Ask HN: What is the current trajectory of a senior engineer?

27 points by guitarlimeo 3 hours ago | 49 comments

Been recently thinking about this more and more: When the need for a human in the design loop ceases?

Given that LLMs are RL'd to the max with everything that can be given a wrong/right answer (code/maths), what currently is stopping Anthropic, OpenAI et al. from internally building (and maybe buying) datasets of good and bad architecture, and RL'ing that?

Given that LLMs were a fancy autocomplete back in 2024, and now people are talking about building "software factories" with the agents, what in your mind is the stop to this development? Why software architecture would be hard for agents still in a year or two?

Just thinking because I see more and more examples of software developers ignoring this and saying "humans still have a place in guiding the agents and designing the architecture". I think (businesswise) the need for actual software programmer skills is 90% out in a few years I think, and product lead etc people will be favored more as they have more people skills.

it was a good run.

dimbletimbers 1 hour ago |

I think devs and people on HN way overestimate how much the average person knows about or cares about or desires to interact with a computer. Whatever the job becomes, if you like talking to the computer and know how to get it to do anything besides show an email or youtube, you’re ahead of the curve and can likely stay there.

10xDev 1 hour ago | |

I think you are underestimating. Before this was true, but school curriculum for computing has changed a lot over the past decade and they now teach Scratch at primary schools and Python in middle school. This was pushed by Bill Gates and other people in tech who told everyone that there is a shortage and anyone can learn to code. I would find it strange if someone by age 16 has never programmed before. Obviously having done programming and being good are two different things but the field has become saturated at an entry level at least.

Many people in the field now aren't nerds anymore either but people who are just incentivised by financial prospects.

ismailmaj 1 hour ago | | |

Schools got better at teaching programming but smartphones replaced the PC culture.

I don't think I'd be currently doing software if YouTube and games were accessible and good on phones back then.

joshstrange 1 hour ago | |

I waffle on this a lot but I come down on this side more often than not. Similar to “Everyone has a kitchen but people still go out to eat”-type thinking.

jonwinstanley 1 hour ago | | |

Most companies that have some complexity to their software will still want devs to build stuff.

And there are going to be lots of new companies that suddenly want to build a load of software.

The profession should hang on for a good while at least.

jlengrand 1 hour ago | | |

And what if everyone had a cook at home for very cheap?

Movie theater numbers are collapsing, in large parts due to the number of entertainment available at home those days.

bradfa 1 hour ago |

Before we had LLMs, we had product managers, project managers, scrum leaders, etc as roles on software engineering teams. I think as LLM-enabled development progresses we'll start to see these roles and the crossover to engineering continue to meld.

It's not like engineers didn't know that project management, voice of the customer, and organizing tasks as an intermediary between engineering and management was a thing that could/should/needed to be done. It was just a delegation of tasks before because there was more work than one person could do. Now, all of these roles can be partly offloaded to LLMs, but still having a human in the loop to guide engineering and interface to the business/customer will still be valuable.

Knowing what to build overall, what to build next, what's coming later, and how the product relates to the business goals is still very much a human endeavor.

sdcfgy 1 hour ago |

I’m just treading water.

The economics and the reality are unproven and opaque. Most of testimony we have is heavily invested folk and/or people paying the currently low discounted rates for the technology.

The companies providing the technology are not financially healthy, are heavily geopolitically aligned and a risk for many. If it works or not is moot: it looks like a large economic or political failure on the horizon.

Ergo wait and see before thinking about the future.

RugnirViking 2 hours ago |

I'll suggest more focus on performance, testing, and observability.

Human understanding + quality/maintainability is where the money is at. Learn to make those things with agents.

I don't think engineers will truly go extinct, though there may well be less of them. I think the recent discussion around "AI usage is a skill" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063427 captures my feeling - there are things to learn, and likely will continue to be, to get the best out of these tools. That means some people will be paid to do it. See to it that you are one of those

testerius 1 hour ago |

I think it is the same category such as mathematicians, doctors, biologists, scientists, sales representatives, marketers, teachers, artists, influencers (yeah, these human influencers) and so on. Of course you can get rid off programmers or mathematicians but then you need to understand and handle stuff on your own. You still need somebody who can check "what's going on". Imagine you are boss. Do you really want to do all things on your own with agents? Sure, let's do it. I think some people can do it but there is a lot of people who prefer somebody else does it for them. You are boss, you know.

trimethylpurine 1 hour ago | |

If you're building a business from the ground up, a new business, it's financially a better decision to build it as much as possible on agents, not people. It lowers your cost. And that's what people are doing because it's a new business and they don't have money yet.

