AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

whywhywhywhy

>AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster. >There used to be a time when people sat down and talked about how they'd do something. Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR. >The most tragic aspect of this way of working is that, to the untrained eye, it works. >If you pull the branch and test it, you'll probably get something somewhat functional. So what do they do? They keep going. Again and again. Until the project reaches a point where no one knows how anything works. Isn't this the opposite of failing faster, it lets people who would have never made it past the first few hurdles and give up get deep in and then the false hope that they can then prompt their way out of whatever mess resulting in deeper and deeper spaghetti.

jqpabc123

In the words of Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap". Any apparent short term gain is really a prescription for long term pain. Ignore what AI fanboys say and instead look at what they do. https://northeasttimes.com/2026/08/07/oracle-bans-ai-code-fr...

delduca

I saw close some companies getting completely lost with AI code

tantalor

> Fixing it would require such a colossal amount of work that it would be impossible to even start justifying it to anyone in management. Bad news: by delegating the thinking to somebody else (Claude) you have become the management.

declan_roberts

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

mikert89

AI gives more leverage to exceptional people, its an amplifier not an extender

pelagicAustral

I don't know what kind of company has got a large codebase and it's taking 20,000 loc pr's expecting that shit to be sustainable, but I work AI first and at the most PR's are touching 12 to 15 files, with the more radical ones sitting at 30. They are still human-reviewable. They are still the kind of change you can revert back to original without breaking all the rest... there are ways of doing this stuff, dear luddites.

aabdi

> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you. I agree with most of this except this. Think there’s some rose tinted glasses here or I’ve got bad luck over time. Life before ai was bad as well. There wasn’t any one to explain to you anything! You had to figure it out yourself. The people either already left or was busy with something else. No one wrote tests (to my standard). Most of the ops works was skipped. Docs were just not there. Nobody linted properly. Just bad mannnn

petcat

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway. [0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...

Syntaf

> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a firm believer in garbage in -> garbage out, AI is only as good as the abstractions and contracts you put in place for it. I don't subscribe to the idea that AI generated code is fundamentally bad, just that people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code. Earlier in the year I put together a talk for my company on what the future of architecture & design means for us in the career, I'm very proud of it and will share here in case folks have their own thoughts to share on the topic: https://youtu.be/SIZrt9Rt05Q?si=W57eirniWmoSFeBu

mjr00

It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You still had to have a competent developer review what they did, which was annoying, but ultimately a time saver over doing it themselves. Now the competent developer can just run agents and do the same review process, except it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced). So we've got a bimodal distribution going on where the bottom X% of developers have become essentially worthless while the top Y% of developers are now more valuable than ever.

brap

It baffles me that someone can just send a PR without knowing the gist of how it works and why it’s done this way. If you can’t answer this basic question then why tf do we even need you around?

xyst

AI generated code is the new "lines of code" metric used by middle management.

1294876

"There are also people who essentially make it harder for everyone else. And now anyone can produce more code in a day than they used to in a year." That is the "democratization" that AI shills speak of: https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2087538364580835804#m Once a CEO with a snowboard-optimized brain gave you a board seat, there is no way back.

scronkfinkle

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way. This hand off is no longer necessary as that same senior can just kick off an agent and have it handle the implementation for them. I've heard some refer to this as a "nature is healing" scenario for the industry where if you only signed up for a high paycheck and didn't care to think critically about any of the work you're doing then this will be painful because that previously manual process has been automated. The floor of what's necessary to be considered valuable has been raised.

fl4regun

Economics would have always created this downward pressure on demand for software engineers regardless, either companies would replace the number of engineers they need with AI, or with low paid offshored workers.

hn_submit

Look, stupid companies who use A.I. to generate their code will simply fail. Companies that use bright engineers to engineer their product and write code (and pay them accordingly) will thrive and thrash the competition. Darwinism in action. I don't believe A.I. will change much, but it will lead to winners and losers, that's certain. Lessons will be learned, A.I. will remain but play a minor role, just like IntelliSense and ReSharper. People need to understand that when things break management will hold you accountable, not the A.I. If you can't fix it you'll be out of a job. So you'd better make sure that you understand the generated code and clean it up before putting it in production because you'll be maintaining it.

i_idiot

So, blame the engineers now? Most likely they were forced by a manager to push more PRs faster else piped.

fithisux

Very good article. But it does cover the case where someone makes it to the top if he/she is junior. Who experience is gained? Maybe I ask too much from a short article.

timedude

This is really well written. I deal with the exact same issues almost daily. Senior engineers who want to guard quality are becoming a bottleneck.