Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

AI does 0% of my work and we are actively hiring. As someone mentioned on another AI thread, if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc?

AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptical of its output.

In any sufficiently complex software project, as much of the development is about domain knowledge, asking the right questions, balancing resources, guarding against risks, interfacing with a team to scope and vet and iterate on a feature, managing resources, analyzing customer feedback, thinking of new features, improving existing features, etc.

When AI is a productivity booster, it's great, but modern software is an evolving, organic product, that requires a team to maintain, expand, improve, etc. As of yet, no AI can take the place of that.

Morale is low because leaders think AI can do that amount of work, but it can’t actually (at least not yet). This both means that they don’t hire enough people to do the work needed, while also “drive by” insulting the intelligence of the people they are overworking.

Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage".

My organization would still hire as many software engineers as we could afford.

- Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

- Using it for exploratory high level research and summarization into unfamiliar repos is pretty nice.

- Very rarely does AI write code that I feel would last a year without needing to be rewritten. That makes it good for things like knocking out a quick script or updating a button color.

- None of them actually follow instructions e.g. in Cursor rules. Its a serious problem. It doesn't matter how many times or where I tell it "one component per file, one component per file", all caps, threaten its children, offer it a cookie, it just does whatever it wants.

Tired.

Mostly of having to try and explain to people why having an AI reduce software development workload by 30-50% doesn't reduce headcount or time taken similarly.

Turns out, lots of time is still sunk in talking about the features with PM's, stakeholders, customers etc.

Reducing the amount of time a dev NEEDS to spend doing boilerplate means they have more time to do the things that previously got ignored in a time poor state, like cleaning up tech debt or security checks or accessibility etc etc

AI has drastically changed how I make decisions about code and how I code in general. I get less bogged down with boilerplate code and issues, which makes me more efficient and allows me to enjoy architecting more. Additionally, I have found it extremely helpful in writing lower-level code from scratch rather than relying on plug-and-play libraries with questionable support. For example, why use a SQLite abstraction library when I can use LLMs to interact directly with the C source code? Sure it’s more lines of code, but I control everything. I wouldn’t have had the time before. This has also been extremely helpful in embedded systems and low-level Bluetooth.

In terms of hiring- I co-own a small consultancy. I just hired a sub to help me while on parental leave with some UI work. AI isn’t going to help my team integrate, deploy, or make informed decision while I’m out.

Side note, with a newborn (sleeping on me at this moment), I can make real meaningful edits to my codebase pretty much on my phone. Then review, test, integrate when I have the time. It’s amazing, but I still feel you have to know what you are doing, and I am selective on what tasks, and how to split them up. I also throw away a lot of generated code, same as I throw away a lot of my first iterations, it’s all part of the process.

I think saying “AI is going X% of my work” is the wrong attitude. I’m still doing work when I use AI, it’s just different. That statement kind of assumes you are blindly shipping robot code, which sounds horrible and zero fun.

We are still hiring engineers. Everyone has a paid Cursor sub, and some people use Claude Code. We also have Claude in GitHub doing automatic PRs.

It’s mostly seen as a force multiplier. Our platform is all Java+Spring so obviously the LLMs are particularly effective because it’s so common. It hasn’t really replaced anyone though, also because it’s Java+Spring so most of our platform is an enormous incomprehensible mess lol

I'm just waiting for the hype-cycle to end. AI might revolutionize some industry (probably natural-language-adjacent), but not ours. COBOL has already been attempted, and far more competently (and with less energy cost).

If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least, they lacked the basic competence with tools that that any university sophomore should have.

Sometimes, however, it is instead a confession "I previously wasn't allowed to copy the preexisting solutions, but thanks to the magic of copyright laundering, now I can!"

- No major change in hiring due to AI.

- A lot of our code base is very specialized and complex, AI still not good enough to replace human judgement/knowledge but can help in various ways.

- Not yet clear (to me anyways) how much of a productivity gain we're getting.

- We've always had more things we want to do than what we could get done. So if we can get more productivity there's plenty of places to use it. But again, not clear that's actually happening in any major way.

I think the jury is still out on this one. Curious what others will say here. My personal opinion is that unless AI gets smart enough to replace more experienced developer completely, and it's far from that, then I'm quite sure there's not going to be less software jobs. If AI gets to a point where it is equal to a good/senior developer we'll have to see. Even then it might be that our jobs will just turn into more managing AI but it's not a zero sum game, we'll do more things. Superintelligence is a different story, i.e. AI that is better than humans in every cognitive aspect.

