My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv.

Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself.

Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift.

We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.

The majority of artists abhor AI, this is a particularly bad example.

Says who?

> We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.

100% agree. People are looking at the future through the lenses of the current paradigm just like when people from the past imagined the future (our present) in a way which we now find hilarious. Most of the time, the future doesn't bring developments which improve an action in a scalar way (faster, shorter, stronger, etc) but instead fundamentally change the nature of that action (handwritten letter communication vs video calls) or completely override the need for it (telephone boxes vs mobile phones).

And the issue here is that this future is bringing fundamental change to the nautre of labor without overriding the need for compensation in order to house and feed the populace. Hence the rejection.

I notice your two comments straddle the contradiction "It's definitely not happening, but also it's terrible that it is."

Where was I saying it's not happening?

But if I can clarify my point. It's more that I'm trying to say "Company promises A is happening and B is the necessary consequences to achieve it".

I do not believe A is happening but B is occurring despite that, in order to achieve hidden agenda C. Though in this case, C is not that hidden since every other article has them blabbing out loud about "wow it's going to be so amazing when C happens!"

here,

A = AI is making us more productive than ever

B = This will cause impacts on jobs and the economy as a whole as we realign what labor is

C = Companies make more money than ever as it works towards eliminating labor on massive (90+%) levels in order to maximize profits and moating the idea of knowledge itself

If you think A is not happening for a software engineer's role, then you are mistaken.

We are all scrambling to figure out what else we need to do (and so are many other roles).

> If you think A is not happening for a software engineer's role, then you are mistaken.

En masse, I argue not. More productivity for engineers would not be met with mass layoffs if engineering production was why value was being added. On the contrary, other industries have had to hire back talent becsuse companies were too aggressive cutting people and needed that work to be done.

But I'm not an oracle. I can only speak for what I see today and won't predict tomorrow. Especially in these trying times.

You're reading too widely for a simple point I'm making: what an engineer did in Aug 2025, they can do in a fraction of the time in Aug 2026.

Everything else is something else you care about, but producitivty is simply proven for almost every engineer on the above point.

> You're reading too widely for a simple point I'm making: what an engineer did in Aug 2025, they can do in a fraction of the time in Aug 2026.

You're not getting my point, and it's not hard. I disagree with this statement.

>producitivty is simply proven for almost every engineer on the above point.

I've read otherwise.

Doesn't really answer the question. The relevant question with your example is "where is your wive's new business of brushing up other people's photos?"

That’s his point, there isn’t one. You don’t need bespoke software anymore. We’ve got the basics already, all the standards we’d ever need, the agents can figure out how to put them together for whatever thing specific you need.

Well I'm not sure if that's a convincing premise, then. If micro libraries customized for the user's needs was all that was needed we wouldn't have most of the net moated out by overly invasive social media.

Even if people could find the tools, they won't seek it if a one button solution can come to them. But we can't outcompete Instagram in a prompt, nor some popular app.

The issue is discoverability. Photoshop has that one magical button that solves all of your issues. But it is hidden behind specialized knowledge and a 10 step deep menu.

Agentic solutions just don't have these issues. You give them your image, that's it.

There’s probably already a LibTouchupGl available since 2005, a perfect touchup tool in 83kb, but nobody had heard of it. On the other hand people can just say “ChatGPT do everything” and it can

> people can just say “ChatGPT do everything” and it can

Yeah, that's the marketing pitch. Much easier to fall into that than really think and approach how you perform a task.

I'm not sure how happy is a recruiter to see an ai photo in cv. Although they don't read cv themselves these days

I am not sure what you are referring to?

A photo with adjusted cropping, background blurring, and contrast etc?

Why are you sending a headshot in your CV?

Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.

because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software"

photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_

some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.

And today the line for amateur capability is being drawn at eager entrepreneur making an app on the back of Supabase and Lovable. The fact that iOS apps have zero users owes far more to sales and marketing than to software, so maybe that's where we should be putting our focus?

What can a mid level person do? Instead of a consultancy loaning out a team of 3-4 people, it might just be one person now. That could mean a lot of downsizing.

One thing mid level people wouldn't be counted on to do was create Photoshop or Paypal. The original thread is about top level pros being the ones who stay in the industry, right? That sounds about right if we're moving the conversation over to Photoshop and Paypal.

this is a more reasonable argument IMO, but i would still disagree that that means only the top level pros stay for a few reasons (although it might happen / is already happening in the short term):

- if it is true that AI enhances our abilities it just means the goal posts move of what was expected for each level

- the complexity ceiling will rise for the level a superstar or a company is capable of maintaining, meaning there will still be stratified complexities for the mid levels of old to handle, it might just be higher than before

- counter intuitively but time and again increased software creation more often than not increases demand for more software rather than decreases

if the world decides it has no more problems to solve with software, then we are in trouble. i don't think that is happening anytime soon.

You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap

It won't be photoshop then. It will be shitty, buggy clunky app that costed a (major) fraction to develop but it will also earn a fraction. Companies like MS can afford this ie with Office suite but patience of markets and customers can allow them to go only so far, if ie Excel becomes semi-useless thats the end of Office and big cash cow for M$ (I'd say about time, that monopoly is not good for consumers at all).

This is in a way the same argument that all companies will use just boxed (albeit customized) software. In reality many, ie banks run their own custom software and for good reasons. Wake me up (in retirement) when any major bank decides to run their finances, regulatory stuff and transactions on llm-generated stuff made by underpaid devs like you describe.

