Ask HN: Where is our profession (programmer) going?
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 testsFirst 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.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668199
Points: 10
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