Link: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

So much good stuff in there. I’ll quote from across sections.

Florian Herrengt:

But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.

You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.

  • "So where does the data come from?"
  • "Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude."

You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident.

"Let's just turn on ultracode and ask it to double-check?"

This one will take a while. You start talking about the latest drama on X.

You finally get an answer back.

  • "Does this make any sense to you?" * "I'm not sure."
  • "Didn't you build this like... last week?"

Silence.

Whenever I talk about this, someone eventually tells me that nobody ever fully understood large systems anyway. It's true.

You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you.

Now they ask an LLM because they don't actually know themselves.

Of course, bad engineers were always a liability.

It has been like this for decades, well before OpenAI or Anthropic existed. Bad decisions compounded, unnecessary complexity accumulated and teams ended up maintaining systems nobody really understood.

The difference is that there used to be a limit to how fast you could do it.

Today, implementation is cheap. You are paid to make good decisions. To build software that will scale while managing complexity.

A lot of good decisions have to be made to keep a large/complex codebase healthy. Bad decisions compound. Fast.

Bad engineers make bad decisions, and AI allows encourages them to do it at a speed that wasn’t hitherto possible. Worse, thanks to the deluge of changes that AI enables, it makes it difficult for the good engineers to review & curtail the bad decisions.

The conclusion is obvious: we can’t afford to have bad engineers.