[throwaway13337]

Software devs lost their pricing power due to LLMs but not exactly how most people think.

What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard.

Now, LLMs can do that stuff better than the guy that wrote it.

Software devs were non-fungible. Now they're commodities. When things become commodities, they lose their value.

I'm not sure why I haven't heard people talk about this aspect. It's the biggest effect on jobs.

[sebmellen]

While this is true to an extent, oftentimes the important context is not in the code but in the head of the writer. The code is just the fence in the Chesterton’s Fence analogy. And that is still non-fungible and will (presumably) forever be.

> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

[throwaway13337]

You're correct that it doesn't answer the why.

But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.

So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.

[sebmellen]

In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.

[throwaway13337]

With my own tiny company, I used to answer questions about my code to support. Supporting the support. I remember doing that when working at big companies too.

Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.

Maybe we've had different experiences.

[sebmellen]

I love it. And no doubt, the smaller your company, the more profound the impact of “agentic” tooling can be.

But I am skeptical that people who have not seen a complex corporate environment understand how different it is.

[kakacik]

> I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company.

In banks its rather 10%, at least in mine is.

[qwertyuiop_]

I am yet to see this pan out in the enterprise. Enterprises are full of mini kingdoms built by VP+ leaders with the tools they prefer or were sold on. And many of these tools are inherently and sometimes by design are cumbersome, expansive and not onboarding friendly. LLMs haven't breached this domain and this domain empirically is 80% of enterprise software. I am yet to see direct examples of llm agents replacing say 4 engineers out of an existing 8 person team.

[dnnddidiej]

Software devs were always fungible up to p99.9