[oblio]

Keep in mind that a good chunk of people here are basically AI boosters: they work for AI companies, sell AI courses and training and certifications, own shares or otherwise benefit from AI companies doing well. Oh, also, lots and lots of marketers. Gitlab kind of exposed this a while ago, their marketing division had alerts based on HN keywords, their marketers were literally expected to be on-call to these keywords and even had a sort of lite SLA to respond to those keywords (stuff like Github, they were supposed to insert themselves in the conversation).

To the direct point: I've used AI for a lot of things. It's good, you can definitely build some things faster. It's far from perfect.

Also, if we were sooooo close to AGI, why would Anthropic and OpenAI continue hiring SDEs like mad, which they are? Why would Claude & co have embarassing bugs years after release (the glitchy scrolling bug, their websites being fully synchronous in 2026!!)? Etc.

[Chance-Device]

People just disagree, some people find that thought impossible unless their opponents are being paid, due to how obviously brilliant they are. And, that seems to be the minority position actually, mostly the discussion is the turkeys telling each other how Christmas is a myth.

[oblio]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

The steam engine was invented in 1765 (+/-) but employment crashed in the textile industry starting in 1815, 50 years later.

LLMs were practically invented in 2017, 9 years ago.

Of course, software is software and we live in a faster age, but guess what, human needs and desires are infinite so requirements keep going up.

At this point I have 0 trust in purely agentic coding (i.e. the 0 supervision approach). YouTube randomly stops displaying subtitles, Gemini CLI (before its shutdown) and Claude Code suffer from constant refresh glitches, the Gemini and Claude mobile websites are synchronous, like we're living in the 60s (if I minimize Firefox both Claude and Gemini stop answering and Gemini until about 1 month ago would also lose my prompt - this is the kind of thing people were fired for in the past, etc). If this level of buginess is the best agentic coding can produce with unlimited state of the art mega corp tokens, software itself will collapse faster than the job market.

Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position.

I'm not even an SDE. If they're turkeys, AI boosters are pheasants :-p

And I know why the legitimate AI boosters do it. They were genuinely impressed by what they saw in agents, especially since many hated programming anyway. They extended the line into the future and assumed complexity was linear. These people looked at LLMs and agents and didn't see what was there, but what could be (frequently from a position of major SciFi consumers through their entire lives, as all techies are).

Optimism is a positive, extreme optimism is a great flaw.

[Chance-Device]

> Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position.

Nobody said that. The claim is that within 24 months the models will have the capability required to replace all of us. I stand by that. How quickly that moves to everyone actually getting replaced is a social and economic question. There may very well be well be a long tail, I’m sure today you can find traditional weavers and barrel makers somewhere, they just happen to be economic novelties.

For the record, I’ll say that by 10 years out the profession is hollowed out enough for it to count as destroyed, and the process has already begun.

[oblio]

Ok... let's say the profession is destroyed. Who maintains all these ever increasing piles of code? Who figures out the requirements, who creates specifications? Who solves issues that are reported by users?

LLMs/turtles all the way down?