The Death of Software Development
(mike.tech)
from codeinabox@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 22 Jan 2026 16:11
https://programming.dev/post/44468353
from codeinabox@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 22 Jan 2026 16:11
https://programming.dev/post/44468353
#programming
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The authors of these articles always make it crystal clear how inexperienced they are.
Whoa you don’t say?! We’ve only been doing that for thirty years now. Glad you finally noticed.
You know what the major problem has been for the past couple decades of my programming career? Hint: it wasn’t writing the code.
Leave it to a finance bro to think everything he does is “DiSrUpTiNg.” What year is it?
Where did you get the impression that the author is an inexperienced developer and finance bro? The introduces himself as someone who started programming from the age of eleven.
Knowing a programming language is not software engineering.
It’s like building a bird feeder and then claiming you can build a skyscraper.
Maybe I can build a bird feeder that is as tall as a skyscraper. 🤔/s
For one really big bird
It’ll come crashing down 😱
This part
Maybe just me, but that screamed “finance bro” to me. “Since moving on from that world.”
The inexperience in professional programming is indicated by the entire article. There’s a huge difference between a hobbyist who starts at 11 and a professional developer. Real professional developers don’t start with “I started when I was 11.” I started when I was 15, 20 years before the author did. Who cares?
His LinkedIn shows little experience in professional development. Just a bunch of “CTO” positions.
He dropped out of university in 2018 after eight years.
I’ve also never heard anyone experienced say “I checked the code. It’s good.” Because it’s embarrassing. And he put it in writing. “LGTM 👍” Insightful.
Yeah when I see a slew of Founder and csuite positions I clock as a grifter rather than a competent technologist.
He also seems to refer to himself by the title BDFL (“Benevolent Dictator For Life”) on his own company’s blog.
Which is so cringey it makes my skin crawl.
Every child with a blog is convinced they’re Guido van Rossum like it’s 2010.
Gross
I started walking 33 years ago, I am by no mean an expert in walking.
Personally, while I see what the author means, I don't agree 100%. What I think is bound to happen is that manual development will lose market share, but not fade away completely. Like stone aqueducts still being needed in some cases despite pipes being a thing, some companies may require proof of work, which could be better achieved with humans. Also, not from a commercial angle per se, but for code reviewers, knowing how to write their own codes would help the oddities in machine-generated code, and fix/improve where needed, meaning at least for study they'd need to do it.
Trust me bro the finance terminal it wrote had no bugs and was fully featured. No I won’t release the source code, instead I’ll promise to release the source code of my next incredible AI project!
If it was so impressive, just show us. We know AI is great at building tech demos that look like they work, but does it actually work? Who knows!
nah only a finance nerd would want to see it, none of them will be reading this /s
He sure loves to evangelise “cloning”, a.k.a. “copying other people’s work”. One wonders how anything new or even slightly tailored for each situation will creep into this ecosystem.
To make an analogy, there’s usually nothing terribly wrong with the mass-produced clothes that big box stores sell. But it rarely fits that well, looks too stylish, or does much more than cover your nakedness. Often, that’s acceptable. But sometimes you need special gear or want a really good quality, tailored shirt.
People still make a living as tailors. In fact, a lot of their work these days is making small alterations to the mass-produced stuff for individual clients.
It has been really fun watching any LLM debugging a bug in a moderately large codebase. It has been so bad in my experience (I really wanted the hype to be real) even in really simple and readable programming languages.
It doesn’t stand a chance though for more complex languages. There was an obvious bug in the way one Rust project was loading a config, decided to “test” Claude sonnet 4.5, I watched it identifying the issue but over engineering paragraphs of new Rust utilities without getting there while the solution was in the second paragraph of the github repo of config-rs, just adjusting the prefix and dropping the separator entry.
Lmao. Lmfao, even.
Here, I’m gonna save you some time and summarize the article for you:
Ahem. Maybe I editorialized a tiny bit. Not much though, trust me bro.