Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post | the human in the loop

Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

07 Jun, 2026

So, my latest post went viral.

And with virality, you get a ton of comments that you must reply to.

I don't want to reply in HN/Reddit/Whatever to prevent endless thread depths that will consume my sanity. I'm going to cherry-pick some comments and leave answers here for those looking for them.

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product.

LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations

I should have been more explicit about it. LLMs are not automating everything when it comes to local tax codes or very fine-grained details, but this is usually handled by the legal team here (which is also automating a lot of routines with LLMs as well).

But much of the domain knowledge I mastered over time (which is obviously shallower than what the legal team is doing) is now just promptable with ChatGPT Pro/Extended Thinking.

That's what makes me sad, I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart in a world of coders that just know how to code, but that's not the reality anymore.

particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations.

Agents used to be bad at this kind of stuff in my workplace as well, but newer models + agent-friendly documentation + AGENT.md begging agents to read the fucking docs before coding changed this landscape for us here.

Less and less I feel the need to reach out to coworkers that have been around for longer and knew something in detail. I need much less human input to do my work now, which is freaking scary when I stop to think about it.

Also, a fintech whose managers recommend speeding up design docs with AI sounds way too careless to be in the money handling business.

Yeah, I don't agree with that as well, and my workarounds have been:

make the docs somewhat generic on the implementation details, state machines and such, so I have room to make a thought-out implementation. After AI came in (and then the layoffs), everybody is drowning in long docs to read and PRs to review, so the reviewers are way less picky now. This gives me room to work around flaws in the initial doc.

do some juggling with the team board to buy me time. For example, I always add tickets for E2E tests, in which I can find bugs, which gives me room to file bug/improvement tickets before the feature is released into the wild. This also gives me more time to review the implementation with caution. I also break the initial parts of the implementation (which are usually more sensitive) into more cards than I usually do so I have some room to implement and review it with caution

Do I like doing this? Of course not, but what are my options? The reports I get from people I know are that my company is not on the extreme edge of vibecoding, so leaving it for a potentially worse environment is not a good trade. At least I'm in a place where I know how to control the anxiety of the stakeholders (my diligence and caution earned me a good reputation) and that does not forces me into full-throttle vibecoding.

Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm one of the engineers who's constantly committing to improve our agentic tooling, I use different models to do adversarial code reviews, I keep a toolbelt of skills and prompts, etc. I have effectively become the so-called "AI-native engineer" (gosh, I hate that term).

I'm more concerned about the future.

If the models (and harnesses) keep getting better at the same pace for the foreseeable years, we are heading to a world where the profession is commoditized to the ground. There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree. The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.

Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.

It's simple to see why: the bulk of the demand was from smaller companies that needed copies but are well-served with ChatGPT-generated copies. Some are still hired just to prompt, review and send the copies, but since the demand is not infinite, not all of them can be hired to do that. One copywriter is now doing the job of 10, but the demand is fixed. The demand is not going to 10x just because you have 10x more supply.

Of course, the very best copywriters are still employable, but they are the ~1%. The other 99% are fighting for scraps. UX...