> "With so many companies worldwide faced with upheaval due to AI in software development, I believe this program will become a template for rapidly leveling up new developers across the industry."
This seems cognitively dissonant with the AI upheaval resulting in the industry needing fewer developers. Maybe they want cheaper developers?
LanceH 1 hours ago [-]
It feels like it's all senior developers now and nobody new. At some point they will want someone new and won't be able to find them.
flowerlad 36 minutes ago [-]
> At some point they will want someone new
If we freeze AI models at their current stage of development, then yes. If not, given the rate at which models are improving (compare Claude today to Claude 1 year ago), in 3 to 5 years software development could be fully automated.
dominotw 13 minutes ago [-]
we dont' need to "freeze" models if next versions aren't a huge improvement over previous ones. That seems to be case now.
astrobe_ 33 minutes ago [-]
Including development of AI models?
teiferer 22 minutes ago [-]
Are you sure that's how this works?
Let's see, my grandparents were about 160cm when they were 35. My parents were about 170cm when they were 35 and I am about 180cm around 35. You are saying I can expect my grandchildren to be around 200cm at that age and their grandchildren 220cm?
tomkarho 47 seconds ago [-]
Or we could assume since new data is increasingly AI generated then the next generation of models are inherently born out of incestuous relationships so I would imagine Claude's grandson is going to be a dwarf.
Of course it is possible also that Claude will marry a chinese model (since it's asian odds are it is also smarter) bringing some diversity into the "gene" pool. Or better yet, a Russian supermodel.
emdash 14 minutes ago [-]
Are you sure that AI model progression and the height of your family members are 35 is related? It seems unlikely but I guess you'd know better than I.
wlesieutre 10 minutes ago [-]
That's their point, we can't assume model capabilities will go up linearly forever just because they have increased quickly in the past
14 minutes ago [-]
falcor84 17 minutes ago [-]
If we didn't have any humans before your grandparents, and these were the only data points we have to extrapolate from, then, yes, this would be a very reasonable prediction.
Terr_ 57 minutes ago [-]
Some of that is long pre-existing, where most companies go: "Let someone else train juniors, we'll hire them away afterwards."
alpha21io 30 minutes ago [-]
Is there evidence that overall software developer positions are declining relative to other jobs? It wouldn't surprise me if Jevons paradox applied here.
bradfa 2 hours ago [-]
Curious how realistic the skills learned in such a program are still applicable in 1-2 years. This industry is moving very fast, it feels like the self motivated, self starter, self learner has been thriving. Probably a good thing to have such a program, but I have doubts.
icantevenhold 44 minutes ago [-]
The industry feels like it’s moving at lightspeed but I feel the fundamentals that were true 30-50 years ago still hold up for most real life work
avaer 1 hours ago [-]
The YC meta model is probably a better school than school now. I'm sure YC knows that.
If you need to be told what to do, it's a short step to your AI replacement being told what to do; money will ensure it. If your job is to discover and capture new things in an exploding possibility space, that's a career.
Schools should teach hacking, but it doesn't seem that's what this program is doing.
geraldwhen 1 hours ago [-]
Microsoft? Maybe they’re hopeful the next admin will make OPT cheap labor again.
petcat 1 hours ago [-]
"software engineer" is likely a career long gone. "Product engineer" and architect is probably the only software-adjacent title that will have consistent demand for awhile.
Basically still just a prompt jockey but knows the difference between outputs that are good and bad.
1270018080 27 minutes ago [-]
I was a huge AI skeptic from the beginning through ~2025. But once Opus came out, it's pretty obvious writing code by hand is an obsolete skill on its own. You still need to know how to read code, how to know what good/bad code looks like, and if it matches what you're truly asking for. But there's really no reason to be typing code with your own fingers in 2026 and beyond.
2024 me would be shocked at current me saying this.
garaetjjte 17 minutes ago [-]
>how to know what good/bad code looks like, and if it matches what you're truly asking for
And how you would know to do that, if you're not writing code?
foltik 8 minutes ago [-]
Maybe you think there’s no reason for you to be writing code by hand anymore, but it doesn’t follow that the entire skill is obsolete.
teiferer 15 minutes ago [-]
> writing code by hand is an obsolete skill on its own. You still need to know how to read code, how to know what good/bad code looks like,
It's my impression that the best way to be able to read code and distinguish good from bad is to write code. Get burned a few times and you know why certain patterns are a bad idea. You don't internalize that equally well from a powerpoint slide.
