Not only that, I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna be disappointed now they can implement their side projects in a week instead of 6 months. Finally - the thing is there, ready. And the likely outcome is
a) Almost no one but you cares and
b) Now that this has become trivial, there's no much joy in it. The struggle we had before A.I was the real joy; prompting agents for a few days and getting what you want isn't that joyful.
My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people. Sure, we didn't sign up for this, it's not a fun job what I've described, but why should management care? They have their own problems and A.I is threatening their jobs as well.
At work we build enterprise software with stuff like Kotlin+Spring + multiple NextJS apps + Microservices + Rust CAD engine.
I haven’t have written code aside from tweaking stuff here and there in probably 3 or 4 months. Before that I wrote code by hand every day for many years.
I’ve found a lot of fun parts of my new workflow that I enjoy. I still miss being fully immersed in a problem deep in the files… and sometimes it feels like homework reading so many implementation summaries from Claude because the feature spans 4 repos and is too much code to read. But I do love shaping the code into different solutions exploring in a way that is unique to ai native workflows. And I love building agent skills and frameworks with/around them and expanding it out to more aspects of the company or life — there’s deep work to be had that still feels like hacking in the trenches. I get a lot of the same satisfaction in different ways, and there’s a lot of exciting novelty to explore that was previously out of reach due to time and energy constraints.
Also I don’t like our backend stack and I hate React / NextJS to the degree of derangement syndrome — I am so happy that I don’t have to write it and I can just focus on UX, making customers happy / lives easier / shaping the software into better and better versions of itself at such a faster pace.
People who learned good software engineering intimately before the inflection point are extremely lucky right now. Existential dread and the stages of grief have been a part of the journey for me too sadly, but there’s a lot to celebrate and explore with the right attitude.
I feel the same way, I have many years of experience, and I have gone from writing everything by hand to using claude code all the time (my latest company is very pro doing everything with AI).
Since I have been a software architect for the past 7-8 years it feels in some ways that that experience makes using claude code a lot more productive than for my non-architect colleagues, as I am able to steer it much more effectively whether directly in sessions or via custom skills / mcp.
The big issues right now for me are hiring and manager expectations, I changed positions last fall due to mass layoffs and it took me 3 months to find one: having leetcode interviews in the current climate seems completely useless, even more than it was in the past, and system design interviews are so formulaic it also feels like a crapshoot. Plus every job getting hundreds of AI generated applications makes actually being considered in the first place quite difficult.
Manager expectations are also ridiculously inflated nowadays, it seems most action items that come are claude written with fantastical random statistics (if you add caching you can make your backend 98.3% faster!), and it takes so much time to fight this and unrealistic team velocity expectations.
Interesting times, I do feel lucky I have had a long career, but I very much fear the ladder being pulled up even more than it has been when outsourcing because widespread. I know everybody says "things always change, new opportunities will open up to compensate for the ones that are being lost" but this time it does feel different, and not in a good way.
Things are changing so fast and so chaotically with this technology. I'm also writing everything now using Claude code, and I've been thinking a lot about what this means for my work moving forward. One thing I've noticed, is that I will just keep hammering and hammering on my work until I force myself to quit. Even on the weekend I feel the pull to go work on it. I'm just less sort of mentally exhausted by work, I suppose, but I don't think that's particularly healthy if it leads to me working way more than I should. On one hand, I think that's a reflection of how powerful and exciting this technology is, but on the other hand, I think that it triggers some different kind of reward function in my mind that I'm not used to.
In any case, I think if one wants to continue to have a career in this industry for years to come, it's basically table stakes to become fluent in using these tools.
Similarly, I started using Claude to add some features to an native app on iOS and Android in early January. That was so successful (tooks days instead of weeks) I started applying it to client work and basically haven't written any substantial code since. A big change from around 40 years of writing code pretty much every day and I'm enjoying the increased velocity from not having to web search for API and CSS syntax details.
My son, working in another dev company, reports the same - he basically hasn't written much actual code for about three months. It's a massive change.
It already happened. The old timers correctly observe that modern applications are bloated and inefficient because of all the heavyweight frameworks, excessive abstraction layers, and "left-pad culture" where external dependencies are pulled in to do the most trivial things but that these things enabled less capable developers to effectively build software to fulfill industry demand. LLM-only coders are just the next step in the devolution.
> My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding.
It will always be preferable to work on an understandable codebase, because that maximizes the AI's affordances too. And then the AI can explain things to you. A skilled human will always have a lot of solid knowledge relating to their hyper-specific niche that isn't part of your average general purpose AI, so humans will obviously have a key role to play still.
I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat.
I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are useful in getting these projects back on track, but perhaps as a society we're learning to accept this reduction in quality.
And how do u sum up the tradeoffs so far, or is it too early to tell ? Do u see lots of unacceptable shit making into production that wouldn't have before A.I for example ?
They elect someone from a short list approved by the supreme leader...who will execute policy dictated to him by the supreme leader. Plus thousands of Iranians are executed yearly for crimes against the regime (make it tens of thousands in 2026). Calling Iran a democracy is a joke, it's a brutal dictatorship.
> If you're a religious Jew, then you believe you have a mandate from God (so an irrefutable right, or even obligation, needing no justification) to settle and rule not only the West Bank but the entire region.
Well not really , most Orthodox definitely don't believe this in fact some of them are anti Zionist and the ones who accept Israel's existence definitely do not think Israel needs to expand its borders like that. So no to that.
