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Comments (265)

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  mjr00
  > If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average.This is the real fear. We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development beyond "it's a cushy desk job, or better yet WFH job, that pays really well." No interest in whatever product was being developed by their company. Just show up, their PM assigns them a ticket to make a widget with a button, they use their TypeScript bootcamp skills to code up a widget with a button, ticket moved to In Review, job's done.Now an agent can do that, and you need fewer of these types of people. Like, a lot fewer. Every engineer on your team who isn't a 10x-cum-100x engineer feels like a massive lost opportunity.The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.
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  saulpw
  I'm a fan of the 'sandwich' model: someone needs to say what to do, someone needs to do it, and someone needs to say if it's been done [well enough]. Even if AI can do that middle bit entirely, we still need humans at the beginning and the end. Replace the humans at the start and you have a paperclip-optimizer; replace them at the end and you have slop.The problem is that software in corporations has typically been product managers at the front, software engineers in the middle, and QA at the end. Software developers who also have good product sense and do diligent QA are still needed. Programmers who treated their job as leetcode exercises are not needed anymore.
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  somesortofthing
  To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too. I have a hard time imagining a world where a drop-in end-to-end replacement for a full software team is more than a year away. I'm sure I'll have a job for a year or two past that, but there'll be some small stock market bump eventually and a bloodbath will begin the second the C-suite takes a closer look at what their engineers are even doing anymore.
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  TrackerFF
  Also, I work as a data analyst, with previous experience as a software engineer. In our office, traditionally maybe 10% of our analysts have enough real software engineering experience to develop any "serious" software products. The rest are domain experts that at most use programming for developing methods and calculations/simulations.In the past 6 months, we've seen non-engineering analysts leverage LLMs (Claude, Codex) enough to launch actual products. They've gone from 0x engineers to at minimum 1x engineers.Prior to this, they'd develop methods, scripts, etc. in Jupyter notebooks, R, Matlab, or whatever they'd be comfortable with. And if it turned out to be useful, they'd work with engineering to develop those into products. Usually a small team of software engineers would do that.But, alas, now they're able to almost completely bypass the engineering teams.
• shahargl
  Hey! I’m the one who wrote it. Saw you asked for a non-x link -https://shahar.blog/2026/11/08/on-being-an-engineer-in-2026/
• OhMeadhbh
  I think the author has confused "Software Developer" with "Engineer." The two are related, but distinct.
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  hackyhacky
  https://nitter.cf/shaharglazner/article/2119796029256032278A readable link for those of us without Twitter/X account
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  hypfer
  > This naturally leads us to think that this is it. We, engineers, are doomed.I find it _very_ unpleasant that all these people constantly talk about a "we" that does not exist.That person is worried, and/or they have seen other people in the industry that are worried. But they've wrongly extrapolated that everyone in the industry would feel that way.It harms the writing. It shows that the person is not adequately grounded.Or, tbf, maybe, made mental shortcuts to reach people. But they've sacrificed truth to connect there, which is bad.
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  jgilias
  What demotivates me the most is how easy it is to copy stuff these days.Suppose we still need judgement and taste to guide AI to a good result. E.g., even if the AI has these itself, if the person guiding the AI has bad judgment and taste, the AI will comply, and build the bad thing because it tries to be aligned with the user.But now, someone else’s _good_ judgement and taste is worth only so much because it takes an afternoon and some tokens to just “do it like they did it”.
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  Isamu
  If you can’t make things right when your agent goes wrong, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t tell the difference between the agent hallucinations and the useful stuff, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t steer the agent in a useful direction instead of just standing back, then yeah…
• anon
  undefined
• otekengineering
  AI is a boon to engineers, and a coffin nail to programmers
• nphardon
  The trick is to remain intellectually stimulated and challenged.
• wrs
  At first I thought tacit knowledge would be a differentiator: LLMs are trained on writing, so they can’t learn things that have never been written down. But tacit knowledge is exactly what reinforcement learning post-training is about. So (just as with humans) the limitation is in providing a rich enough environment, with good enough feedback, to train in the tacit knowledge.
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  tabs_or_spaces
  > It started with giving up on writing code. Then it expanded to pretty much any writing - Slack messages, documents, emails.I find it very strange that observability is always left out of these types of articles. Does nobody care about what happens in production and how customers are actually using what you develop?
• coef2
  I'm curious about whether LLMs could continually learn from the feedback they receive while performing some tasks without translating those experiences into text. But at the same time, I'm reluctant as tacit knowledge feels like one of the last moats we have left.
• red_admiral
  The OP tries to answer the question "What makes some engineers above average?" and ends up with interesting concepts, but I think they're missing a key part of the question that already has a scientific answer.Tacit Knowledge, intuition that comes from experience, times when something seems off but you can't quite put your finger on why - science has studied this! Specifically cognitive psychology. The answer, in modern terms that apply to both human and artificial intelligences, is training data. A good summary of this is "The Expert Mind" (Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-expert-mind/, PDF and HN discussion from 2006: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41282574 )tl;dr: experts have lots and lots of practice.(The research does go into a lot more detail, for example time-on-task is not the same thing as practice.)This has implications for the CS degree of the future, because it seems a lot of colleges are "pivoting" to AI, for example their Java module might as well be renamed "Using AI to write Java". To me, this sounds like exactly the kind of thing that is _not_ practice. It's the difference between trying to do maths problems by looking at memorising the solutions without (trying to) solve the problems yourself first. I'd really like to try the opposite way: a CS degree where you get deep into the fundamentals and are forced to write code in a sterile AI-free lab environment. My hypothesis is that this will produce (e.g. Java) programmers who will pick up AI-Java-coding quickly enough, but also have the intuition to step in when the AI code seems "off".
