[alephnerd]

> ...most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it...

A SWE who bases their entire identity and career around only writing code is not an engineer - they are a code monkey.

The entire point of hiring a Software ENGINEER is to help translate business requirements into technical requirements, and then implement the technical requirements into a tangible feature or product.

The only reason companies buy software is because the alternative means building in-house, and for most industries software is a cost-center not a revenue generator.

I don't pay (US specific) 200K-400K TCs for code monkeys, I pay that TC for Engineers.

And this does a disservice to the large portion of SWEs and former SWEs (like me) who have been in the industry because we are customer-outcome driven (how do we use code to solve a tangible customer need) and not here to write pretty code.

[gedy]

You might be missing that a lot of companies are giddy that the mgmt can just vibe code stuff and there's no opportunity for engineers to be involved, (except for when it crashes?). I use AI tools and they are nice, but the mgmt are mostly not logical and need someone to sort through their bullshit.

[alephnerd]

Yeah no. Almost all companies I've chatted with - from MSPs to C-Suite of F10s - expect and demand humans-in-the-loop. I'm also on a couple boards and we've aligned on the same expectation as well.

Look, AI/ML and especially LLMs are powerful, but there does remain a degree of instability and non-determinism which will require human intervention to remediate.

That said, there is a lot of dev work in companies that is a cost-center, and those are the portions that will start getting vibe coded and deployed in product with little-to-no oversight (eg. a support portal for SMBs at an enterprise), but the equivalent feature would have already been an afterthought even without LLMs and probably given to a couple SWEs we'd be fine re-orging in a quarter anyhow.