[HN Gopher] An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]
___________________________________________________________________
An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]
Author : mighty-fine
Score : 122 points
Date : 2026-03-18 20:50 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| For better or for worse, when everyone is a "potential software
| founder" nobody is because your potential customers can just use
| AI the same way you did.
| c0wb0yc0d3r wrote:
| I believe that it just changes the opportunity cost. There are
| still only 24 hours in a day. You can't copy everything.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in
| making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These
| people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie
| different solutions together, and generally make their lives
| increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it.
|
| My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this
| context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solves
| unless you have the technical and domain knowledge to redirect
| and correct it frequently. Perhaps training will solve this, and
| it'll certainly get better, but I'm not sure how far it'll go and
| how fast.
|
| My gut feeling is that software will only become more ambitious
| and interface with hardware and other systems in increasingly
| sophisticated ways. Things that seemed infeasible due to time and
| cost constraints will be on the table. It'll reveal new
| challenges, I think. I have a feeling it'll be humans with deep
| technical skills who are at the forefront of solving those
| challenges for a while yet.
|
| Not claiming I have the skills and to be one of those people,
| just that it's where I'm pushing my career at the moment.
|
| I'm stoked that people like this have the resources and newfound
| capabilities to create solutions like this. The reality is that
| previously, many people have been underserved due to the
| economics of software and inherent risks of trying things like
| this as a smaller business owner. So this is great. We can find
| more ways that software can be valuable, and people can do their
| jobs better in ways they've literally only imagined before. It's
| great.
| edg5000 wrote:
| What could happen is a reduction in the amount of programs
| used, with a smaller set of more sophisticated programs doing
| more work. This maps to what we saw pre-industrial revolution:
| lots of small family operations doing menial manufacturing work
| (woodworking, textiles, cooking). This got replaced by large
| factories. A smaller amount of companies producing the a larger
| volume of goods. With AI, a smaller group of engineers could
| handle more local complexity, thus allowing more sophisticated,
| general purpose software to be created, deleting the sea of
| small pieces of software we have today.
|
| Will this means many will be jobless? No, they would do other
| things. They'd be using this software to support society,
| operating at a high level. Think low-code, but incredibly
| complex stuff; just not raw code anymore. Instead of making
| circuit boards out of descrete components, you now slap a few
| ICs on a board with some supporting passives and the work is
| then all done in software. Engineers use more high-level
| components rather then welding and machinijng things from
| scratch; you buy T-slot profiles and bolts rather than casting
| and milling steel from billets.
|
| So the job of programmer may disappear simmilar to how we don't
| have bakers anymore, baking is done in factories, operated by a
| small staff. Current-day programmers will then increasingly
| shift to whatever high-level constructs we'll come up with,
| this high level work will be supported by the base
| infrastructure that those who still touch raw code will build.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| From what I have observed in my team, the opposite is
| occurring. Everyone is just making their own software because
| the barriers are so low. There is a lot less sharing and
| coordination going on, and the bottleneck moved to having the
| hardware available to run it all, so now we're spending a lot
| more money on compute.
| wild_egg wrote:
| Factories benefit from economies of scale that favour
| centralization.
|
| I think smaller groups handling more complexity is on point.
| But that's because each group will build their own bespoke
| factory catered to their exact needs.
|
| I very fully expect a mass proliferation of custom programs
| rather than standardizing on a common set that groans under
| the weight of being so general to support all use cases.
| gzread wrote:
| What were you doing before, if not making resilient software?
|
| I find that scalability is usually overblown because computers
| are fast now, which is not to say you shouldn't make it run
| fast on _one_ computer.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I had to strike more of a balance between moving quickly and
| focusing strictly on resilience. The difference moving
| forward would be that the features already exist, and my job
| will increasingly be focused on ensuring they work properly,
| and the underlying systems supporting features are
| consistent, cohesive, and not duct taped together like an LLM
| built it.
|
| It reminds me a lot of my early career spent remediating
| offshored PHP applications.
| robotswantdata wrote:
| Are we sure Claude Scale(tm) won't appear next month? A
| specialist agent that turns your vibe coded mess into a
| production grade scaled solution on their infrastructure.