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  kypro
  Something I was thinking to myself last week – "if I believe SWE is more or less dead then why am I so busy?"Clearly there is still some work to do, but the work I do now is very different, and for me, much less enjoyable.I'm not solving challenging logic or algorithmic problems anymore, but basically just iterating on features with agents or getting them to look into things for me.It sucks because I used to be very good at these things, but my edge against less competent SWEs doesn't really exist anymore.More annoyingly, people I work with are producing a lot of code that I think the design of kinda sucks, but agents can force the design to work and so it works. I suggest we do things another way, but I'm now just slowing things down and it's hard to argue against the comment, "if that becomes a problem we can just get Claude to refactor later".I guess what I'm saying is that I think think there's a really crappy job that will still exist for a while around managing and contributing to these agent-generated codebases. But skill is less about your technical abilities, but how good you are at hooking up agents to things and getting them to solve problems. This doesn't interest me at all though. My desire to spend a lot of time design and thinking about problems, and deeply understanding the codebase I'm maintaining now just work against me.I think there will be SWEs by some definition, but the job as it existed a few years ago is gone. Not even saying that's a bad thing, but for someone like myself, it may as well be dead.
• greenbit
  AI has breadth, humans have depth.
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  cadamsdotcom
  AI is NOT coming for your job. Not your whole job...It's coming to take away the roles in your job that can be done by AI.It happened before and it'll happen again. Humans adapt - there's more work now than ever. Some examples from the 20th century...Big companies used to have printing departments to which you'd send a print job, walk over and pick it up, nicely stapled. Nowadays the office printer sits there 24/7 awaiting your print job. You have to staple it yourself though.Big companies used to have secretaries & clerical staff who'd type up your letter and send it off for you. Now we have keyboards and email. You have to send the email yourself though.Big companies used to have "code typists" who typed out huge amounts of code. Now they have agent managers who delegate the typing. Getting good output is a challenge, but asking for the output you need is so much better than RSI from typing and so much more effective than debugging based only on one's puny human knowledge, that we're suffering through. You have to assure the quality of the work yourself though.It's strange seeing so many people take to their blogs and loudly declare themselves unemployable. I doubt anyone'd hire this author and that'll make their prophecy come true - for them.A cautionary tale indeed.
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  dimbletimbers
  We’re awash in these claims without evidence. A so-called “founder” of a company with no reputation or economic impact to speak of claims the entire world has changed and they’re 100x engineers now, and the code has never been better and the features have never shipped faster. But there’s no evidence for that claim in the economic data, no explosion of products, no new features in any product I use that isn’t just a shitty chatbot integration. Where is the 100x more software going? Why does the internet appear to suck more than ever? What are other people seeing that I’m not? I see 100x more “thought leaders,” 100x more text to sift through, 100x more lame resume-padding repos and budgeting apps, 10x more grift and vitriol online, 10x less collaboration between developers, but on the other end of that extrusion, people are just lonelier, more tired, more stressed, and pissed off about how shitty software has become.
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  bonsai_spool
  I'm curious how actual engineering fields are affected - this highlights the imprecision we use when we call programmers/developers "software engineers."Other engineering disciplines, presumably, don't change so drastically from one year to the next...
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  kokanee
  I don't buy the reductio ad absurdum, which hinges on the assertion that some developers are still 10x more productive than others due to differences in their engineering potential. I think that A) however you're measuring productivity is probably not capturing the full story, and B) one of the most important reasons people have differences in productivity is because not everyone puts the same amount of effort in. It's not necessarily because they don't have the ability to stay off of reddit and work longer hours and prompt more furiously, it's because not everyone is equally motivated to do so (hence the entire field of management).I also don't buy the idea that there is special human stardust that gives us permanent irreplaceable economic value. Even if the tacit knowledge that the current generation of engineers were able to build up in the years prior to ~2025 does give us value that won't be completely replaced for a long time, why would you assume that the delta between what you can do and what claude can do will still be worth $200K in 5 years?
• iamsaitam
  > If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average.100x more output at 0.5x quality.
• xnx
  On Being an [Software] Engineer (i.e. AI agent manager) in 2026
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  pofferfish
  Am I the only one who finds it weird that someone whose profile says they are a CTO starts their article with how AI meant that they had to delegate away debugging and writing code.Weren't they supposed to do that anyway?
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  rsoto2
  "Maybe one day agents will have their own experiences, too. Maybe they'll develop intuitions they can't quite explain, just like we do."Imagine believing you have stumbled on to a benign consciousness and enslaving it to write shit code.
• arichard123
  It's all about trust
• wolvesechoes
  Many of you were never engineers in the first place. It may hurt, but that's the reality.And no, orchestrating agents to do your bidding doesn't make you one either.
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  empressario
  Oh he means programmers. I thought he meant real engineers.
• akeel_mohamed
  [flagged]
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  gosen
  > Maybe one day agents will have their own experiences, too. Maybe they'll develop intuitions they can't quite explain, just like we do.Machine / program / software cannot have these things in my opinion because this stuff is produced by human consciousness which we cannot even fully explain yet. Someone has "to teach" the agent to have this stuff, but we don't have that knowledge. And also "intuition" is a feeling (like love, hate, sadness, joy) so no agent can have that until they have the limbic system, prefrontal cortex and other stuff.
• omrirosner
  [flagged]
• briancarterio
  [flagged]
• ls-a
  [dead]
• fleroviumna
  [dead]
• latentsea
  This is copiummaxxing.