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by tripleee 4 days ago
If software development were getting easier, first thing I'd expect to see would be a strong downward trend in salaries. Why pay a high mid+ dev rate when a junior+LLM can do the same?

That's yet to happen. 90% of software dev skills are still relevant - AI is, for now, just a productivity boost.
1 comments
aenis 4 days ago
We have been heavily using agentic coding in my place, and what is emerging is people who used to be tech leads or architects are now back to producing code, and what would require 5-10 people now starts as a 1-2 person project. Some of those have already gone live, successfully, so there will be more of that.

Between juniors with LLMs and seniors who don't like AI, I'd hire the junior, but I think the trend in 2026 will be to hire senior people who enjoy producing code with LLMs.

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thefourthchime 4 days ago
Producing code is an interesting word because obviously they're not typing code anymore. That's where I've landed.

I'm somewhere between 10-60x more productive than I used to be. My day cycles between 3-6 different projects, bug fixes, development cycles. Each one them going ten times faster than I could on my own.

We don't even consider bringing on vendors or saas anymore. We only look at our existing vendors and think about getting rid of them.

There is a rift though. Some teams are still just "playing with it". Our offshore workers who haven't seemed to increase their velocity at all. In the next couple of years there's going to be a pretty big wrecking. Those that are agentic and those who are not.

I always ask myself if I'm still bringing value. But then I look at what I'm talking to the computer about. And the amount of different tech stacks algorithms. Tricky business logic isn't something that you can just pick somebody off the street and do.

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aenis 4 days ago
Same here.

For now there is value. Only today Opus 5 suggested a really bad but totally workable approach to an edge problem. It would work by putting a lot of undue stress on infra. People would add infra. A simple pushback reduced a O(n) to a O(1) solution - and that was my value added. I bump into those things regularly.

I think the labs want to address the clueless dev market - hence the "proactivity" in Fable. But it will be a difficult thing to balance.

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tripleee 4 days ago
that's certainly one extreme end of enthusiasm
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