by chickenimprint | 2026-03-06 18:45:52+00:00
> Software is everywhere and thus the value of maintaining software and the value of software engineering remains high.

This is an unfinished argument. What if we get coding agents to maintain software? What if frequent rewriting becomes cheap enough? Something that's a tenth or one hundredth of your salary doesn't have to be good to make for a good business decision. Why do you think every native application has been replaced by slop made up of 10 layers of JS frameworks on top of electron? Nothing matters as long as the product is cheap and fast to pump out, barely works on modern hardware, and makes dough.

> AI does not reduce software, it increases the amount of software.

There's not infinite demand for software. If AI inference costs take 50% of the prior payroll expenses, while making a company twice as efficient, that means we need 4 times as much demand in software engineering at the same salary for everyone to keep their job. What new or improved subscription, app, website, device, or other software product does the world need right now? 99.9% of people use the same 5 apps. Most of their free time, attention, and disposable income has already been captured by trash that is unbeatable due to network effects. Are we all going to sell shitty LLM frontends to businesses until they notice they could have done the same thing themselves? There might be an explosion in new software, but no one there to care about using it.

> I believe there is a huge chasm that will likely never be crossed between the human intent of systems and their implementation that only human engineers can actually bridge.

Maybe, or the AI might just be missing context. Think of all the unwritten culture, practices, and conversations the LLM hasn't been made aware of.

> In short they want a throat to choke.

You're responsible for those under you anyway, this doesn't help. Banking on those in charge being irrational forever in a way that is bad for business, and without ever noticing, is a bad gamble.

> The other factor is that while AI can clearly replace rote coding today [...], X is not something that can be solved for without a lot of knowledge and guardrails.

I'm talking about the world the AI-maximalists predict is rapidly approaching, not where we are today. None of that knowledge and none of those guardrails are hard to grasp intellectually, compared to advanced mathematics for example. Put your institutional knowledge in a .md file and add another agent that enforces guardrails in a loop. The only way out I see is a situation where there are complex patterns that we intuitively grasp, but can't articulate. Patterns that somehow span too much data or don't have enough examples for LLMs to pick up on.

> There will be engineers who maintain all the same code, they'll just cover more scope with LLM assisted tools.

So fewer jobs with lesser qualifications?

> Ultimately I don't see the boundary the same way you do, as software engineers we have always had to justify our systems by their real world interaction.

I've seen the way engineers design products, and I like products designed by engineers, but no layperson does. Laypeople don't want power, privacy, or agency. They care about how things work, and they lie to themselves and others about what they really want. They don't want a native desktop app that streams high-quality audio from a self-hosted collection, they want a subscription that autoplays algorithmic slop through a react native app on their iPhone. Do you really think you're better at appealing to/fleecing customers than people with actual UX, marketing, and behavioral psychology experience? This example only applies to mass-market software, but I'm sure it's not much different in other fields. Engineers keep thinking they could everyone else's job, but they don't do so well in practice.