This is cope, ai coding agents will follow the path of self driving cars. They will be watched with extreme caution, but will slowly but surely expand outwards. Eventually manually writing code will be considered a dangerous/bug introducing act

If AI coding agents follow the same path then any software engineer over 25yo can peacefully continue working for 30 years until the tech is capable. The comparison is futile…

Self driving cars are deterministic models and are missing real world data to train on to increase their accuracy.

LLMs are non-deterministic so any interaction with them is a bug inducing act by definition because you don't know what you're gonna get.

I've yet to see this apply with self-driving cars.

I was told that private car ownership would be a thing of the past by 2025. Somehow it is 2026 now, and there is not a single (true) self driving car near where I live.

>They will be watched with extreme caution

We're doing a great job of that right now, aren't we?

Eventually pigs will fly. Oh look anyone can just say ridiculous things will happen with no proof, and mentioning self driving cars does not help your case at all.

Until the VC subsidies stop and the human devs are half the cost of the claude tokens lol

Moore's Law covers transistors, not LLMs.

Moore's Law hasn't covered transistors in quite some time.

We get about 10% YoY now, which is actually impressive, but not even close to the past experiences. Computing power used to take 18 months to double, and was being attacked at a bunch of different angles.

Now we are literally out of tricks, to the point where we had to undo some of those tricks because they were fundamentally flawed, and it takes 100x the engineering investment to get that 10% YoY, or sometimes only every other year, and that isn't going to continue for much longer.

We can't increase clock speed much. We can't increase density much. We are out of clever tricks. It takes an entire earth's worth of human talent just to produce the machine that produces the chips. How the hell are people still insisting that computing power continues to follow Moore's Law?

Several of the limits we've hit are fundamental matters of physics.

Meanwhile, LLMs ask for orders of magnitude more compute than is cheap and cheerful right now. Do we even have a single order of magnitude left for compute?

In the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded.

There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.

Now you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!

Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money?

If its so good why aren't you rich?

Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?

Because the companies everyone claims are now obsolete are making a lot of money still doing the supposedly obsolete things?

No one buys CDs but Taylor Swift still makes a lot of money from her music. Doesn't negate that making music is economically worse than ever.

Most people book flights online, travel agents still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that travel agency as a business is economically worse than ever.

Most people have cameras in their pockets that can take good photos, photographers still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that being a photographer is economically worse than ever.

Hopefully, you see the pattern. You don't remember that companies that are no longer around.

Many of those companies like duolingo have already collapsed in stock price with YoY growth dropping off a cliff. It is happening, it just isn't instant.

And yet those companies aren't collapsing because it became easier to rewrite their software, but because llms themselves have replaced a core part of their business (such as translation or simple art).

Seems like so far the market is not convinced at all that SaaS companies as a whole are any more disruptable than before.

That and talking to a lot of users, Duolingo reduced the quality of their service moving to LLM generated content -- a lot of people moved to other apps.

> Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse?

I'm a doctor and I'm building my own EMR system.

I've also been a hobbyist programmer for over a decade, but the point still stands because without LLMs I wouldn't have the time to even try it.

Software wins because of the sales team and the network effects. You could already create a better twitter or facebook that no one would use long before llms.

Extremely bad software is now easy to write.

Sadly, we have trained software users to pay for shit code.

See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.

There's very little incentive for people to advertise that their product was vibe coded. In fact there's many incentives to hide it. Many people hate AI and why would you invite more competition?

Bun gets a lot of hate for vibe coding.

I vibe coded to modernize one of my old hobby websites (so not even vibe coding from scratch) and I immediately got anti-AI comments, and I didn't even say I used AI.

Hope it keeps up, then. Social shaming is one of the last real hopes against this since government regulators are compromised.

There's nothing wrong with vibe coding as long as the quality is good.

>as long as the quality is good.

Well that's where we're seemingly at an impasse, no?

I don't even like the term "good vibecoding". The term was implied as a means to just let the computer type its own code and "go with the vibes". i.e. you have no deeper idea on how it works underneath.

Now, AI-assisted coding? It can be good. It can be a rush job. But the idea is that LLM's are in the passenger's seat, not the diver's. Much smaller chance where you have no idea where you're going since you're at the wheel.

The output is indistinguishable from manually written code.

"My vibecoded stuff is indistinguishable from handwritten stuff" and "I got anti-AI comments after vibecoding my website even though I didn't say anything about AI" are not very compatible with each other.

There was absolutely nothing showing that it was vibe coded other than the fact that a website that didn't get any updates for 5 years suddenly got a 20+ bullet point update. People just assumed it was vibed because of the sheer number of changes.

There was not 1 mention about anything being broken, they were simply complaining about AI.

Anti-AI psychosis is a very real thing that is happening https://x.com/Jediwolf/status/2054776716770320631

I hope on HN of all places I don't need to explain the difference between "writing correct code" and "Software Engineering". We both know what a 20 year old million line legacy software needs.

Not everything needs to be amazon/google scale backed with things like sharded dbs or kubernetes.

Nope, not at all. But a million line codebase isn't close to Google scale. That's typical boring non-tech legacy code system scale. And I don't think I'm at a point where I'd want to vibe code my way though that and take responsibility for it.

Then why isn't Photoshop killed?

Marketing? Who knows? I haven't used photoshop a single time ever since I found out about photopea.

the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed