition from being "in" the loop to being "on" the loop.

[sltr]

The formal engineering disciplines are not defined by the construction vs design distinction so much as the regulatory gates they have passed and the ethical burdens they shoulder for society's benefit.

https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/its-time-to-license-software-...