In both cases, it seems programmers are feeding generative AI models to the extent that their involvement is minimal or almost redundant, making what they do seem trivial and devaluing their own work.
Plenty will disagree with one or both of those.
Unless you are here to start a fight, consider a more nuanced question, for a relatively broad audience.
(FWIW I disagree with you on both.)
Until the AI can take the prompt: "Improve the product so that it will generate more sales, satisfy the government, and not piss off existing users", it is not going to replace me. For every task less than that, it does marginally improve my workflow.
For any programmers out there who are so untalented that they barely exist as more than a human token generator, they are indeed at risk.
Stay current with technology, or your career will stall (or worse).
That’s it. But staying current gets harder with age:
- Family responsibilities reduce time for learning.
- Workload increases, leaving less time to explore.
- Developer community isolation makes it harder to stay connected.
- Learning new tech gets slower with age.
- You get jaded, most “new” tech is just old ideas repackaged with a lot of hype.
That said, you should try vibe coding. For someone like me, experienced but not always hands-on, it’s incredible how fast and well you can produce code. But here’s the catch: the more experience you have, the better your results. That’s why junior devs are falling behind. Veterans intuitively understand complexity, architecture, and their role in the process. They can “vibe” good solutions with little training - just experience.
And that’s the problem. You need experience to thrive in this new paradigm. But with students leaving CS programs and companies freezing junior hiring, we’re killing the pipeline. That’s dangerous. LLMs aren’t general AI, they’re tools. And tools are only as good as the craftspeople using them.
Meanwhile, if you’re still in the game, you can’t afford to get lapped.
- The Ph.Ds and other experts building LLMs are ecstatic because they're suddenly getting paid a fortune and having an entire industry paying attention to their every little utterance.
- The venture capitalists suddenly have a whole new technology to make their investment bets on and there are hordes of founders eager to vie for funding.
- The grifters and hustlers have new sexy buzzwords to attach to their dubious products to try to rip off the credulous.
- The fad chasers and résumé driven developers have a whole new silver bullet to pursue.
- The influencers, know-it-alls, pseudo-intellectuals, and net kooks have something new to pontificate on and debate each other about.
- The sort of programmer getting benefit from LLMs and arguing that education is no longer necessary get to fantasize about finally being free of gatekeeping and more skilled software engineers looking down on them.
I'm probably right on the edge of violating some kind of guideline so I shall stop there and say only that the chattering on HN should not be mistaken for what's going on in the real world.
I'd take the average comment with a grain of salt. There are talented programmers that use this site, but most users are probably not a prolific Carmack-esque SWE.