Worried about the next generation who - I think - will not learn normally (incl whatever it does to the brain) and may never reach the degree of engineering capability some of us have.

Tired of leadership who think productivity will raise.

Tired of AI summaries sent around unreflected as meeting minutes / action items. Tired of working and responding on these.

I have been in software for 20 years, and was just about to quit 2-3 years ago because of how mundane things became. And now I am actually loving it again because of AI. I'd say, AI writes 95% of my code, and I use it for 75% of the decisions during working on a project.

I am under MUCH more pressure to deliver more in shorter periods of time, with just me involved in several layers of decision making, rather than having a whole team. Which may sound scary, but it pays the bills. At one company I contract with, I now have 2 PMs; where I am the only dev on a production app with users, shipping new features every few days (rather than weeks).

It feels more like performance art, than it even feels like software development at this point. I am still waiting for some of my features to come crashing prod down in fantastic fashion, being paged at 3am in the morning; debugging for 12 hours straight because AI has built such a gigantic footgun for me.... but it has yet to happen. If anything I am doing less work than before - being paid a little more, and the companies working with me have built a true dependency on my skills to both ship, maintain and implement stuff.

I feel like I suddenly have a superpower.

I'm wearing glasses that tell me who all the fucking assholes and impostors are.

I used Claude Code to navigate a legacy codebase the other day, and having the ability to ask "how many of these files have helper methods that are duplicated or almost but not quite exactly duplicated?" was very much a superpower.

My company is still hiring engineers like it was doing before. About the work itself I can say LLMs are good with PoC or new projects, I can't say the same about already existing codebase. For me it's a good tool, but not THE solution. Lately I'm making a lot of AWS Serverless configurations with Cloudformation and LLMs hallucinate a lot for that. At this point, I always verify if it exists in the doc or not, because it spits out stuff that doesn't exist at all.

I'm not using AI for anything. I read and write my own emails, make my own slides, write my own python code using vim, debian, openbox, bash and tmux, just as I have been for almost 20 years. I don't even use an LSP or autocompletion! Hell, I even read actual books, on paper!

And yes, I did test ChatGPT, claude, cursor, aider... They produce subpar code, riddled with subtle and not so subtle bugs, each of my attempts turned out to be a massive waste of time.

LLM is a plague and I wish it had never showed up, the negative effects on so many aspects of the world are numerous and saddening.

In the practical sense, not much of my work actually changed and my company seems to be hiring the same as before.

In the psychological sense, I'm actually devastated. I'm honestly struggling to be motivated to learn/create new things. I'm always overthinking stuff like:

- "Why would I learn mobile app dev if in the near future there will be an AI making better UIs than me?" - "Why would I write a development blog?" - "Why would I publish an open-source library on GitHub? So that OpenAI can train its LLM on it?" - "Why would I even bother?"

And then, my motivation sharply drops to zero. What I've been up to lately is playing with non-tech related hobbies and considering switching careers...

It's a great tool for a programmer...but the external perception isn't great. It can put pressure on people and also lead to undervaluing programmers. Overall it's probably a bad thing. Though it is fun.

I work with rather 'basic' CRUD applications with CMS and user management portals + some integrations to CRM systems etc. There is a lot of legacy stuff and rather bad practices or no general style guidelines followed.

AI helps here and there but honestly the bottleneck for output is not how fast the code is produced. Task priorization, lacking requirements, information silos and similar issues cause a lot of 'non-coding work' for developers (and probably just waiting around for some who don't want to take initiative). Also I think the most time consuming coding task is usually debugging and AI tools don't really excel at that in my experience.

That being said, we are not hiring at the moment but that really doesn't have anything to do with AI.

Patiently looking forward for the HN front page to be about something else than generative AI.

