Ask HN: Where is our profession (programmer) going?

A former software company founder reports that at a friend's 15-person firm, developers rely heavily on AI tools like Claude, with code no longer serving as the source of truth, code reviews done by AI, and multiple simultaneous AI sessions replacing human code inspection. The observer questions whether software development is shifting from a precise occupation to a probabilistic one, potentially leading to the profession's decline.

I had been running a small 3 people software company for about 4 years. Since closing down, I recently hung out at a friend's company to see what they were working on 15 ppl . To preface: I'm a heavy user of Claude rarely write code by hand , but what I'm seeing in person has been rather shocking to me, and I wanted to calibrate with others. In particular: - the code is not the source of truth anymore; it's ask claude to write, and ask claude to explain - LoC, abstractions, and all those "software development principles" does not seem to matter to people - Code review is not done by humans - Actually understanding the problem deeply seems to be offloaded to claude - Some developers are running like 5+ simultaneous claude sessions, and no code is being looked at - Explosion of llm-generated tests First off, is this similar to what's going on at your company? If this company is representative, it feels like software development is going from a precise occupation that requires high degree of understanding to something probabilistic and offloaded understanding to eventually not an occupation at all honestly . I'm interested to hear other folks' perspectives. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668199 Points: 1 Comments: 0