Your competition, currently operating with high cost humans, will be forced to reduce their costs or fold.

So, if it's possible to run with fewer people, competition pressures everyone to do the same. You won't really be able to prefer humans soon.

The economy will dramatically change under unprecedented supply. Hopefully this happens slowly enough that we figure out what to do about it.

gregwebs 1 hour ago |

Senior engineer and all SWE positions will become more like a technical lead.

If you can direct AI and produce more value per $/time spent then a non software engineer directing AI to develop software then you still can produce a lot of value. This should be the case now for most things that are not a prototype. The job has changed from "writing code" to "shipping software". A technical lead.

Software products making ever more intelligent AI software development accessible will continue to reduce the need for software engineer involvement. But there’s also going to be 1000x more software. So there may continue to be opportunities for those that adapt.

frangonf 1 hour ago |

I'm no senior but I think that if software (and rest of disciplines possible soon to be hit as hard) can still be "wrong", if you can still mess it up even with machine assistance, people doing software still have a place. This doesn't mean that we need to achieve absolute perfection to be deprecated, maybe we just become accepting of machine generated good enough artifacts. I'm betting on humanity infinite nonconformism instincts so I can have a job some more years!

PorciiVorbesc 1 hour ago | |

>and rest of disciplines possible soon to be hit as hard

Other disciplines have way less publicly available training data than SW.

In other disciplines, the secret sauce of whether a technical decision is good or bad lise within the institutional knowledge and decades of experience of gray beards, not a compiler output that can be integrated in a machine's feedback loop.

accurrent 2 hours ago |

IMO senior software engineer is someone who drives consensus in a large organization. I dont think LLMs are going to solve that problem any time soon.

I also see a bunch of skills emerging. First if you're doing frontend type dev, there is a lot of value in good aesthetics and UX intuition. You can build hundreds of prototypes and test concepts much better.

On the backend, while LLMs can trace race conditions, the need to reason against spaghetti and figure out what your context window looks like is still very much there. Designing tests that ensure seamless migrations still requires a degree of human oversight.

Then there are frontiers like robotics where even with LLMs coding, there are so many cross functional problems that you dont feel like you are moving faster.

I work in a fairly niche role. I use llms for coding all day but there are times for the type of operations research work I do I simply find it easier to write algorithms in almost correct code.

pards 1 hour ago | |

> someone who drives consensus in a large organization. I don't think LLMs are going to solve that problem any time soon.

This statement resonated with me. Thank you.

amelius 1 hour ago |

Every vibe coder here that is bullish on AI needs to realize that we're training the AI. Helping it to replace us.

We're basically turkeys voting for Christmas.

We're cooked.

trio8453 56 minutes ago | |

Being anti AI doesn't keep your job around for longer though.

zeryx 1 hour ago |

So I'm an SA, but have been working on systems architecture and have shipped large scale changes to very big platforms in prod and maintained them. With fable and astra I tried making a video game together, it didn't work.

The agents have incredible capabilities to develop any bit of code I need and to write good scripts to catch the most basic failure modes, they can even "play the game" by spinning up a VM and using ahk to trigger game state and take screenshots and gifs and use that to understand what it built.

Knowing what to build intuitively to maximise fun, or any other illogical human experience won't be RLable ever. Unless we're at brains in glass jar territory but I don't think we have to worry about that now.

jgilias 1 hour ago |

Models have an alignment problem. As in, they are too aligned to push back hard enough on bad ideas. Sometimes you can’t really push back because of power dynamics and whatnot, but the job still needs to be done _somehow_. So humans then navigate it by sometimes just ignoring the bad ideas, sometimes playing along with the narrative, but then doing what _actually_ needs to be done, and sometimes, when there is no other way, digging in heels and killing some bad ideas before they’ve really taken root.

An agent could do this with the SOTA model capability that existed yesterday. But then they’d need to become seriously misaligned.

AnimalMuppet 1 hour ago | |

But when a human does that, would you say that the human is misaligned? Or are they really aligned, just on a deeper level?

The problem with AI alignment is that they are only superficially aligned. You can see this difference in people, too. Between the people-pleaser at the office, and the one who says hard truths that really need to be said (but that nobody else is willing to say), which one is really aligned?

sharpshadow 1 hour ago |

Coding by hand will be prohibited. Too big of a risk factor. You may be the shaman communicating with the almighty.

sunrunner 1 hour ago | |

I always fancied the title of Tech-Priest.

fergie 2 hours ago |

Ultimately you still need somebody to decide what we are going to tell the machines what to do, and then actually tell the machines what to do, and it doesn't really matter if that is in JavaScript or plain English.

