[jarjoura]

I frame the shift more like this:

Systems engineering is an extremely hard computer science domain with few engineers either interested in it, or good at it.

Building dashboards is tedious and requires organizational structure to deliver on. This is the bread and butter of what agents are good at building right now. You still need organization and communication skills in your company and to direct the coding agents towards that dashboard you want and need. Until you hit a implementation wall and someone will need to spend time trying to understand some of the code. At least with dashboards, you can probably just start over from scratch.

It's arguably more work to prompt in english to an AI agent to assist you in hard systems problems, and the signals the agent would need to add value aren't readily available (yet?!). Plus, there's no way systems engineers would feel comfortable taking generated code at face-value. So they definitely will spend the extra mental energy to read what is output.

So I don't know. I think we're going to keep marching forward, because that's what we do, but I also don't think this "vibe-coded" automated code generator phase we're in right now will ultimately last. It'll likely fall apart and the pieces we put back together will likely return us to some new kind of normal, but we'll all still need to know how to be damn good software engineers.

[christofosho]

I understand where you're coming from, and think there is something missing in your final paragraph that I'm curious to understand. If LLMs do end up improving productivity, what would make them go away? I think automated code generators are here until something more performant supersedes them. So, what in your mind might be possibilities of that thing?

[jarjoura]

Well I guess I no longer believe that long term, all this code generation would make us more productive. At least not how the fan favorite claude-code currently does it.

I've found some power use cases with LLMs, like "explore", but everyone seems misty eye'd that these coding agents can one-shot entire features. I suspect it'll be fine until it's not and people get burned by what is essentially trusting these black boxes to barf out entire implementations leaving trails of code soup.

Worse is that junior engineers can say they're "more productive" but it's now at the expense of understanding what it is they just contributed.

So, sure, more productive, but in the same way that 2010s move fast and break things philosophy was, "more productive." This will all come back to bite us eventually.