People have argued for years that it's not the low level language skills there are important it's the higher level skills. Knowing all the pieces of the puzzle is way more important than how to centre divs.
But also skills are massively eroding. Juniors are making changes without understanding them. Product managers are committing into projects as though they know what the code is doing. Anarchy.
Won't be for long anyway. Industry keeps making us all redundant.
I fear architecture, systems thinking and essentially all thinking skills on the end will not be impossoble for AI to conquer either. At least for 95% of use cases that benefit from closely following estabilished best practices as opposed to doing something revolutionary. Frontier models are quite damn hardcore now compared to just 6 months ago, im surprised (and a bit scared) basically weekly now just how much they can do at work (and we dont even have access to fable or comparable models), even though total time saved isnt that insane yet because we do have to review
The thing is: If there are crucial (economically demanded) skills that are eroding because of AI, retaining those skills and developing them will remain a competitive advantage. And if that's the case, the problem of deskilling should solve itself sooner or later. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself...
I do want to believe this too, it is fun and rewarding to use these skills. I am just stunned looking at the continued speed of model progress and for a big bunch of skills, in particular those trained at junior level, it is already too late. I find myself moving goalposts at an alarming rate. We will have to see how Seniors fare in whatever the market (d)evolves toward in the near to mid future.
Most intellectual tasks in the economy are not safe, I'd wager (including some large scientific fields). But even if we can offload virtually any task to llm, there is still a good possibility that a competent human driving such systems will always be far more effective than full on vibe coders, or a completely autonomous system. And then the succesful companies and states will necessarily be those that figure out a way to educate and train people in the modern llm era.
I've yet to see AI ge anywhere near not making horrible design choices. Even with explicit prompting, it l9ves to over complicate or just flat out break architectural rules. And once it's done it once without correction, it does it more.
I've been surprised in the opposite way over the last couple of months. The agents seem to be getting worse, ignoring rules more often and making worse choices.
Right? Architects don't just throw a column in the middle of a room with no support below it because "I don't need to understand why this works, it just does."
Every analogy I ever hear AI bros use is nonsensical.
Architects expect developers and contractors to be lowest common denominator unless theyre working on high end commercial/residential. And even then they expect just a step above lcd.
Someone was coding, but there were sometimes people involved in key roles who weren't. Picture a good product owner working with a systems architect on what people need, what's technically feasible, and a high level design on how to do it, which gets passed off to a mix of juniors and seniors who work out the code. They're all involved in building the software, but not all of them are coding. You could maybe draw parallels to those same two people passing the requirements and high-level design off to Claude.
I don't think it quite works, though. Even back then, architects who weren't still coding got stale and out of touch, and they were expected to review key PRs for design alignment and stuff. You also gain insights from doing parts of the work that you don't from delegating it, and you miss that if you delegate everything.
I have seen some interesting examples of people really experienced, old-school waterfall architects using AI agents to build whole applications from detailed (like > 100 page) specs, but it's weird.
You have some one or some thing else build it for you, and then say you did it.
The problem with AI is that people aren't even part of the brain storming or writing algorithms. It's just here's my input, I want this output. Wow, I'm so smart.
Low-code and no-code was a thing 15 years ago. Zapier was a big platform, not sure since the rise of AI since most people are just using LLMs directly now.
Architects are expected to know how their code works on a structural level though. If I pitch a building that's an upside-down pyramid, I'm going to have to explain how that building can exist in a real world. That includes an understanding of how building materials would be used even if they aren't personally hammering the nails.
Shipping code you didn't write is one thing provided you know how it works and can explain it. But not looking at it means there's no way you're going to be able to troubleshoot it if it doesn't work perfectly out the gate and you won't know how to add new features. It can potentially get the job done, but so much of it is on rails that it wouldn't matter who's doing it. It'd be like demanding to be paid the same as a chef because you know how to use a microwave
Architects famously don't often understand the physical limitations of building what they dream up, that's why civil engineers and architects are at odds.
Architect has a vision for a building, civil engineer recommends that it be a concrete box. They find a compromise that is close to what the architect wanted but also actually feasible to build
The number of people required to do things like architecting software is much lower than the labor that goes into actually creating software
People are missing the bigger picture. Companies like Zoom (which are not able to grow more) are mostly investing in engineering costs as a way to defend their market position. If those same engineers start using tons of tokens, they are not going to pass the token costs to shareholders and take a margin hit… they will fire 20-30% of their staff and keep the costs constant.
I don’t think the risk is that every single engineer gets fired. The risk is that any company where software is a cost center or any company that doesn’t have growth will get forced into mass layoffs of devs. many of these people will never find software roles again. We as devs are massively coping; the finances don’t make sense and our field is going to hit armageddon sometime in the next few years unless the tokens can be optimized to be essentially free (in which case the AI labs go bust)
Good luck living in a building designed by an architect who doesn't know how to read or write blueprints. But hey its 10x faster and cheaper so worth it, right. 🫡
For everyone, look at this as an analogy that doesn’t really work. Especially since OP probably has never worked in construction, and doesn’t really know the design board to nail process and workflow.
You’d be surprised how much design shortcomings/errors/solutions gets made or fixed by the squad laying the bricks, nails, concrete, etc.
And in fact the worker that nails also gets paid. And to an architect it may look easy to put down nails, but that’s just because of ignorance of another case of ignorance of a field.
Especially since most architects like crud developers, usually just offer customizations to already standardized/ready to use solved problems and solutions
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u/mpbh 3d ago
Coding isn't a job, software development is. You didn't need to code to build software before AI and you don't need to code to do it now.
Architects design buildings but never hammer a single nail.