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The author of this post has been a software developer for over 30 years. Over the course of the years, they have heard "the end of software engineering as a profession" over and over again. In 1983, it was time for the Multimedia age. Adding sounds and videos was made websites way better. You put a video tag in HTML and your job was ton; everyone was going to be a a sound engineer for UX products. Obviously, UX is still around. In 2000, the IntelliJ IDE came out. Autocomplete was there. JavaDocs in the IDE. Feedback on compiling before even compiling the code. His friend claimed that was the end of our job. It substantially helped with the quantity of the code with some of their code in between. They discuss two times they automated a job away: once for themselves and another time for somebody else. The "somebody else" case was around migration of help care systems from MUMPS to a more modern relational system. The author automated 85% of it, gave this person and the code but they still had a job. For themselves, it was updates an HTML page with mental health care providers via a long process from reading emails, opening excel sheets and more. When the work was done, they just moved to something else. The dot com bubble was the next one. Software went from discs to websites written in JavaScript. The widespread Internet came true. Many people lost their jobs but many more were gained. "This is indeed a set of passive-aggressive jabs on the continuing assault on our senses by the LLM hype lobby." is the quote at the end. LLM's aren't going to completely take our jobs but it was just change.
Analysis Summary
# Morning News Roll-up 2025-11-27
## Overview
The provided content explores the historical cycle of "existential threats" to the software engineering profession, specifically contrasting past technological shifts (Object-Oriented Programming, Multimedia, IDEs, and the Dot Com Bubble) with the current Large Language Model (LLM) "hype lobby." The author argues that while technology evolves and automates specific tasks, it shifts the level of abstraction rather than eliminating the profession.
## Top Stories
### The "Death" of Software Engineering: A Historical Cycle
- Summary: The author reflects on 30 years of repeated claims that software engineering is ending. Historically, advancements like Object-Oriented libraries (1996) and advanced IDEs like IntelliJ (2000) were predicted to make programmers obsolete by allowing "business people" to snap components together. Instead, these tools merely increased the quantity of code and shifted the complexity to higher levels of abstraction.
- Source: hxxps://www[.]jasonscheirer[.]com/posts/vignettes-childhood-career/
### Automation vs. Job Displacement in Healthcare Systems
- Summary: An analysis of two case studies where the author automated significant portions of existing jobs. In a migration from MUMPS to relational systems, 85% of the work was automated, yet the human staff remained necessary for the remaining complexity. In a personal case involving mental health provider updates, automation of manual tasks (Excel/Email) simply allowed the developer to move on to more valuable work.
- Source: hxxps://www[.]jasonscheirer[.]com/posts/vignettes-childhood-career/
### LLM Hype and the Evolution of Data Collection
- Summary: The author criticizes the current "LLM hype lobby," contrasting modern aggressive web scraping with the ethical "crawling" standards of the past (respecting `robots.txt` and `user-agent` fields). The narrative suggests that like the "Multimedia Age" of 1993 and the "Dot Com" boom, LLMs will eventually become a mundane, integrated tool rather than a profession-killing catastrophe.
- Source: hxxps://www[.]jasonscheirer[.]com/posts/vignettes-childhood-career/
# The LLM Hype Cycle & Software Engineering Existentialism
## Key Points
- **Technological Transitions:** The industry has survived multiple "extinction events" including the shift to Object-Oriented Programming, the Multimedia Age (1993), the advent of refactoring IDEs (2000), and the Dot Com bubble.
- **Abstraction Shift:** Automation typically targets the "mundane" or "garden path" problems, while new, more complex problem sets emerge at higher levels of abstraction.
- **Data Ethics:** There is a noted shift from respectful, permission-based web crawling for training corpora to the more aggressive, often non-consensual data harvesting used by modern LLM entities.
- **Economic Impact:** Technology shifts (like the Dot Com crash) cause temporary job loss in poorly modeled businesses, but lead to "green shoots" (Web 2.0) where the technology becomes an organic, mundane part of the economy.
## Threat Actors
- **LLM Hype Lobby:** Described as a collective of entities pushing an "assault on the senses" regarding the inevitability of AI replacing human labor.
- **Aggressive Web Crawlers:** Modern bots that ignore traditional protocols (`robots.txt`) to harvest data for LLM training.
## TTPs
- **Fear-Based Marketing:** Utilizing the "death of the profession" narrative to drive adoption of automation tools.
- **Non-Standard Crawling:** Moving away from traditional `user-agent` identification and local domain restrictions to aggressively tax servers for data collection.
- **Abstraction Escalation:** Identifying manual developer tasks (like class renaming or HTML updates) and automating them to increase output volume while maintaining the need for human oversight.
## Affected Systems
- **Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC):** Impacted by the integration of autocomplete and automated refactoring tools.
- **Legacy Healthcare Systems:** Specifically MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) being migrated to relational databases.
- **Web Infrastructure:** Systems targeted by unthrottled training-data crawlers.
## Mitigations
- **Skill Adaptation:** Moving with the technology to operate at "one level higher" of abstraction.
- **Robots.txt & User-Agent Filtering:** Traditional methods to manage crawlers, though noted as increasingly ignored by modern actors.
- **Business Model Validation:** Focusing on "web-native" or "AI-native" logic rather than simply applying new technology to old business models without purpose.
## Conclusion
The current "threat" posed by LLMs to the software engineering profession is consistent with a 40-year cycle of technological hype. While LLMs automate specific cognitive tasks and change the nature of the workflow, they are assessed as a "change" rather than an "end." The recommendation for practitioners is to focus on solving high-level problems that cannot be solved by "snapping LEGOs together" and to remain skeptical of the hyper-productivity claims used to justify labor displacement.