I work in hardware design and verification. I've seen many AI-based EDA tools proposed at conferences but in the team that I'm working now I haven't seen AI being adopted at all. Among the proposed tools that caught my attention: generating SystemVerilog assertions from natural language prompts, generating code fixes from lint errors, generating requirements, vplans and verification metrics from specifications written in natural language, using LLMs inside IDE's as coding agents and chat bots to query the code. I think the hardware industry will be harder to penetrate by AI because hardware companies are more secretive about their HDL code and they go to great lengths to avoid leaks. That's why most of them have an in-house IT infrastructure and they avoid the cloud as much as possible especially when it comes to storing HDL code, running HDL simulations, formal verification tools and synthesis. Even if they were to employ locally hosted AI solutions that would require big investments in expensive GPUs and expensive electricity bills: the industry giants will afford it while the little players won't. The ultimate goal is to tapeout bug-free chips and AI can be a great source of bugs if not properly supervised. So humans are still the main cogs in the machine here. LLMs and coding agents can make our jobs a whole lot easier and pleasant by taking care of the boring tasks and leaving us with the higher level decisions, but they won't replace us any time soon.

My organization isn't a pure tech company so not much has changed. Management acknowledges AI's velocity but maintains a healthy skepticism of throwing "AI" into everything as a panacea. Writing the code has rarely been the hard part.

I think currently once you get into the weeds of a project the AI can only really lend a helping hand, rather than do 30-50% of the work.

It can kickstart new projects to get over the blank page syndrome but after that there's still work, either prompting or fixing it yourself.

There are requirements-led approaches where you can try to stay in prompt mode as much as possible (like feeding spec to a junior dev) but there is a point where you just have to do things yourself.

Software development has never been about lines of code, it has always required a lot of back and forth discussion, decisions, digging into company/domain lore to get the background on stuff.

Reviewing AI code, and lots of it, is hard work - it can get stuff wrong when you least expect it ("I'll just stub out this authentication so it returns true and our test passes")

With all that in mind though, as someone who would pay other devs to do work I would be horrified if someone spent a week writing unit tests that I can clearly see an AI would generate in 30 seconds. There are some task that just make sense for AI to do now.

> I'm just wondering what the morale is with AI doing 30-50% of your work?

I don't know any developers who use AI to that large extent.

Myself am mostly waiting for the hype to die out so we can have a sober conversation about the future.

Our company is trailing AI tools for developers. I've had good and bad success with them, but my job satisfaction is way low in both cases.

It’s like autocomplete on steroids.

When code autocomplete first came out everyone thought software engineering would become 10x more productive.

Then it turned out writing code was only a small part of the complex endeavor of designing, building, and shipping a software system.

I often find myself pissed off that AI can’t properly do even the most trivial, menial coding work. And I have to spend more time guiding it than doing it myself.

On the other hand I find it super useful for debugging. I can paste 500k tokens into Gemini with logs and a chunk of the codebase and ask it what’s wrong, 80% it gets it right.

The slowdown in hiring outside of AI is the bigger morale hit.

Mostly feeling like a caveman. I've been trying and failing to use it productively since the start of the hype. The amount of time wasted could've been used for actual development.

I just simply don't get it. Productivity delta is literally negative.

I've been asking to do projects where I thought "oh, maybe this project has a chance of getting an AI productivity boost". Nope. Personal projects all failed as well.

I don't get it. I guess I'm getting old. "Grandpa let me write the prompt, you write it like this".

The pressure to do more AI based work is certainly there.

Also from my experiences with agents, and given that I have been around computers since 1986, I can clearly see where the road is going.

Anyone involved with software engineering tasks, should see themselves becoming more of a technical architect for their coding agents, than raw coding, just like nowadays while Assembly is a required skill for some fields, others can code without ever learning anything about it.

Models will eventually become more relevant than specific programming languages, what is worth discussing X or Y is better, if I can generate any that I feel like asking for. If anything newer languages will have even harder time getting adopted, on top of everything that is expected, now they also have to be relevant for AI based workflows.

As a software engineer: the only impact the AI bubble has on me is the time it takes to explain what's a stake to less tech-savvy colleagues. Zero consequences on my actual job, excepet being pissed of each time a promising project "pivots to AI" and starts shoehorning it everywhere.

As a person I'm increasingly worried about the consequences of people using it, and of what happens when the bubble bursts.

It’s still exciting times. Productivity up. In two years it will be different.

Once in a while I save ~10 minutes by using AI. About as often as embarrassing myself by having to admit that my primary source was an AI while researching some topic.

The main thing that changed is that the CTO is in more of a "move fast, break things"-mood now (minus the insane silicon valley funding) because he can quickly vibe-code a proof-of-concept, so development gets derailed more often.

My org is always a decade behind, so I'm still just ignoring the official push for whatever Oracle low code crap is called.

Hiring is as haphazard and inadequate as it has been in the last 25 years, no change there.