|
| Expect anthropic to want to capture more of the supply chain
| over time
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yeah which is why the solution has to be legislative. These
| companies are trying to take over the entire industry and
| even if they won't have as good a solution as someone who
| only focuses on one thing they have the capital, distribution
| and name recognition to kill any upstarts
| pron wrote:
| If they could they would, and if they can they will. Maybe it
| will appear next month, and maybe 5 years from now, and we
| don't know which of these is more likely. But I think that if
| agents could actually produce good, reliable software than
| can evolve over time, there's little they couldn't do even
| beyond software. So it won't be (just) the software
| developers being replaced, but also software users.
| kaycey2022 wrote:
| scaling these solutions will prove to be counter productive. If
| you are thinking of scaling you are still trapped in the
| current paradigm. This plumber guy is only unique in that he
| read the news and pushed a little harder to see what the actual
| f is going on. In the days that come, every single person who
| is serious about their job will do and experience the same
| thing.
|
| I'm not saying this particular individual is wrong in trying to
| build his solution to the market. Maybe there is some VC money
| to be made in this moment. But as AI in the workplace gets
| normalised, most people will either come up with solutions for
| their problems, or they will ask someone they know to help them
| with this.
|
| scale will only matter if you are explicitly building a
| platform. That will still require real software engineering
| skills.
|
| As for hardware interfacing, if I am not mistaken, almost all
| companies selling hardware right now still behave like babies
| when it comes to users getting access to the software inside
| it. They void warrantees, sue them, so on etc. For ambitious
| user driven software innovations in the hardware space the
| companies should open up their interfaces. I don't see this
| happening at all not only because of the companies' greed but
| also for regulatory and safety reasons.
| pron wrote:
| You assume that the agents can produce okayish software that
| isn't very resilient, but that's not quite what we're seeing.
| Remember Anthropic's attempt to have agents write a C compiler
| (which isn't a super-complicated task by any means). Despite
| preparation work that is well beyond what most software can
| have (specs available to the agent and that the model trained
| on, thousands of human-written tests available to the agent and
| that the model trained on, and a human-written reference
| implementation available to the agent and that the model
| trained on) the agents still failed to converge. In other
| words, under conditions that are so favourable as to be
| unrealistic for almost any kind of real software, the AI agents
| couldn't even produce so much a workable C compiler. And this
| is what I also see: the agents take the code in a direction
| that doesn't converge, let alone make it resilient.
| herewulf wrote:
| "Mechanical engineer uses code to improve engineering process".
| Okay, this has been going on forever. Other engineering
| disciplines and various fields using software to solve problems.
| Programming doesn't exist in a vacuum of theory.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think there are many moats that non-experts won't attempt to
| cross even with AI assistance.
|
| For example, we've built in a lot of complexity to areas like
| authentication. And for good reason. It's like electrical code.
| I'd pay good money to watch a muggle attempt to configure OIDC
| infrastructure. Even with the AI explaining everything to you,
| it's too much information to digest at once. You'd need an entire
| afternoon just to wrap your head around the idea of asymmetric
| cryptography. That's a lot of time not spent doing the thing your
| business is actually about.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I absolutely love this, because to me, this is what software
| development should be about, solving actual problems and
| providing faster calculations, improving the workflow for people.
|
| It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a
| developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and
| waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little
| naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT industry over
| the past 20 years. When I started my first job, we frequently had
| customers ask for bespoke solution, most of which was small one
| week to a few months of work. Multiple co-workers in the mid
| 2000s has side businesses, where they did contract development,
| most of which was these types of small one off solutions. Most of
| the software companies, in my area, that did these types of jobs
| are all gone now.
|
| If AI accidentally created an environment where people can once
| again solve small programming problems on their own and massively
| improve the workflows I'm all for it. Serves the industry right
| for abandoning these customers.
| phil21 wrote:
| Yeah the whole tech world did a weird side quest over the past
| 20 or so years huffing its own farts due to how the
| internet/adtech/etc sucked all the air out of everything else
| tech related. And the economy as a whole.
|
| It also coincided with the hollowing out and offshoring of
| practically all US industrial and manufacturing capability.
|
| I will be very happy if the result of AI means we go back to
| how things should actually be - where technology/IT is used to
| support real world things and acts as a backstage enabler to
| get shit done. Not the main event.
