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The next two years of software engineering

The next two years of software engineering

napolux

Comments (173)

  • afro88
    > The bottom line: Junior developer hiring could collapse as AI automates entry-level tasksIf AI automated entry-level tasks from today, that just means "entry-level" means something different now. It doesn't mean entry-level ceases to exist. Entey-level as we know it, but not entry-level in general.
  • maciejzj
    TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life.This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.
  • babblingfish
    My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but without having to look up library function calls and language specific syntax
  • misja111
    > Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plateI'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.
  • osigurdson
    >> The skillset is shifting from implementing algorithms to knowing how to ask the AI the right questions and verify its output.The question is, how much faster is verification only vs writing the code by hand? You gain a lot of understanding when you write the code yourself, and understanding is a prerequisite for verification. The idea seems to be a quick review is all that should be needed "LGTM". That's fine as long as you understand the tradeoffs you are making.With today's AI you either trade speed for correctness or you have to accept a more modest (and highly project specific) productivity boost.
  • stack_framer
    Funny that he mentions people not pivoting away from COBOL. My neighbors work for a bank, programming in COBOL every day. When I moved in and met them 14 years ago, I wondered how much longer they would be able to keep that up.They're still doing it.
  • hncoder12345
    Sometimes I wonder if I made the wrong choice with software development. Even after getting to a senior role, according to this article, you're still expected to get more education and work on side projects outside of work. Am I supposed to want to code all the time? When can I pursue hobbies, a social life, etc.
  • Jean-Papoulos
    >The flip scenario: AI unlocks massive demand for developers across every industry, not just tech. Healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and finance all start embedding software and automation.I find this one hard to believe. Software is already massively present in all these industries and has already replaced jobs. The last step is complete automation (ie drone tractors that can load up at a hub, go to the field and spray all by themselves) but the bottleneck for this isn't "we need more code", it's real-world issues that I don't see AI help solving (political, notably)
  • ch4s3
    > junior developer employment drops by about 9-10% within six quarters, while senior employment barely budges. Big tech hired 50% fewer fresh graduates over the past three years.This study showing 9-10% drop is odd[1] and I'm not sure about their identification critria.> We identify GenAI adoption by detecting job postings that explicitly seek workers to implement or integrate GenAI technologies into firm workflows.Based on that MIT study it seems like 90+% of these projects fail. So we could easily be seeing an effect where firms posting these GenAI roles are burning money on the projects in a way that displaces investment in headcount.The point about "BigTech" hiring 50% fewer grads is almost orthogonal. All of these companies are shifting hiring towards things where new grads are unlikely to add value, building data centers and frontier work.Moreover the TCJA of 2017 caused software developers to not count for R&D tax write offs (I'm oversimplifying) starting in 2022. This surely has more of an effect than whatever "GenAI integrator roles" postings correlates to.[1] https://download.ssrn.com/2025/11/6/5425555.pdf
  • danieltanfh95
    The most useful thing juniors can do now is use AI to rapidly get up to the speed with the new skill floor. Learn like crazy. Self learning is empowered by AI.Engineers > developers > coders.
  • reedf1
    All well-documented knowledge fields will be gone if software goes. Then the undocumented ones will become documented, and they too will go. The best advice to junior devs is get a hands on job before robotic articulating sausages are perfected and humans become irrelevant blobs of watery meat.
  • austin-cheney
    I have been telling people that, titles aside, senior developers were the people not afraid to write original code. I don’t see LLMs changing this. I only envision people wishing LLMs would change this.
  • athrowaway3z
    I've been saying for a decade that one of the fundamental issues with SWE in the average company, is that management does not seem to understand that SWE is a management level job. Its not an assembly line worker. It requires reorganizing, streamlining, stake-holders, etc - in code and data - which directly affect people much the same that any other management role has. There are just fewer issues with HR and more with CDNs or CVEs.> A CEO of a low-code platform articulated this vision: in an “agentic” development environment, engineers become “composers,”I see we'll be twisting words around to keep avoiding the comparison.
  • megamix
    The most important question is who will get paid the most? I don't think the future of software engineering will be attractive if all you do is more work for same or even less pay. A second danger is too much reliance on AI tools will centralise knowledge and THAT is the scariest thing. Software systems will need to perform for a long time, having juniors on board and people who understand software architecture will be massively important. Or will all software crash when this generation retires?
  • tigrezno
    The next two years of software engineering will be the last two years of software engineering (probably).
  • burnermore
    Something very odd about the tone of this article. Is it mostly AI written? There is a lot of references and info. But I am feeling far more disconnected with it.For the record, I was genuinely trying to read it properly. But it is becoming unbearable by mid article.
  • xkcd1963
    Please dear developers be as lazy as possible and use LLMs. The amount of bugs that get shipped enable me a comfortable life as opsec.
  • mellosouls
