Ask HN: Where is our profession (programmer) going?

166 points by syntaxbush 119 days ago 183 comments
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I had been running a small (3 people) software company for about 4 years. Since closing down, I recently hung out at a friend's company to see what they were working on (15 ppl). To preface: I'm a heavy user of Claude (rarely write code by hand), but what I'm seeing in person has been rather shocking to me, and I wanted to calibrate with others.

In particular: - the code is not the source of truth anymore; it's ask claude to write, and ask claude to explain - LoC, abstractions, and all those "software development principles" does not seem to matter to people - Code review is not done by humans - Actually understanding the problem deeply seems to be offloaded to claude - Some developers are running like 5+ simultaneous claude sessions, and no code is being looked at - Explosion of llm-generated tests

First off, is this similar to what's going on at your company?

If this company is representative, it feels like software development is going from a precise occupation that requires high degree of understanding to something probabilistic and offloaded understanding (to eventually not an occupation at all honestly).

I'm interested to hear other folks' perspectives.

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