|
| I often said since the early 00's my dream would be to have
| made enough money in the insanely stupid "tech for tech sake"
| world to go back to just being one of a few "IT guys"
| supporting a factory and keeping the machines running. These
| jobs of course exist, but due to tech salaries very few small
| manufacturing businesses could support hiring such a person.
|
| There is now a generation or two of technologists who don't
| understand that the job isn't to learn the latest hot web
| framework or yammer on about best practices or whatever. It's
| to support a business in shipping actual products to customers.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I love it too. It's a really positive aspect of AI. And it's
| NOT because it "takes jobs away from developers". In this case,
| there was NO (professional/career) developer and NO software
| product focused on what this guy did.
|
| We've long made fun of excel-jockeys getting carried away with
| VBA, but they came into being because engaging with turgid and
| expensive software companies to do important but small jobs was
| such a pain in the ass. This is the start of a new era, and
| while I am sure we're going to see some wild fiascos, it is a
| move in the right direction for people that need to solve
| problems with computers.
| jakeydus wrote:
| You're telling me that salesforce CAN'T actually solve every
| problem in the world more simply and efficiently than just
| building a tool to fit the job??
|
| The software industry has just abstracted every problem to the
| point of being unable to solve anything.
| sroerick wrote:
| In my experience, I've worked with a number of people in non-
| tech industries who tried to pivot their company into software,
| and a huge obstacle was that ultimately the code became
| unmaintainable.
|
| Maybe they didn't have the expertise to pick a software stack
| that would serve them in the long run, or they just didn't have
| the budget to hire a SWE or team full time, or their contractor
| team just wasn't super invested in the project.
|
| So tech people look at "vibeslop" as unmaintainable technical
| debt, but they ignore that in a lot of situations their own
| salary is what makes the tech debt unmaintainable. Maybe that's
| uncharitable, but I do think many techs are very far removed
| from the "solve a problem and then dogfood it" cycle
| f-serif wrote:
| >10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100
| drawings in five minutes
|
| bullshit story always leave something like this.
| zupa-hu wrote:
| I also caught this but then figured 10m may not be the typical
| drawing time. 10m -> 1m means 10x faster. 5m = 300s alas
| 3s/drawing. So maybe it only tool 30s/drawing previously.
| (Unlikely.)
|
| But even then, it also says 5m can save days of work. Days is
| minimum 2days, or 16h, or 960s. That's not 10x faster as
| previously stated, but 192x faster.
|
| So yeah, it doesn't add up.
| i_cannot_hack wrote:
| It's a really interesting case study, but the summary seems to
| lean into the AI hype to an extent that borders on lying.
|
| > His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire
| thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn
| everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.
|
| I don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face
| after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradicts it.
|
| In the interview the engineer says "When Claud Code came out
| almost a year ago, I started dabbling with web based tools ..."
| and "When it first came out I had so many ideas and tried all
| these different things", so he had clearly already used
| extensively it for a year. I would also guess the engineer was
| somewhat technically minded from the get-go, since he claims he
| was "really good with excel" before starting with Claude Code,
| but that is beside the point.
|
| The interviewer later asks "How much of those 8 weeks was
| learning Claude Code versus actually building the thing?", and
| the interviewee answers "Well, I started Claude Code when it
| first came out so the learning curve has really gone down for me
| now..." and then trails off to a different subject. Which further
| confirms that the summary in the post is false.
|
| It really seems like the engineer has spent the year prior
| learning Claude Code and then spent 8 weeks on solely building
| this specific application.
|
| The interviewer also claims "This would normally have taken a
| developer a year to build", which seems really unsubstantiated.
| It's of course hard to judge without all the details, but looking
| at the short demo in the video, 8 weeks of regular development
| time from a somewhat experienced developer doesn't seem too far
| fetched if the objective is "don't make it pretty, just make it
| work".
|
| As I said, it's a really interesting case study about a paradigm
| shift in how software is developed, and it's clear this app would
| never have existed without Claude Code. So I don't really see the
| need for the blatant lying.
| mirsadm wrote:
| I've noticed even experienced engineers have started
| overestimating how long things would take to build without AI.
| Believe it or not we coded before AI and not everything took
| years all the time.
| le-mark wrote:
| We've all worked on projects where it took months to get
| requirements from the business. Sometimes to see the project
| cancelled after months of sitting around waiting for them to
| decide on things.
