Post by @yosh@toot.yosh.is

@yosh@toot.yosh.is

2026-03-07 12:15 UTC

LLMs are clearly giving the broader tech workforce an existential crisis. Which I think is understandable. If you view your job as solving issues for business as quickly as possible by way of writing code; then yeah you&#39;re generally not going to fare well against a machine. I think things become more interesting when the frame shifts from &quot;the output is code&quot; to &quot;the output are systems&quot;. IMO writing the code has never been the hard part of building systems.

Replies (2)

@yosh@toot.yosh.is 2026-03-07 12:32

Now granted: what us practitioners believe generally matters less than what the people controlling the purse strings believe. If the tech job market contracts, it affects all of us. But I think there's going to be a through-line here. If producing code becomes cheap, then planning and review become more important. Which can be rephrased as: "specification and verification will become more important" — "What should we do?" and "Did we in fact do that?"

Open ##2643915
@pkal@social.sdfeu.org 2026-03-08 10:09

@yosh@toot.yosh.is I think that anyone who looks at the state of software and software systems seriously, especially if you don't cloud your judgement by self-congratulating on being able to deal with glorified puzzling, has to admit that there is a lot of accidental complexity in how we deal with computers in general. This also reminds me of the joke article about why Stroustrup make C++: https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all.

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