HN – 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 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.

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

26 comments