|
| Coding has never been the roadblock in software. Indeed don't
| we experience this now with ai? Vibe code a basics idea then
| discover the things we didn't consider. Try to vibe that and
| the code base quickly gets out of hand. Then we all discover
| "spec driven development" SDD and in turn discover thinking
| of specifying everything our selves is an even bigger of
| PITA?
| abelitoo wrote:
| > So I don't really see the need for the blatant lying.
|
| Because this is an advert
| sumedh wrote:
| He might be a bit nervous to speak to the camera and might have
| messed up the timeline.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I don't get it - it's an app that uses an image model to parse a
| pdf file and structure the data with a csv export?
| fdghrtbrt wrote:
| Yes that phrase shows how simple it is, doesn't it?
|
| But before LLMs, computers couldn't understand that phrase. Now
| they can.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I had a similar "oh wow this has normalised fast" a few weeks
| back when someone was like "oh it just takes all the human
| written recipe data and normalises it?" and I smiled at the
| "just". Literally a nightmare problem only a few short years
| ago.
| shortercode wrote:
| I feel both great and awful about this. For over a decade I've
| said that nearly anyone that uses a computer could benefit from
| some programming understanding. A little bit can go a long way to
| solving problems like this. Problems that collectively slow down
| and block the ambitions of a huge number of people worldwide.
|
| But instead we've found a way to circumvent the process. Losing
| the understanding of your own problem and the new ideas that come
| off the back of it.
|
| I'm reminded of the story that NASA had a research project to
| make pens that would work in space, and Roscosmos just used
| pencils. I always thought NASA came off worse in that anecdote,
| but I wonder what they learnt while making the pen...
| ash_091 wrote:
| That story is a classic urban legend.
|
| Both agencies used pencils, but they were problematic because
| the graphite could break off / float around / cause shorts.
|
| The space pen was developed by Fisher independently of NASA.
| NASA bought 400 of them for $2.39 each. The Roscosmos later
| bought 100 for the same price.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The story is BS, btw.
|
| Firstly, pencils in space pose serious risks. Pencils produce
| dust, graphite dust is conductive, and won't settle down in
| microgravity. They were used early on, but both space agencies
| phased them out when they realized the risks. After that, they
| first moved to grease pencils, which kind of suck for normal
| writing.
|
| NASA didn't research how to make pens that work in space, an
| American private company did it on their own initiative and
| money. Then they sold pens to NASA for cheap, and marketed the
| same pens to people not in space for a lot of money and made a
| nice profit.
|
| Today, both Roscosmos and NASA use the same pens, bought from
| Fisher.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Space pen is also an incredibly reliable pen here on earth
| too. Highly suggest people grab one.
| k1musab1 wrote:
| Overpriced for what it is - there are pressurized tank pens
| starting at $4, a lot more ergonomic too.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Oh neat had no clue
| fdghrtbrt wrote:
| Waiting for the "jUsT sToChAsTiC pArRoTs" crowd.
| mromanuk wrote:
| The guy from the story, it's just another developer starting from
| a different trade, pretty normal across our history, musicians,
| lawyers that discovered that they were good at computers. The
| conclusion is flawed, not anyone can endure what this person did,
| sit at a terminal, going back and forward until something is
| finished. That's what a SW dev does. My conclusion, many more
| people will discover that they are good at software, not
| everybody, but some of them will discover this new powers, thanks
| to a new lower barrier provided by LLM.
| tariky wrote:
| You are 100% correct. That guy just did not know that he has
| developer soul.
| pbiggar wrote:
| Let's take the metaphor of writing. Would we say this guy is
| just a writer who started from another trade? No. Writing is
| something that used to require experts (scribes) and that now
| anyone can do and is just a normal part of doing any work.
|
| Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now
| being democratized because everyone can do it due to good
| enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going
| forward.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is
| now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good
| enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going
| forward.
|
| The ability to solve problems is what's important. Not your
| ability to remember things or to hold sacred knowledge.
| vunderba wrote:
| This. Software development probably requires some of the
| _least_ boilerplate memorization in all of STEM. Deductive
| reasoning and imagination are far more important than being
| flexing that you've committed quicksort to memory.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| If that were true, industry interview processes would be
| very different.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Writing is a tool, a technology. Much like hammers or saws,
| which are also commodified. And even though anyone can go buy
| a saw, not everyone is a carpenter.
