[VincentEvans]

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup.

Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years.

But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no longer be constrained by sandboxes of Excel or Access - they will ship multi-cloud edge-deployed kubernetes micro-services wired with Kafka, and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

[mnky9800n]

I met a guy on the airplane the other day whose job is to vibe code for people who can't vibe code. He showed me his discord server (he paid for plane wifi), where he charges people 50$/month to be in the server and he helps them unfuck their vibe coded projects. He had around 1000 people in the server.

[daveidol]

So wait is he an actual software engineer doing this as a side hustle? Or like a vibe coder guru that basically only works with AI tools?

[mr_toad]

A big part of the reason that people develop solutions in Excel is that they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. No business case, no scope, no plan, and most importantly no budget.

Unless a business allows any old employee to spin up cloud services on a whim we’re not going to see sales people spinning up containers and pipelines, AI or not.

[boston_clone]

What about a sales person interacting with an LLM that is already authz'd to spin up various cloud resources? I don't think that scenario is too far-fetched...

[zurtri]

So very true.

And then over time these Excel spreadsheets become a core system that runs stuff.

I used to live in fear of one of these business analyst folks overwriting a cell or sorting by just the column and not doing the rows at the same time.

Also VLOOKUP's are the devil.

[simultsop]

Unless they have a linux with some libre office, I fail to see where there is no budget for Excel. Initially you have to keep up with windows licenses then office.

[Cthulhu_]

> and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

This will be the big counter to AI generated tools; at one point they become black boxes and the only thing people can do is to try and fix them or replace them altogether.

Of course, in theory, AI tooling will only improve; today's vibe coded software that in some cases generate revenue can be fed into the models of the future and improved upon. In theory.

Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes.

[jack_h]

> or replace them altogether.

Before AI companies were usually very reticent to do a rewrite or major refactoring of software because of the cost but that calculus may change with AI. A lot of physical products have ended up in this space where it's cheaper to buy a new product and throw out the old broken one rather than try and fix it. If AI lowers the cost of creating software then I'm not sure why it wouldn't go down the same path as physical goods.

[worldsayshi]

The prevailing counter narrative around vibe coding seems to be that "code output isn't the bottle neck, understanding the problem is". But shouldn't that make vibe coding a good tool for the tool belt? Use it to understand the outermost layer of the problem, then throw out the code and write a proper solution.

[pelario]

> Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes.

So, no compilers for you neither ?

(To be fair: I'm not loving the whole vibe coding thing. But I'm trying to approach this wave with open mind, and looking for the good arguments in both side. This is not one of them)

[jiggawatts]

> There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers

New? New!?

This is my job now!

I call it software archeology — digging through Windows Server 2012 R2 IIS configuration files with a “last modified date” about a decade ago serving money-handling web apps to the public.

[mjomaa]

WebForms?

[dhorthy]

When Claude starts deploying Kafka clusters I’m outro

[CuriouslyC]

It's already happening brother, https://github.com/containers/kubernetes-mcp-server.

[Syntaf]

I allowed Claude to debug an ingress rule issue on my cluster last week for a membership platform I run.

Not really the same since Claude didn’t deploy anything — but I WAS surprised at how well it tracked down the ingress issue to a cron job accidentally labeled as a web pod (and attempting to service http requests).

It actually prompted me to patch the cron itself but I don’t think I’m that bullish yet to let CC patch my cluster.

[zer00eyz]

I have seen a few dozen Kafka installs.

I have seen one Kafka instal that was really the best tool for the job.

More than a hand full of them could have been replaced by Redis, and in the worst cases could have been a table in Postgres.

If Claude thinks it fine, remember it's only a reflection of the dumb shit it finds in its training data.

[Jtsummers]

Superfund repos.

[throwup238]

Now that's an open source funding model governments can get behind.

[binary132]

A lot of big open source repos need to be given the superfund treatment

[cruffle_duffle]

What makes you so sure it will have a repo?