AI usage is personal, widespread and on a don't ask don't tell basis.

I use it a lot to:

- Write bullshit reports that no one ever reads.

- Generate minimal documentation for decade old projects that had none.

- Small, low stakes, low complexity improvements, like when having to update this page that was ugly when someone created it in 1999, I'll plop it on aistudio to give it a basic bootstrap treatment.

- Simple automation that wasn't worth it before: Write me a bash script that does this thing that only comes up twice a year but I always hate.

- A couple times I have tried to come up with more complex greenfield stuff to do things that are needed but management doesn't ever acknowledge, but it always falls apart and starts needing actual work.

Morale is quite crappy, as ever, but since some of the above feels like secretly sticking it to The Man, there are these beautiful moments.

For example when the LLM almost nails your bimonthly performance self report from your chat history, and it takes 10 minutes instead of 2 hours, so you get to quietly look out of the window for a long while, feeling relaxed and smug about pocketing some of the gains from this awesome performance improvement.

its really fun, like learning to code again to see what all can be done, an how much more power is available at your fingertips.

what sucks though is that its super inconsistent whether the thing is gonna throw an error and ruin the flow, whether thats synchronous or async.

In my last company, they've fired all the employees except the CEO. He has a neuralink chip embedded in his brain and vibe codes all day through his brain waves. He even vibe codes during his sleep.

All companies will end up with just one employee. If you don't agree with this, you don't know how to prompt.

Biding my time. GPT5 was a wake up call. The hype will die down and the hangover will begin.

Moving fast in the beginning always has caveats.

In the meantime I'm doubling down on math and theory behind AI.

Only the most toxic workplaces are still pushing for this since several years ago.

AI is an irrelevant implementation detail, and if the pace of your work is not determined by business needs but rather how quickly you can crank out code, you should probably quit and find a real job somewhere better that isn't run by morons.

Cursor Bot on Github feels like a significant step forward, catches tons of stupid mistakes, typos, etc better than 95% of human reviewers can. The days of needing 2 reviewers on a PR are over IMHO, allows human reviewers to focus on broader architectural decisions.

Angry because this is yet another play by the ruling class to make more money, and you, I, and everyone you know is going to pay dearly for it.

Baffled because there are too many rank-and-file tech workers who seem to think AI exciting/useful/interesting. It’s none of those things.

Just ask yourself who wants AI to succeed and what their motivations are. It is certainly not for your benefit.

"Meh"

Developer operations and architecture haven’t caught up to efficient and productive AI workflows yet. Most orgs don’t have good ways for all their employees to have agents running in parallel and closing the loop within the agent (generating results that the agent can check and iterate on, with the dev being able to jump in easily to inspect). These iterations still require too much manual and bespoke management. So management and devs don’t see the full picture yet on current genetic productivity potential and dismiss it as a wash on time savings.

It is now 3 years since I was told AI will replace engineers in 6 month. How come all the AI companies have not replaced engineers?

It's fucking sick, dude. My buddy and I have a two-person team pulling contracts you needed a whole team to do before. Fucking love it, mate.

50% of my code these days has been entirely replaced by AI, with little to no review beyond a cursory glance.

That 50% is unit tests.

It's not my biggest concern here in the US

Most companies are going to have to rebuild their business entirely or die. That’s very exciting because I really think this will usher in a new wave of companies/hiring. Everything has to be rebuilt so I really don’t buy the hiring Armageddon.

I'm really enjoying using Claude Code. There is a learning curve, and you have to set your project up in a way that helps these agents work better, but when you do it's a massive productivity boost with certain stuff. It's generated some decent looking landing pages and other UI stuff that I would have otherwise spent multiple hours on. It can even build some backend services that I would have also spent a couple hours on. This time adds up, which lets me see my family and friends more and that's the most important thing to me.

I don't really see it replacing us in the near future though, it would be almost useless if I wasn't there to guide it, write interfaces it must satisfy, write the tests it uses to validate its work etc. I find that projects become highly modularised, with defined interfaces between everything, so it can just go to work in a folder satisfying tests and interfaces while I work on other stuff. Architecting for the agents seems to lead to better design overall which is a win.

I'm just writing crud apps though, I imagine it's less useful in other domains or in code bases which are older and less designed for agents.

My next experiment is designing a really high level component library to see if it can write dashboards and apps with. It seems to struggle with more interactive UI's as opposed to landing pages.