Maybe I've just given up, or maybe I'm a realist? But I fully believe AI will just...catch up with everything?
There's so much money in it right now. There's such a momentum. There are zero incentives to slow down for those that are in charge.
I've accepted that in 5-10 years, the vast majority of human devs. and engineers will not touch a single line of code. It'll be small increments, with a couple of big ones here and there.
And there will not be any triumph for those that hold steadfast to the principle of human coding. They'll be tiny boutique shops that do custom stuff, in the same way cobblers are to the mega shoe factories.
We've been able to make watches with machines for 50 years. Handmade Watchmakers, and their producuts are more valuable and in demand than any guy running a conveyer belt. They still make 20x more if not 50x. People look up to them.
You can make a choice not to become a button pusher and still do things by hand. You dont have to fry your brain. You're falling for a massive trap to strip you of your value.
the difference is that code is not something the average person will marvel at over the intricate hand built details. You might get a few nerds interested if it's something super novel (like rewriting a major modern web app without any 3rd party libraries that is 30x more performant), but most people dont care. Extra true for businesses, I can't think of a business other than maybe a mom&pop shop or a place where showing wealth is important where they wouldnt happily issue casio watches far before they would consider a rolex.
Regular businesses are not going to build their own slop software because of AI, this is delusional. People will be hired because they love to build. Only a small percentage of the world loves to build things.
The most passionate people with the best reputation will suceed, they will continue to be in the most demand and will be the most valuable, like a swiss watchmaker.
Sorry LLMs arent replacing anyone who's got strong skills and cultivates them. You're so wrong here. These more passionate builders will however replace the lazy people who offload all their skill and brain capability to llms, and they'll use AI to help them.
Being lazy and letting llms do everything for you is not a good strategy.
Handmade watches are a tiny, niche market; they survive only because they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. Quartz watches are both cheaper and more accurate.
There is not room in the world for more handmade watchmakers, and there's not going to be room for much "artisan software" either.
Yeah, I have a really hard time buying the "AI code isn't maintainable long term" because if you look at the quality increase from January of this year to now, it's insane. We've gone from Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 to Fable 5.1 and GPT 6 in less than a year, where we went from 0 mathematics problems being solved by AI to a Millennium prize problem being solved in a few days of compute. Obviously not the same as coding skills, but it shows the growth in raw reasoning and abstraction.
I understand why people are resistant to this from an emotional perspective, but I really don't see a plateau in sight. RLVR is clearly still cooking and narrow RSI seems to be on the horizon.
But I'm also a realist. If the technology exists, it will be used to the maximum economical extent.
That would be like saying the first vehicle off the assembly line had to be profitable; there is an ocean of optimization that will drive the economics.
feels like pure copium to believe that won't change rapidly.
You can get a decent idea running some of this stuff locally. Depending on how efficient you want your agent to be, you can get an awful lot done on beefy local hardware and ~300W power consumption. Just inference of course ...
> if you look at the quality increase from January of this year to now, it's insane.
It's non-existent. LLMs still suck at writing code just as much as they did at the beginning of 2026, or 2025 for that matter. LLM proponents are always trying to hype everyone up on the supposed improvements, but they have never yet been real. That means they are unlikely to be real in the future either.
That's just ... not true? Have you tried qwen3.8 (compared to qwen3) or deepseek 4? they've improved tremendously, maybe not at every class of problems, but if you take a disciplined approach and don't ask them to one-shot everything (e.g. update agents.md as you go, actually use the thing you build, give feedback etc), it's positively absurd what you can get done now with a single agent.
I agree that not every class of software or problem or this or that is going to be decimated/revolutionized whatever, but to not see any improvement since 2025 just sounds like you're not looking.
> I've accepted that in 5-10 years, the vast majority of human devs. and engineers will not touch a single line of code.
Why would companies employ human engineers then? What is the value addition to justify high human salaries. If AI is going to get so good (and I am not saying it won’t happen, that’s a separate debate), why can’t AI figure out the prompts itself?
That is where a lot of people in tech believe things are headed, executives in particular. Fully autonomous AI-driven codebases. “Dark factories.” One agent generating a plan, one writing the code, one responsible for testing and validating, and one to orchestrate the rest.
The idea is software development will follow in the footsteps of physical manufacturing and eventually become fully automated. I think one huge flaw with this belief/comparison is that the automated assembly line is deterministic. LLMs and AI agents are not. Every Tacoma made on the Toyota assembly line is made from the same blueprint. There are no robots deciding on-the-fly whether to use a laser weld or an adhesive, what material to use for a specific component, etc. Now think about how LLMs build software. No matter how strict a harness or detailed spec you give it, it will always make decisions. That is what makes it “agentic” after all.
I've fully automated the software development part in my company. With production apps, no code has been written by hands, no requirement written by hand. Everything is fully automated except the testing part. And testing means the human testable parts are still performed by hands. The resule, with less people we produce more, actually way more. Our cost has gone down, quality has improved litrally. The code is being produced with AI is of higher quality, we employ multiple agents during planning phase and then different agents during execution phase. Sometimes some tasks has to be redone because some agents are better than others. Our release cycle is reduced from 2 weeks to 2 days.
We'll probably get there, once frontier labs RL the fuck out of AI agents sitting in meetings and interpreting incoherent ramblings of business majors into actionable requirements. That's the biggest value human devs currently provide.
Yes, AI for now has significant code quality issues, but that's mostly because it lacks agency to take care of code quality unless you explicitly tell it to. It is good at refactoring its own messes when you even vaguely ask for it. So while something like Astra still needs supervision to produce decent code, I expect that in a year or two it will be unnecessary.
I'm in the same boat. When I started thinking about LLM development as multi-year iterative training adjustments, it felt like the majority of shortcomings can be addressed.
TrackerFF · · focus · HN ↗
There's so much money in it right now. There's such a momentum. There are zero incentives to slow down for those that are in charge.
I've accepted that in 5-10 years, the vast majority of human devs. and engineers will not touch a single line of code. It'll be small increments, with a couple of big ones here and there.
And there will not be any triumph for those that hold steadfast to the principle of human coding. They'll be tiny boutique shops that do custom stuff, in the same way cobblers are to the mega shoe factories.
physicallyIllfr · · focus · HN ↗
You can make a choice not to become a button pusher and still do things by hand. You dont have to fry your brain. You're falling for a massive trap to strip you of your value.
austinthetaco · · focus · HN ↗
physicallyIllfr · · focus · HN ↗
The most passionate people with the best reputation will suceed, they will continue to be in the most demand and will be the most valuable, like a swiss watchmaker.
Sorry LLMs arent replacing anyone who's got strong skills and cultivates them. You're so wrong here. These more passionate builders will however replace the lazy people who offload all their skill and brain capability to llms, and they'll use AI to help them.
Being lazy and letting llms do everything for you is not a good strategy.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
Legend2440 · · focus · HN ↗
Handmade watches are a tiny, niche market; they survive only because they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. Quartz watches are both cheaper and more accurate.
There is not room in the world for more handmade watchmakers, and there's not going to be room for much "artisan software" either.
jrflo · · focus · HN ↗
I understand why people are resistant to this from an emotional perspective, but I really don't see a plateau in sight. RLVR is clearly still cooking and narrow RSI seems to be on the horizon.
But I'm also a realist. If the technology exists, it will be used to the maximum economical extent.
falserum · · focus · HN ↗
Economics depend on that a lot.
arbitrary_name · · focus · HN ↗
feels like pure copium to believe that won't change rapidly.
falserum · · focus · HN ↗
I have no data for neither, so I’ll wait for numbers.
Will LLMs stay being useful? Definitely. Will in 10 years touching/changing code be somewhat niche, like ASM development is now? Not clear yet.
And optimisations are not a given, a lot of low hanging fruit are already taken, because it actually saves lots of money already now.
spopejoy · · focus · HN ↗
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
It's non-existent. LLMs still suck at writing code just as much as they did at the beginning of 2026, or 2025 for that matter. LLM proponents are always trying to hype everyone up on the supposed improvements, but they have never yet been real. That means they are unlikely to be real in the future either.
spopejoy · · focus · HN ↗
I agree that not every class of software or problem or this or that is going to be decimated/revolutionized whatever, but to not see any improvement since 2025 just sounds like you're not looking.
samuraijack · · focus · HN ↗
Why would companies employ human engineers then? What is the value addition to justify high human salaries. If AI is going to get so good (and I am not saying it won’t happen, that’s a separate debate), why can’t AI figure out the prompts itself?
draftsman · · focus · HN ↗
tegeek · · focus · HN ↗
NichoPaolucci · · focus · HN ↗
Aozora7 · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, AI for now has significant code quality issues, but that's mostly because it lacks agency to take care of code quality unless you explicitly tell it to. It is good at refactoring its own messes when you even vaguely ask for it. So while something like Astra still needs supervision to produce decent code, I expect that in a year or two it will be unnecessary.
xpct · · focus · HN ↗