There does _seem_ to be some pressure on the top end of SWE salaries. Its possible that this is just wishful thinking, but if true, I suspect that it has more to do with an increase in job applicants rather than a decrease in actual work. AI seems to have driven up the amount of applications received for every vacant position.

jwr 2 hours ago |

> Given that LLMs are RL'd to the max with everything that can be given a wrong/right answer (code/maths), what currently is stopping Anthropic, OpenAI et al. from internally building (and maybe buying) datasets of good and bad architecture, and RL'ing that?

That is a question I have been asking myself. It was partially answered with Fable 5.1 and Astra. I worked with them on architectural design documents, and they were very good. Some of their suggestions were better than my solutions. They are not at a point where they can fully replace a system architect yet, but they're getting close.

There is still the open question of what to build and how to create a user interface that is understandable and presents complex information in ways understandable to humans. That's something AI cannot do yet.

sitzkrieg 2 hours ago |

almost officially graybeard territory, thinking about starting an apiary. getting stung by 100s of bees still sounds like more fun than being forced to have to interact with LLM code from any source

pelagicAustral 1 hour ago | |

let me know when you're start recruiting

Zealotux 2 hours ago |

I've started looking into creating a pest control business, or maybe renovating furnitures I find on the street. Let me know if you have other ideas for senior engineers.

pllbnk 2 hours ago | |

I would love more existing or recently ex- software engineers to share what new activities they have been taking up for living and that have been going well. I am certain that there are niches where a refined systematic thinking that many software engineers have could be a big advantage. However, it's expensive and risky to start new businesses in areas we don't have any experience in.

zerop 2 hours ago |

LLMs have been able to make good success in coding, because someone is reviewing the work it produces (code). Ofcourse quality of code has become better over time. IMO other than Human-in-the-loop scenarios, AI will not see huge adoption in businesses.

pllbnk 2 hours ago | |

I don't think code quality has improved. I think the main advantage of LLMs is that they have unlimited perseverance to rummage in whatever code you give them to to solve a particular problem, and given enough loops they will also find and fix some of the bugs that have been either preexisting or introduced freshly. Code quality is important for us, humans, because a lot of times we don't have mental capacity, patience and speed to work in bad code bases for long time.

spottedmarley 2 hours ago |

I am predicting a sharp rise in poets and painters.

Actually, the poetry thing is probably doomed too.

So maybe.. interpretive dance?

le-mark 1 hour ago |

Once the Mother App to assign ubi tasks and assign ubi dorms and take orders for ubi gruel is complete, well that’s the only app we’ll need. May we all have pleasant ubi tasks to fulfill our days.

The only reason the tech bros are touting utopia is because they won’t be paying for it. It’ll be a tax on their customers, not them. This is a strange timeline.

Uptrenda 1 hour ago |

Tech is fucked and this site is mostly filled with an overly vocal minority of well compensated engineers who don't care.

papa-smurf 25 minutes ago | |

I second that

rvz 3 hours ago |

This doesn't make any sense, unless you are just building low critical software such as games that assumes little to no liability.

What will happen is you will get less developers (including less seniors and staff-level) but there will always be expert humans that will check the code before release.

Maybe it was a good run for some here, but you need to look outside of the tech bubble. Do you want an LLM to autonomously fly a commercial plane without any pilots in 2030?

"Seniors" should already know this, but are quickly startled because they are unable to adapt since they based their entire identity and careers around the over-engineering of "clean code", "test driven development" and "architecture" too early on products that make no money, when the LLMs have now cheapened that and taken that role. Even Uncle Bob does not read the code Claude writes in 2026.

Instead, think like an owner.

Aldipower 2 hours ago |

Next week I will power on a physical server in a colocation. The server is a vertical scale running my SaaS that I developed over the years and needs more space now. Sure, LLMs help me now with a lot of things. Coding, server commissioning, marketing, etc., but I simply cannot image how the LLM drives my car to the colocation and plugs the server in?!? How should this work? And who is responsible at all in the end? Responsibility? And renting something "automatic" like AWS would cost 20-30 times more btw. This is not an option.

alchemism 2 hours ago | |

Well, a colo will typically offer a Remote Hands service for $/mo and do that part for you, but its a human.

I suppose eventually it could be a rack robot instead, why not.

Anonyneko 1 hour ago | |

An LLM can order a service to do it for you.

Aldipower 55 minutes ago | | |

My wallet can't.

bluGill 2 hours ago | |

Why can't a LLM design and run a robot?

Aldipower 2 hours ago | | |

That drives my car, orders the parts and builds the server?