funnyfoobar

Original author here: These skill have been adding a lot of value in very less time. After debugging a knarly bug for 4 hours, you might be exhuasted to explain in it a good way, this helps with that.

I have replied to a comment adjacent to yours, for my parent comment. Please check i think if you follow the "process", it is avoidable.

To be honest, what you have described only shows lack of process.

I am not talking about vibe coding here, which is totally different and understandable. But I am talking about the professional context where the structure is already in place.

Here is my workflow, if it helps:

1. I have a system level prompt i execute(command/skill) before I start anything which says things like

    i) follow SOLID principles
    ii) follow TDD
    iii) follow these testing principles like, don't test the implementation details etc
    and 20 other things

2. I give it the context of what I need to accomplish, and toggle the plan mode ask it follow the above things I have set at system level, and generate me a document to review step by step

3. I review everything, add feedback to the generated plan, prompt again, and finally finalize the plan

4. now that the plan is finalized, I would have a small alignment with co-workers and ask it implement step by step, and then before proceeding with next step, i will tell it to ask me for feedback

each steps code is reviewed and commited, before proceeding to next step

5. once all steps are done, manual testing is done, i do a local review

6. I have a specific skill which reviews everything, and gives me feedback

7. we have human reviewers who will review the code, and coderabbit

8. then we take it to the staging and uat before taking to prod

so see we have not skipped any process of "software engineering", claude code is just an accelrant

but if you are not doing most of the above steps, i see what you are saying would happen by default

What you are saying may have made sense at the start of 2025 where people were still using github copilot tab auto completes(atleast I did) and was just toying with things like cursor, but unsure.

Things have changed drastically now, engineers with these tools(like claude code) have become unstoppable.

Atleast for me, I have been able to contribute to the codebases i was unfamiliar with, even with different tech stacks. No, I am not talking about generating ai slop, but I have been enabled to write principal engineer level code unlike before.

So i don't agree with the above statement, it's actually generating real value and I have become valuable because of the tools available to me.

I was not expecting a couple of new apps being built, when the premise of the blog post talks about replacing "mid level engineers"

the thing about being an engineer at commercial capacity is "maintaining/enhancing an existing program/software system that has been developed over years by multiple people(including those who already left) and do it in a way that does not cause any outages/bugs/break existing functionality.

while the blog post mentions about the ability of using AI to generate new applications, but it does not talk about maintaining one over a longer period of time. for that, you would need real users, real constraints, and real feature requests which preferably pay you so you can priortize them.

I would love to see such blog posts where for example, a PM is able to add features for a period of one month without breaking the production, but it would be a very costly experiment.

Yeah you are right, I am underselling myself in terms of just watering it down to LOC. But I was mostly talking about tangible outcomes that are obvious.

> AI can write 15k lines of code, but it cannot take Liability for a single one.

Thanks for writing this, I needed it.

Yes, there will be always someone who is needed to program stuff. Totally agree with that.

But my question is "how many of those will be needed", because I am not saying that programmers are not needed.

When less numbers are needed, there will be so much competition in finding those jobs, esentially would also mean not able to find the work, as there will be always someone who would be willing to the job at lower wage and come to work with more youthful energy.

Just speaking out loud.

I agree with the takes, but my only question would be.

If everyone is doing high level stuff like architecture and design, how many of "those people" will be really needed in the long term? My intuition is telling me the size of market needing number of engineers will shrink.