Comment by mplanchard
3 hours ago
I don’t know. I mean, I agree with you overall, but it seems like tons of engineers, especially here on HN, have been more than willing to go all-in on AI for at least the past year, with many dire warnings of “coding is a solved problem,” “if you’re not programming swarms of agents, you’re going to be left behind,” and so on.
This has not been my experience with my fellow engineers IRL on average, but I do feel like there is a significant contingent of us who are ready and raring to yield engineering in its entirety to the LLMs.
A lot of people who write code aren't professional SWEs. A lot of professional SWEs especially on Blind aren't typical SWEs at typical companies. A lot of people who claim to write code are lying. I mean would you take Gary Tan as a valid datapoint for how effective AI is at professional SWE coding? I wouldn't. But these are the kind of people who shill it the most on HN.
Also, I suspect that a lot of HN comments that generally state that AI has been useful for their work are actually not referring to programming work, but it's very easy to default interpret it that way. For example, I just recently saw a comment stating how AI can do 90% of their senior-level job, and when I looked into the guy's profile, he was actually a designer, which makes sense. But on first read I assumed the comment was referring to writing code.