Software Engineering

This is the kind of post that does not look like much when you start, and then it does not let go of you. On June 6, 2026, a software engineer writing under the name poisonfountain published a long, careful essay on Bear Blog titled “LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don’t know what to do.” It reached Hacker News #11 the next morning: 787 points, 768 comments, a comment-to-score ratio of 0.98. That is not a “people loved it” hit. It is a “people argued about it” hit. The comments are the story. ...

It is tempting to look at today’s coding agents and believe that backend development is about to become a one-shot prompt. I do not buy it. Not because LLM agents cannot write code. They clearly can. They can add endpoints, patch CRUD flows, generate migrations, update tests, and edit multiple files with impressive speed. The real problem is more annoying: the most important parts of a backend system are often not written in the first line of the ticket. ...