| andyferris wrote:
| I am not a carpenter; I use a saw at least once a month.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Writing is a tool, a technology.
|
| Like paint, it can be used as a tool, to paint your house,
| or as a craft and artform, to paint the Rouen Cathedral.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| What is this "sacred knowledge?"
|
| Is it knowing how to write a regex without a reference, or
| maybe implementing a distributed ec postgres cluster using
| bash, ooh how about writing a minimum cnn in C for edge
| classification ooohhh wooowee...
|
| Ever worked construction? There's hammer swingers that need
| one swing per nail and never miss. Or plasterers that make
| chalk look like marble. How about a high voltage lineman that
| can switch a 20kv oil-cooled transformer in less than 15
| minutes to get the power to the school back on
|
| No different from any tradesman - we're not special
| coldtea wrote:
| > _thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM._
|
| New lower barrier means commodification.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| Lol no it doesn't you literally have it backwards - think
| about the trades, specifically construction, as low barrier
| to entry jobs and consider that houses/buildings are all
| different (not commodities).
| knollimar wrote:
| Apprentices are considered commodities here
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| Lol you think developers aren't already commodities? You
| joking?
|
| edit: i love how this is getting downvotes but no further
| responses. y'all are in denial. let me ask you this: why
| is the most common interview loop round a _generic_ LC
| round? lolol
| coldtea wrote:
| "Lol", do you think in lols or do you ever sit and
| consider something more deeply? Or maybe you think adding
| a lol makes the other side's argument ridiculous and
| yours stronger?
|
| Skipping the lols, here's the answer to your question:
| doesn't matter if developers "are already commodities" to
| some degree.
|
| First, because that degree is small, else developers
| wouldn't command such high salaries relative to other
| trades. So they might be commoditized compared to
| surgeons, but not at all compared to most office or blue
| collar trades.
|
| Second, even if they are commoditized to some degree, the
| argument is that AI will bring further commodification.
| Not that it will introduce the first and foremost case of
| commodification in the developing world.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > developers wouldn't command such high salaries relative
| to other trades.
|
| lololol something can be a commodity and still expensive.
| to wit: have you heard of this thing called oil which is
| recently very expensive?
|
| > do you think in lols or do you ever sit and consider
| something more deeply?
|
| i think deeply enough to recognize when someone's
| reasoning is so flawed they should've almost immediately
| reconsidered their claim upon conceiving of it. and then
| i laugh out loud (at them) when they didn't. occasionally
| many many times.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _lololol_
|
| Go to Reddit, it would be a better fit. Or maybe 9gag.
|
| > _something can be a commodity and still expensive. to
| wit: have you heard of this thing called oil which is
| recently very expensive?_
|
| Which is irrelevant. That coding services are already a
| product for sale is a given.
|
| We're not talking about commodification in the "something
| becoming an object that can be sold" sense. We're talking
| about commodification in the sense of a product being
| made generic and cheapened. If you didn't pick this up by
| now, further discussion is pointless.
| knollimar wrote:
| I was pointing out the reference wasn't pointing at the
| house but the apprentice.
|
| Lower barrier to entry means the developers are _even
| more_ interchangeable than now.
| phil21 wrote:
| Like all things it's a spectrum. Many developers (most
| these days) are a commodity. The truly talented are not,
| and are uniquely good at their specializations.
|
| Just like tradesman. A generic electrician journeyman for
| residential break/fix work is more or less a commodity
| these days. A specialized electrician who is known to be
| an expert at rehabbing 150 year old knob and tube wiring
| on a historical mansion is not.
|
| It's interesting to me how developers fought so hard to
| commodify themselves though? When I started my career in
| my early teens no one at all put jobs up for a
| "programmer" - it was nearly always a "C programmer" or
| "COBOl programmer" and most developers focused on one or
| two languages as experts. Then there was usually even
| further specialization on top of that as well!
|
| Sometime after the dot com boom devs decided that if you
| were a developer worth anything at all you could pick up
| any language and be productive in it within weeks or
| months in nearly any role or industry. I've always
| thought this was insane.
| coldtea wrote:
| Lol,no.
|
| Houses/buildings are each isolated physical structures.
|
| Software is trivially and instantly replicated, and the
| same software can serve millions.
