Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/]

Exhibit B - May 2026 - "Building for the future" - Cloudflare lays off 1100 people, about 20% of their workforce to "continue building the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/]

I'll finish on this quote: "The future ain't what it used to be." — Yogi Berra

Without going into ethical or political segments, my thoughts essentially boil down to the fact that Time to Market (TTM) is often the primary metric in web development.

On the other end, I believe that when it comes to system programming, performance, reliability and security are more important metric than TTM.

I also believe that system programming is closer to embedded programming (robotic) than web development, which makes it easier to bridge into embedded if robotic rise in the future.

For someone who enjoy being a contributor, and does not wish to move into managerial positions, would you agree that system programming is a good place to go?

I am especially interested by people with experience in the industry, to confirm or debunk my theory.

Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47499577

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

This cracked me up. Good work. I enjoyed this article a lot.

He was right.

He doesn't go in details, but there is a bit:

> Issue and PR triage/review. Agents are good at using gh (GitHub CLI), so I manually scripted a quick way to spin up a bunch in parallel to triage issues. I would NOT allow agents to respond, I just wanted reports the next day to try to guide me towards high value or low effort tasks.

> More specifically, I would start each day by taking the results of my prior night's triage agents, filter them manually to find the issues that an agent will almost certainly solve well, and then keep them going in the background (one at a time, not in parallel).

This is a short excerpt, this article is worth reading. Very grounded and balanced.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. No BS, no ads, no sale pitch, no AI, no pretending, nothing. Just a stranger sharing with the world a project he built at home.

Those picture of the welds are inspiring. It is as honest as it gets. Loved it.

Thank you.

From all the data I have seen, the software industry is poised for a lot more growth in the foreseeable future.

I wonder if we are experiencing a local minima, on a longer upward trend.

Those that do find a job in a few days aren't online to write about it, so based on what is online we are lead to believe that it's all doom and gloom.

We also come out of a silly growth period where anyone who could sort a list and build a button in React would get hired.

My point is not that AI-coding is to be avoided at all costs, it's more about taming the fear-mongering of "you must use AI or will fall behind". I believe it's unfounded - use it as much or as little as you feel the need to.

P.S.: I do think that for juniors it's currently harder and require intentional efforts to land that first job - but that is the case in many other industries. It's not impossible, but it won't come on a silver plate like it did 5-7 years ago.

Each and everyone of us is able to write their own story, and come up with their own 'Moral'.

Settling for less (if AI is a productivity booster, which is debatable) doesn't equal being screwed. There is wisdom in reaching your 'enough' point.

This article though, is so disappointing. It's pure LLM-lingo, which makes it awful to read.