// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
It's 2020. You're the most senior person on your team, in charge of code
quality and architecture. You've set up good engineering practices, you
thoroughly review PRs from people who are less experienced than you and
work hard to maintain a healthy codebase.
Then at some point, you go on holiday. When you come back, the codebase
is a mess. Everyone merged each other's PRs without really paying much
attention, someone added a bunch of new tables to the database to
denormalise it because it was easier and they added serverless or Kafka
to the stack without any solid evidence that they needed either.
Fast forward to 2026. You haven't been on holiday. It's just a normal
Monday morning. You make yourself a nice coffee, open your computer and
find yourself with 7 PRs to review. You open the first one:
+24506
-3938
lines, accompanied by some AI-generated description of what they're
supposed to do. Somehow, your team has made more changes since Friday
than they used to make while you were away for a few weeks.
AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.
There used to be a time when people sat down and talked about how they'd
do something. Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open
a PR.
The most tragic aspect of this way of working is that, to the untrained
eye, it works.
If you pull the branch and test it, you'll probably get something
somewhat functional. So what do they do? They keep going. Again and
again. Until the project reaches a point where no one knows how anything
works.
Just like someone buying a new luxury car on a credit card. You don't
see the debt. You just see the car that looks great.
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team
has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately,
it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.
You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.