|
| Also, even in your example you're just the commodified
| roofer or construction worker. Not the non-commodified
| house.
| dahart wrote:
| > consider that houses/building are all different (not
| commodities)
|
| The vast majority of US housing construction is tract
| housing, which is a commodity. In the EU, flats, which are
| also commodities.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| Citation please. Certainly I'm aware of cookie cutter
| developments but "vast majority" seems like an
| exaggeration to me.
| williamcotton wrote:
| _"The current market share of custom-built homes is
| approximately 19% of total single-family starts"_
|
| https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/08/custom-home-building-
| grows...
| xvedejas wrote:
| New multifamily construction in the US that has to
| undergo design review is arguably fairly custom in that
| each site will have different requirements. I think it's
| fair to say that commoditization is a spectrum?
| zeckalpha wrote:
| tract != multifamily
| PepperdineG wrote:
| Both can be true in homes being unique while also
| functionally being like commodities. Whether a home or a
| spec home or tract home the pricing is based similarly to
| sports stats and no matter how one-of-a-kind a home is a
| mortgage on such a home can then be packaged with a bunch
| of other homes into a bond where bond investors will look
| at the stats of the combined homes and who the borrowers
| are.
| gopher_space wrote:
| It's difficult to appreciate just how quickly and obviously
| low-barrier jobs sort people by ability and aptitude.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It means specialization. When people with no software
| development experience but lots of experience in some other
| domain have the ability to create software that fits their
| individual needs, that's a recipe for an explosion in highly
| specialized tooling.
| unkiep wrote:
| This sounds like "no true Scotsman..."
| smugtrain wrote:
| More like the inverse. No true Scotsman seeks to remove
| someone from belonging to a group to keep the group pure,
| because no true member of that group could act in such a way.
| This is adding people to a group that they would otherwise be
| excluded from. It seeks to expand the definition of the group
| to include the outsiders.
| sltr wrote:
| People like this will create a net increase in software jobs.
| Once his software makes enough money so he doesn't have to sit in
| front of a computer, he will employ someone. It will initially be
| a gig fixing slop. https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/about-that-gig-
| fixing-vibe-co...
|
| People in the trades have a ruthless pragmatism that SV has
| forgotten.
|
| https://www.slater.dev/2025/08/oil-spills-can-create-jobs/
| tonfreed wrote:
| I think it's awesome that AI is enabling this. I think the the
| future of software engineering is in helping make this kind of
| thing resilient and removing the fragility that AI generated code
| always seems to inject
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Trades / SWE overlap is interesting as I think they are analogous
| to each other.
|
| I went to college with a lot of actual engineers - mechanical,
| electrical, chemical, etc. In those fields you are designing
| products and then engineering processes to output a cog of some
| sort (drug, car, GPU, iPhone, etc) in the thousands to millions.
|
| In our fields as SWEs, a lot of our job it's like the trades
| going into a house to install HVAC, fix a burst pipe, upgrade a
| circuit breaker, replace a furnace, etc. No two setups are
| exactly alike, no requirements are exactly alike, etc.
|
| Even in the age of LLMs I think the industry remains more
| artisanal than engineering. And that's not a knock on us, I think
| it's because what we do is essentially automate business
| processes.. and no two businesses are alike. I don't think LLMs
| replace the role, it just makes parts of our job faster. The
| mindset of how you automate something doesn't generally exist in
| the minds of people who want the automation.
| knollimar wrote:
| I do this wirh conduit. Not as far along but definitely certain
| tasks in trades are prime for automation.
|
| Tbh this is nothing new; we knew technical people with Claude
| code would be able to program well enough that tbey would be
| business developers.
| pragmatic wrote:
| How is a mechanical engineer a "trade worker."
|
| Most engineers have to take at least one programming class in
| college.
| btrettel wrote:
| I agree, my immediate reaction was that mechanical engineer is
| not a trades worker.
|
| I majored in mechanical engineering at college. We had a
| required programming class. A lot of people like myself already
| knew how to program before we took the class too. We also had a
| required electronics class. My experience is that most folks
| with CS degrees would be surprised by the breadth of what
| mechanical/aerospace/chemical/etc. engineers learn.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I didn't read the article but if he is really an actual
| mechanical engineer then this is not that interesting.
