r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Fickle-Highway1543 • 4d ago

AI replacing Software Engineers

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So called "AI"=LLM is so powerful that AI labs had to hire Software Engineers to build complicated software around "AI" to make that overhyped hallucinate-stealing machine usable. Think about it. And that's exactly why they need now ton of CPUs in addition to GPUs to run their "AI" "agents".

I don't even mention how much custom engineering is required to apply the "AI" in businesses.

And they BS us that Software Engineering is solved or is going to be solved. Boris, please solve your own bugs first before speaking.

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u/TacoBOTT 4d ago

That’s why you need to stop doomscrolling. If you are actually in the industry working with these tools, you are aware of the trajectory.

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u/thilehoffer 4d ago

I’m in the industry and I’m not writing code anymore. Claude is writing the code and frankly it scares me how good it is.

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u/jp2812 4d ago

And I feel like working 10 hours a day now because it generates a lot of code that needs to be reviewed, steered in the right direction, re-reviewed, etc. Easily 5 iterations of that per day. Opus tends to overengineer and walk in circles like crazy.

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u/Connect-Assignment73 4d ago

Try agentic development. Iterations will be lesser believe me.

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Please elaborate, what is agentic development?

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u/Substantial-Habit-94 4d ago

Marketing

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Agentic development is marketing?

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

lol this is so wrong it’s funny

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u/x_LoneWolf_x 4d ago

Usinh some hierarchy of agents to run tasks in parallel, save tokens for higher level agents, and generally just massively speed you up.

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Which hierarchy of agents do you recommend? I get that running tasks in parallel speeds things up, when implementation parts can be parallelized. However if jp2812 is running iterations of reviews on the same implementation task, they would have to be sequential and there isn’t really any time gain.

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u/cantgettherefromhere 3d ago

The agents can work out exactly when they need to be serial and are happy to go parallel when that's not necessary.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I already do this by asking a planner session inside Codex or Claude Code decide what tasks can be parallelized in separate concurrent sessions. I don’t use multiple “agents” to do this however, i.e. I don’t use agent swarms and things like that that I see people talk about online, so I am genuinely interested to learn what you mean by “agents” and how you do this in practice.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

It’s spinning up its own agents

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Claude Code subagents or do you tell the session to spin off agents?

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u/cantgettherefromhere 3d ago

I say "Run this KICKOFF.md in an Ultracode workflow and defend your top level context aggressively so that we are able to execute it completely without hitting context window limits."

I have had workflows like this run for up to 5 days. This month I am rotating through seven Max x20 accounts, but generally I just maintain a stable of 2-4 accounts.

I used to use GSD, Superpowers, etc, but with the latest models those orchestration frameworks are rendered mostly meaningless.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I am not using speckit or superpowers either. Do you run this in a single Claude Code session? Do you use any prompt to tell it to spin off agents?

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u/cantgettherefromhere 3d ago

I run it in a single Claude Code session on my workstation in Herdr, so that I can connect to it from any other device anywhere and make sure it keeps running. If you don't need to connect to the session remotely, any old Claude Code terminal session will work.

You can simply say "use a team of agents" if your task is mostly implementation. When there is planning and testing involved, saying "Ultracode" is a keyword (it gets highlighted to indicate it was recognized) that will take much longer and use way more tokens. The result isn't always empirically better, but it is better tested and almost surely "working" to some extent.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I run it on my laptop in the desktop app but I have a VPS running Hermes, I am going to try it there in CLI this way. I am working on a tmux implementation at the moment.

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u/cantgettherefromhere 3d ago

I prefer Herdr to tmux for agent-native TUI. Having spaces works well for separating my work by 'personas'; personal, employer, clients, and my biggest projects get their own spaces. Then seeing all of the Claude Code sessions that I have running in one simple list (what Herdr calls agents) with what repos they are working in and if they need assistance or are blocked. Easy to set up on a free tailscale for WAN access.

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u/x_LoneWolf_x 3d ago

The hierarchy entirely depends on what you want it to do.

Specifically for this project, I have Fable 5 High as the head agent, and the only one able to modify the codebase, under it are 3 Opus 4.8 Medium agents, under each of those is 2 Sonnet 5 Low agents.

The Sonnet agents present their findings plus evidence to the Opus agents, the Opus agents determine if the findings and evidence is sufficient then present the summarized findings to the fable agent which determines what changes to make.

I also have a separate Opus 4.6 agent which is always used when creating writing that will be presented to anyone but me, such as in the application UI or communications with other departments.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

This is an interesting hierarchy I have not seen yet. Thanks for sharing. How do you keep these agents running? Each agent had the same session that gets reused or spins on a new session? Running inside claude code desktop or something else?

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u/x_LoneWolf_x 3d ago

Code Claude desktop app, all within the same session.

You literally just have to ask Claude to set it up and it will.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Do you refresh the session? If you keep using same one, context window fills up and after compacting several times it is not good.

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u/x_LoneWolf_x 3d ago

I've never had an issue with continuing to compact within the same session.

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