I don’t recall the last time Claude suggested anything about version control :-)

[surajrmal]

Does anyone remember the websites that front page and dreamweaver used to generate from its wysiwyg editor? It was a nightmare to modify manually and convinced me to never rely on generated code.

[mr_toad]

I agree that the code that dreamweaver generated was truely awful. But compilers and interpreters also generate code, and these days they are very good at it. Technically the browser’s rendering engine is a code generator as well, so if you’re hand-coding HTML you’re still relying on code generation.

Declarative languages and AI go hand in hand. SQL was intended to be a ‘natural’ language that the query engine (an old-school AI) would use to write code.

Writing natural language prompts to produce code is not that different, but we’re using “stochastic” AI, and stochastic means random, which means mistakes and other non-ideal outputs.

[djeastm]

I definitely remember that. Got paid $400 for my very first site in the early 00s.

But we also didn't have an AI tool to do the modifying of that bad code. We just had our own limited-capacity-brain, mistake-making, relatively slow-typing selves to depend on.

[slipnslider]

I still remember that Frontpage exploit in which a simple google search would return websites that still had the default Frontpage password and thus you could login and modify the webpage.

[goosejuice]

Developers do that too. Consultants have be doing rescue projects for quite a long time. I don't think anything has or will change on that front.

[pkdpic]

Agreed, sometimes it seems like there are only two types of roles. Maintaining / updating hot mess legacy code bases for an established company or work 100 hours a week building a new hot mess code base for a startup. Obviously oversimplifying but just my very limited experience scoping out postings and talking to people about current jobs.

Regardless this just made me shudder thinking about the weird little ocean of (now maybe dwindling) random underpaid contract jobs for a few hours a month maintaining ancient Wordpress sites...

Surely that can't be our fate...

[inejge]

> Developers do that too.

Not at that speed. Scale remains to be seen, so far I'm aware only of hobby-project wreck anecdotes.

[linsomniac]

>it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

IMHO, there's a strong case for the opposite. My vibe coding prompts are along the lines of "Please implement the plan described in `phase1-epic.md` using `specification.prd` as a guide." The specification and epics are version controlled and a part of the project. My vibe coded software has better design documentation than most software projects I've been involved in.

[VincentEvans]

I assume you have some software engineering fundamentals training.

[aitchnyu]

Do we have a method to let AI analyze the data within the DBs and figure out how to port it to a well designed db? I'm a fan of the philosophy of write strong data structures and stupid algorithms around them, your data will outlive your application, etc. Simple example is a Mongodb field which stores same thing as int or string, relationships without foreign keys in Postgres etc. Then frustrating shit like somebody creating an entire table since he cant `ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN`

[danielbln]

"Claude, connect to DB A via FOO and analyze the data, then figure out to to port it to well designed DB B, come back to me with a proposal and implementation plan"

[meander_water]

I think we're already there [0].

[0] https://x.com/PovilasKorop/status/1959590015018652141

Im really curious about what other jobs will pop up. As long as there is an element of probability associated with AI, there will need to be manual supervision for certain tasks/jobs.

[broast]

> it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

These are my favorite types of code bases to work on. The source of truth is the code. You have to read it and debug it to figure it out, and reconcile the actual behaviors with the desired or expected behaviors through your own product oriented thinking

[josefx]

The description makes it sound like someone wanted to deploy a single static site and followed a how to article they found on hacker news.

[enos_feedler]

Its alright because you can shove all of that into an LLM and have it fixed instantly

[worthless-trash]

See, you're using the definition of "Fixed" from the future, not the current definition of fixed.

[ssss11]

Foxpro, the horror

[ddingus]

This whole discussion is blowing my mind!

When I hit your comment:

1. I thought, "YES! Indeed!"

2. Then, "For Sale: Baby Shoes."

3. The similar feel caused me to do a rethink on all this. We are moving REALLY fast!

Nice comment

[cruffle_duffle]

I for one can’t wait. It will be absolutely spectacular!