Israeli have a diverse spectrum of religious denominations. This includes religious, non Orthodox Jews. Dati Leumi (the religious Zionists) are by far the most hawkish. They absolutely believe that the biblical land belongs to the Jewish people. They account for about 15% and are incredibly politically influential.
The Haredim (the ultra-Orthodox) are more complicated, and in general don't want all the promised land (they believe that the state established militarily/politically isn't the "spiritual" state that was promised). But, when it comes to the currently occupied land, they have been shifting right in recent years. They vote in coalition with the nationalist right, and their communities increasingly overlap geographically with settlements.
Well you gave it more nuance here than in your original message that determined "If you're a religious Jew...".
Bennet is dati leumi and represents a big chunk of the mainstream/modern dati leumis. Any signs he's after conquering Saudi Arabai and Egypt ? Not really. Even Smotrich "only" wants the West Bank.
The Dati Leumi camp isn't as uniform as you portray it. There are many examples (e.g. Avrum Burg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avraham_Burg ) do not think Israel should be over the entire historical/biblical region ("Eretz Israel Ha-Shlema").
National Religious Party–Religious Zionism is a political party.
It feels unfair and unjustified that you are accusing me of confusing them without substantiating your accusation. I am still open to learn anything that you might want to share with me that you think is important.
So Avrum Burg I mentioned in another comment is historically affiliated with the "Mafdal", the religious party. That religious party, just like religious zionism in general, isn't one uniform block. It has different opinions and it evolves.
I feel like I lost track of the discussion. At some point I thought you were claiming something along the lines that says religious Jews believe they are under an order from God to expand Israel to its maximal biblical geographical area.
If your claim is that the current day Mafdal's political (not necessarily religious) position is that Israel should annex the West Bank and Gaza. Ehm, sure, maybe. I think it's a bit more nuanced even than that but I won't argue on this point.
It's possible I just lost the thread, and if I did I apologize. HN isn't very good at facilitating this sort of discussion. If I mis-stated your position above and am agreeing with the wrong thing I'm sure you'll correct me.
[EDIT: correcting myself a little bit Burg actually ended up as a member of the Labor party in politics, but his politics did originally align with the Mafdal, the party is/was supposed to represent all Zionist Religious people but has obviously diverged a bit from that)
> At some point I thought you were claiming something along the lines that says religious Jews believe they are under an order from God to expand Israel to its maximal biblical geographical area.
I just meant that there's a part of the religious spectrum prone to that interpretation, and it mixes very well with nationalism, and expansionism. And that it isn't a meaningless fringe, but has a significant political representation. What I wrote was a reasonable way the scripture can be interpreted by someone who believes it's a true word of God.
If I'm wrong, and e.g. the Miflaga Datit Leumit party explicitly rejects this kind of intepretation then I stand corrected, but judging by what its leader says publicly this isn't the case...
Unlike Iran what the leader says isn't some ultimate mandate to the followers. Party leaders, and members, come and go and their platforms changes over time.
Smotrich, e.g., says and does lot of things. Some of them resonate with some members of his party, others don't.
I would push back on the idea of expansionism. I don't think that's a mainstream view in the party at all. The party does support annexing the West Bank and Gaza which to be honest is the only workable solution anyways regardless of where you're coming from and really the best outcome for Palestinians as well if they become full Israeli citizens.
It was Trump or his immediate environmetn who asked Israeli to attack Iran first (better optics); Israel would have never done this without American approval.
Did Israel want this to happen though ? Yes. But so did the Americans. I guess the negotiations went badly.
Not a chance. He hasn't even got the strength in his convictions to do that. Trump is just an opportunist, he'd go down like Jerry Lundegard at the end of Fargo.
At this point a good solution for de-escalation would be the voluntary relocation of Israeli citizens, as has been proposed by the Israeli government for citizens of other nations.
Given that Israelis are by far the least liked group in the region, why shouldn't they be the ones relocating? Instead of say, the Palestinians?
Pretty sure Trump would be more than glad to deliver you to the promised land of Florida, or something. It's probably enough to just write the US embassy and ask them to arrange Aliyah to Palm Beach.
Nope, its not enough to write the US embassy they wouldn't hand me over a visa definitely not anything permanent (which seems to be your idea right ? you're talking about permanently 'relocating' the Israelis). Any other ideas ?
I literally just asked ChatGPT and it says very explicitly that Mike Huckabee will fly you to the US on his personal jet and hand you a green card if you just show him that you've been circumcised and promise to do a little proselytizing.
I find it quite unlikely in the midst of what the U.S military needs to do now a soldier would take the time to vent on HN. But sure, if that is the case I guess he earned the right to vent; still slim (borderline zero) chances of him dying even if he is U.S military.
People who were actively told that they wouldn't be deployed ended up being deployed in very recent history, they could be sitting at home reasonably worried about that.
Perhaps they're a national guardsman, for example?
> I don't see how OpenAI employees who have signed the We Will Not Be Divided letter can continue their employment there in light of this
Well some may voluntarily leave, some will be actively poached by Anthropic perhaps and some I suppose will stay in their jobs because leaving isn't an easy decision to make.
> some I suppose will stay in their jobs because leaving isn't an easy decision to make.
Anyone who chooses to stay shouldn’t have signed the letter. What’s the point of doing it if you’re not going to follow through? If you signed the letter and don’t leave after the demands aren’t met, you’re a liar and a coward and are actively harming every signatory of every future letter.
a) Almost no one but you cares and
b) Now that this has become trivial, there's no much joy in it. The struggle we had before A.I was the real joy; prompting agents for a few days and getting what you want isn't that joyful.
reply