Ask HN: Is this the SWE workflow of the future?

Internally transferred to a new team in a top-10 F500 company. This team is pushing incredibly hard to be seen as "AI-First" & is very opinionated about what other teams should be doing.

I was explicitly told I am not to write any code by hand. Claude usage is mandatory coupled with a proprietary superpowers / speckit / GSD framework with 100+ agents and skill files.

All code reviews are agent driven. No one takes the time to actually understand anything. Documentation has become novel length slop, as have Jira tickets.

I ship stuff I don't understand. Management says there won't be a need for many SWEs in the future.

Am I alone in experiencing this? Is this the future of work?

7 points | by mc-0 1 hour ago

1 comments

  • rvz 45 minutes ago
    Yes and No.

      Yes:  Agents will be there as an option, with less SWEs needed.
   No:  Agents won't be a complete SWE replacement and they still need human SWEs for accountability.
    Here's a great analogy on driving with autopilot:

    Say you are driving your car on autopilot. What happens when it stops working or experiences an outage / malfunction?

    Do you sit there and wait for the provider to get back online or do you take control of the wheel yourself?

    So having said that:

    > All code reviews are agent driven. No one takes the time to actually understand anything. Documentation has become novel length slop, as have Jira tickets.

    > I ship stuff I don't understand.

    Looking at my above sentence and judging by this workflow, is the future of driving having people never looking on the roads and no hands on the wheel while driving and they should wait for the provider to fix the outage whilst being stranded on the motorway?

    Both driving and SWE will always require a human in the loop in case the system fails and requires human intervention.