| Mechanical engineers build a lot of technical software. Most
| fluid dynamics code or vibration code is probably written by
| mechanical engineers. Now, some times people say "mechanical
| engineer" but they don't mean someone that studied FFTs.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| As part of my "well shit what's next" arc I've been checking out
| machine shops in my area. By and large they are dumb manual 30
| year contracts or highly automated job shops..
|
| And the owners of those job shops aim for 3 shifts per worker via
| automation, and mash their own software with AI already. They are
| ruthless at cost cutting and automation and AI tools are perfect
| for them.
|
| Unfortunately the vibe I get talking to them is essentially a
| triumphant "why would I need you, I have AI" or "yeah you're
| screwed".
|
| I can't blame them for being served expensive barely functional
| crap SaaS or ERP software for ages, but I was not expecting to be
| viewed as part of the problem coming from a robotics, automation,
| and optimization background myself. It's just all a block of
| overpaid swindlers to them.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I have always wanted to get back to the metal, and the rapidly
| changing software landscape seemed like a good kick into it,
| but it might also mean a complete lack of opportunity
| georgemcbay wrote:
| The general approval the average person has for tech/software
| workers has declined precipitously over the last decade (IMO
| for some pretty good reasons, as an overall industry we've done
| a lot of societal harm) which just adds to how cosmically funny
| it is that as a group we are likely to experience one of the
| quickest mass career disruptions from AI.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Software development usability has always been measured in mean
| time before black-box failure: something misbehaves that the
| person can't fix or understand.
|
| LLM's shorten that time for every application and every user, but
| particularly for users from professions that haven't built
| modeling or debugging skills because they rely on physical
| reality - like pipes fitting or process supervision - to weed out
| non-performers.
|
| Hiring for LLM-enhanced work should focus on debugging skills in
| unknown situations.
| pron wrote:
| Except I find that agents are much better at debugging than
| writing code. When the code gets to the state where the agents
| can no longer debug it and keep it running (as happened in
| Anthropic's failed C compiler attempt) humans will likely not
| be able to save the situation (in an efficient way). And
| without careful human supervision from the start, the code
| ultimately gets to that place.
| pron wrote:
| Here's what I find difficult to reconcile with my own experience.
| I've been using Codex in anger for the past 2 months or so (with
| gpt5.3-codex and then gpt5.4) on projects of different
| complexity. It is quite good at debugging, but the (non-trivial)
| code it produces is _really_ bad. And I don 't mean bad
| stylistically, but bad in the sense that Codex clearly won't be
| able to maintain it for long (which is how Anthropic's C compiler
| experiment failed) because it uses an approach of "success at all
| costs" where it always prefers fixes that treat the symptom
| rather than going back and rethinking the architecture as
| features are added.
|
| So the options are: 1. the program involved here is really
| trivial, 2. it hasn't evolved long enough for the agent to fail
| at evolution, or 3. others are not seeing what I'm seeing.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| This tracks with my own experience. I have to watch what the
| LLM does in response to any given ask, especially when adding
| new features to an existing system, because it will do things a
| different way every time until it no longer knows what patterns
| to follow.
| sroerick wrote:
| It is weird. I've had maintainable solutions on non-trivial
| code, but it does kind of require babysitting. Planning
| documents and detailed specs help. You get a feel for where the
| agent will want to take a shortcut and can devise ways to
| navigate around that.
|
| I also find Go works really well, and generally stays, if not
| exceptional, than at least maintainable.
|
| I've also enjoyed using OCaml, but I will say that I found the
| single worst function I've ever seen in a codebase in vibecoded
| OCAML.
|
| You might just try asking - "hey I'm having trouble keeping
| maintainable codebases - how can I structure this project in a
| way where the code will be stable long term".
|
| Sometimes getting the "software architect" role into the agent
| context is all it takes.
| tintor wrote:
| He used Claude Code, you are using Codex.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| For decades, employees have been developing tools using whatever
| was available to them, and in most cases, this was limited to
| Excel macros.
|
| AI provides access to much better tools for testing and quickly
| experimenting with new ideas.
|
| The only ones who should be worried are companies that charge
| millions for four junior developers and an agile coach, and
| deliver more PowerPoints than code (I'm looking at you,
| Capgemini).
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Seems like a really slick application, nice work.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-21 23:01 UTC)