[locknitpicker]

> Yeah but there were a lot less ditch diggers in the world after the invention of the backhoe

As a specialization? Sure. But the ditch diggers moved since to machine operators, handymen and the like.

In the past there were sysadmins. Do we have less software engineers since sysadmins ceased to be a thing?

[wiseowise]

> As a specialization? Sure. But the ditch diggers moved since to machine operators, handymen and the like.

All of them? What if they liked digging ditches?

> In the past there were sysadmins. Do we have less software engineers since sysadmins ceased to be a thing?

Software Engineers were never sysadmins in the past, you’re thinking DevOps maybe?

[simonw]

The software engineers who like "digging ditches" are going to have a bad time in the new agentic engineering world, unfortunately.

Here "digging ditches" corresponds to somebody else figuring out the detailed requirements and specification and handing it to the engineer to transcribe into code.

That's what the coding agents replace. Thankfully for most engineers I've worked with that's only a small part of their overall jobs, albeit one of the most time consuming.