Compare this to math. Every successful mathematician has gone through the motions of proving certain basic theorems in math. Like Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. And then they went through related exercises. This was all learned with sweat. The statement above is akin to saying there is no point in doing any proofs by hand anymore, just read one and you will have sufficient understanding of mathematics and become a good mathematician. I don't think that's true. (And I also believe that many sw eng people would be better at their job had they groked the proof of the halting problem.)
rfgplk 1 hours ago [-]
Yep. If you think your job involves "writing code" as the core part of your responsibilities, write yourself off immediately. That career is dead and dusted. Sadly most companies still haven't realized this, given how few Architect openings exist (and those that do, most are asking for 20+ years of exp lol)
icantevenhold 41 minutes ago [-]
In my professional experience most people I encountered that held the architect title didnt really know anything about proper software engineering and just knew how to talk well and hold meetings with many different stakeholders - which tbf is not a trivial skill, but I can’t imagine everyone becoming architects and no one doing actual work they understand.
stingraycharles 56 minutes ago [-]
Definition of what the role actually means can change as well over time, in the same way that a civil engineer also isn’t physically doing the construction.
majormajor 49 minutes ago [-]
Most companies aren't gonna need an architect, but if you can tell and demonstrate a good story around quality/risk/stability they might be interested in that.
crassglassass 58 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
pards 18 minutes ago [-]
> students will take DevOps: Engineering for Secure Development and Deployment
... in Github Actions? What a great way to discourage them from entering the industry.
thadk 1 hours ago [-]
Can anyone share syllabi for these?
BatchJob 1 hours ago [-]
Im sorry for being so negative but MS sold software engineers (and US high school and college students) down the river so long ago, the nerve of them now even pretending to care is just so offensive. This business has gotten so rotten, the best thing I can tell anyone is to find something rewarding to do with your life.
coolThingsFirst 2 hours ago [-]
Now that you have learnt Software Engineering, hunting for a job is easy just make 10^10^10^10 job applications.
theteapot 59 minutes ago [-]
Start your own business.
coolThingsFirst 46 minutes ago [-]
how?
ahartmetz 53 minutes ago [-]
Just slop them, bro
dyauspitr 3 hours ago [-]
“So you type your request into this chat window…”
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
The assumption here is that senior engineers are still needed to review AI-generated code. That assumption might not be valid for very long. I find myself reviewing AI-generated code less and less because the code quality is very good -- and getting better every month. Soon reviewing AI-generated code will be like manually verifying the results of a calculator--it is a waste of time. At that point all you need is an architect. I predict senior software engineers will be obsolete within a year.
BoggleOhYeah 2 hours ago [-]
As a principal, I still catch people submitting shitty AI code on a weekly basis. Their brains are rotting to the point that they can't tell if the code is doing the correct thing or not.
frank00001 2 hours ago [-]
Just left my programming job due to this. Stopped thinking, stopped caring. AI destroyed my coding joy, so I’m finished with that. Leadership challenges next - hope to use my brain a bit more.
deadbabe 2 hours ago [-]
You won’t, leadership requires even less brain.
bradfa 2 hours ago [-]
Good leadership requires brains. Average leadership is attainable without brains.
LanceH 1 hours ago [-]
I've found myself engaging more with AI writing code. There is no easy time during the work day. I'm talking to product about what they want, communicating with AI to write it, and verifying that it covers what was asked for. And the better I get at it, the more of the product I need to learn at a faster pace. If I find some downtime, I work on additional features at the same time, something I wouldn't do on my own.
Quite simply, I'm more mentally drained at the end of a day working with AI than I am a normal day of coding. There is still a lot of energy and thought that needs to go into what needs to be written.