    On the junior developer question:A humble way for devs to look at this, is that in the new LLM era we are all juniors now.A new entrant with a good attitude, curiosity and interest in learning the traditional "meta" of coding (version control, specs, testing etc) and a cutting-edge, first-rate grasp of using LLMs to assist their craft (as recommended in the article) will likely be more useful in a couple of years than a "senior" dragging their heels or dismissing LLMs as hype.We aren't in coding Kansas anymore, junior and senior will not be so easily mapped to legacy development roles.
  • qsera
    I would like to see how things will be when using AI would require half of a devs current paycheck.
  • zqna
    My question: are those people who were building crappy, brittle software, which was full of bugs and and orher suboptimal behavior, that were the main reasons of slowing down the evolution that software, will they now begin writing better software because of AI? Answering yes, implies that the main reason of those problems was that those developers didn't have enough time to spend on analyzing those problems or to build protection harnesses. I would stronly argue that was not the case, as the main reason is of intelectual and personal nature - inability to build abstractions, to follow up the route causes (thus not aquiring necessary knowledge), or to avoid being distracted by some new toy. In 2-5 years I expect the industry going into panic mode, as there will be a shortage of people who could maintain the drivel that is now being created en masse. The future is bright for those with the brains, just need to wait this out
  • Eong
    Love the article, I had a struggle with my new identity and thus had to write https://edtw.in/high-agency-engineering/ for myself, but also came to the realisation that the industry is shifting too especially for junior engineers.Curious about how the Specialist vs Generalist theme plays out, who is going to feel it more *first* when AI gets better over time?
  • anon
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  • streetcat1
    For some reason miss two important points:1) The AI code maintainence question - who would maintain the AI generated code 2) The true cost of AI. Once the VC/PE money runs out and companies charge the full cost, what would happen to vibe coding at that point ?
  • bradleyjg
    The bottom up and top down don’t seem to match.Where is all the new and improved software output we’d expect to see?
  • PraddyChippzz
    The points mentioned in the article, regarding the things to focus on, is spot on.
  • mawadev
    I mean it's pretty simple: management will take bad quality (because they don't understand the field) over having and paying more employees any day. Software engineer positions will shrink and be unrecognizable: one person expected to be doing the work of multiple departments to stay employed. People may leave the field or won't bother learning it. When the critical mass is reached, AI will be paywalled and rug pulled. Then the field evens itself out again over a long, expensive period of time for every company that fell for it, lowering the expectations back to reality.
  • tommica
    One thing that fucks with juniors is the expecration of paying for subscriptions for AI models. If you need to know how the AI tools work, you need to learn them with your own money.Not everyone can afford it, and then we are at the point of changing the field that was so proud about just needing a computer and access to internet to teach oneself into a subscription service.
  • globular-toast
    This article suggests it is specialists who are "at risk", but as much more of a generalist I was thinking the opposite and starting to regret not specialising more.My value so far in my career has been my very broad knowledge of basically the entire of computer science, IT, engineering, science, mathematics, and even beyond. Basically, I read a lot, at least 10x more than most people it seems. I was starting to wonder how relevant that now is, given that LLMs have read everything.But maybe I'm wrong about what my skill actually is. Everyone has had LLMs for years now and yet I still seem better at finding info, contextualising it and assimilating it than a lot of people. I'm now using LLMs too but so far I haven't seen anyone use an LLM to become like me.So I remain slightly confused about what exactly it is about me and people like me that makes us valuable.
  • keybored
    Is there a Jeapordy for guessing prompts? Give an executive summary of GenAI trends where GenAI is the destiny and everything reacts to it. Touch on all “problems”. Don’t be divisive by making hard proclamations. Summarize in a safe way by appealing to the trope of the enthusiastic programmer who dutifully adapts to the world around them in order to stay “up to date”; the passive drone that accepts whatever environment they are placed in and never tries to change it. But add insult to injury by paradoxically concluding that the only safe future is the one you (individual) “actively engineer”.I’m not saying that this was prompted. I’m just summarizing it in my own way.
  • gassi
    > Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and GeminiAh, there it is.
  • ahmetomer
    > Junior developers: Make yourself AI-proficient and versatile. Demonstrate that one junior plus AI can match a small team’s output. Use AI coding agents (Cursor/Antigravity/Claude Code/Gemini CLI) to build bigger features, but understand and explain every line if not most. Focus on skills AI can’t easily replace: communication, problem decomposition, domain knowledge. Look at adjacent roles (QA, DevRel, data analytics) as entry points. Build a portfolio, especially projects integrating AI APIs. Consider apprenticeships, internships, contracting, or open source. Don’t be “just another new grad who needs training”; be an immediately useful engineer who learns quickly.If I were starting out today, this is basically the only advice I would listen to. There will indeed be a vacuum in the next few years because of the drastic drop in junior hiring today.
  • wakawaka28
    The outlook on CS credentials is wrong. You'll never be worse off than someone without those credentials, all other things equal. Buried in this text is some assumption that the relatively studious people who get degrees are going to fall behind the non-degreed, because the ones who didn't go to school will out-study them. What is really going to happen generally is that the non-degreed will continue to not study, and they will lean on AI to avoid studying even the few things that they might have otherwise needed to study to squeak by in industry.
  • doug_durham
    The author has a bizarre idea of what a computer science degree is about. Why would it teach cloud computing or dev ops? The idea is you learn those on your own.
  • wagey90
    [dead]