Terr_ 34 minutes ago [-]
> mentally drained
Anecdotally, I find my final mood often depends on whether I know the origin and trustworthiness of the stuff in front of me, ex:
1. [Good] I know what I wanted, I have a concept of what "correct" looks like. I use the LLM to generate an output, and I check it. Even if it's annoyingly wrong, I can fix it up.
2. [Bad] Someone else had a concept, and they put it through an LLM to generate something (Ticket, PR, review comment.) However the provenance is lost, I have to guess which parts of the thing are "real" and which are nonsense the human never actually intended or even noticed.
I think some of the latter drain comes from how reading means inferring/simulate the mind of the writer, but LLM output is wrong enough that little warning flags never stop popping up.
throwaway_45 2 hours ago [-]
The issue is the higher ups don't even seem to care. You just turn into the guy that's yelling at the clouds. I don't know what the future of this industry is.
lelanthran 1 hours ago [-]
> At that point all you need is an architect.
What value would an architect provide that a SOTA LLM can't?
flowerlad 1 hours ago [-]
As of now it is insufficient to outline the end-user requirements, AI will ask you a bunch of questions that requires you to make architectural decisions. I think within 3 to 5 years that might change as well.
majormajor 33 minutes ago [-]
If you say "yeah go with your own recommendation" every time you'll get something that'll at least kinda work sooner or later. Not sure you need an "architect."
But is that workflow enough in a competitive world anyway, or will there be an edge for people who do more than "outline the end-user requirements" like it's the waterfall 70s?
dude250711 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 22:31:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This seems cognitively dissonant with the AI upheaval resulting in the industry needing fewer developers. Maybe they want cheaper developers?
If we freeze AI models at their current stage of development, then yes. If not, given the rate at which models are improving (compare Claude today to Claude 1 year ago), in 3 to 5 years software development could be fully automated.
Let's see, my grandparents were about 160cm when they were 35. My parents were about 170cm when they were 35 and I am about 180cm around 35. You are saying I can expect my grandchildren to be around 200cm at that age and their grandchildren 220cm?
Of course it is possible also that Claude will marry a chinese model (since it's asian odds are it is also smarter) bringing some diversity into the "gene" pool. Or better yet, a Russian supermodel.
If you need to be told what to do, it's a short step to your AI replacement being told what to do; money will ensure it. If your job is to discover and capture new things in an exploding possibility space, that's a career.
Schools should teach hacking, but it doesn't seem that's what this program is doing.
Basically still just a prompt jockey but knows the difference between outputs that are good and bad.
2024 me would be shocked at current me saying this.
And how you would know to do that, if you're not writing code?
It's my impression that the best way to be able to read code and distinguish good from bad is to write code. Get burned a few times and you know why certain patterns are a bad idea. You don't internalize that equally well from a powerpoint slide.
Compare this to math. Every successful mathematician has gone through the motions of proving certain basic theorems in math. Like Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. And then they went through related exercises. This was all learned with sweat. The statement above is akin to saying there is no point in doing any proofs by hand anymore, just read one and you will have sufficient understanding of mathematics and become a good mathematician. I don't think that's true. (And I also believe that many sw eng people would be better at their job had they groked the proof of the halting problem.)
... in Github Actions? What a great way to discourage them from entering the industry.
Quite simply, I'm more mentally drained at the end of a day working with AI than I am a normal day of coding. There is still a lot of energy and thought that needs to go into what needs to be written.
Anecdotally, I find my final mood often depends on whether I know the origin and trustworthiness of the stuff in front of me, ex:
1. [Good] I know what I wanted, I have a concept of what "correct" looks like. I use the LLM to generate an output, and I check it. Even if it's annoyingly wrong, I can fix it up.
2. [Bad] Someone else had a concept, and they put it through an LLM to generate something (Ticket, PR, review comment.) However the provenance is lost, I have to guess which parts of the thing are "real" and which are nonsense the human never actually intended or even noticed.
I think some of the latter drain comes from how reading means inferring/simulate the mind of the writer, but LLM output is wrong enough that little warning flags never stop popping up.
What value would an architect provide that a SOTA LLM can't?
But is that workflow enough in a competitive world anyway, or will there be an edge for people who do more than "outline the end-user requirements" like it's the waterfall 70s?