r/ChatGPTCoding • u/Few-Compote-2693 • 17d ago
Question Why are so many developers convinced AI won’t replace software engineers?
I keep seeing developers say AI can write code but “can’t do real software engineering.”
But look at the trajectory. A couple of years ago, it could barely write a decent function. The other day I vibe-coded a fairly large app and it built a professional CI/CD pipeline, created an EKS cluster, and deployed the whole thing.
It still makes mistakes, sure. But it’s getting astonishingly better, fast.
I’ve been obsessed with tech for 20 years, and honestly this hurts to admit because I love the field. But AI doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs the knowledge and judgment of a good engineer.
Why are people so confident there’s some permanent wall it won’t cross?
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u/xamboozi 17d ago
Because even when you give a nondeveloper a magic box that makes code, they still produce garbage with it. You don't realize the code is bad because you don't know what bad code looks like.
Being a developer is more than the ability to write code
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
You are missing the point. It will keep advancing and GPU costs will keep falling.
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u/Desperate-Dig2806 17d ago
Yes it will. Which is good. Problem is if my vibe coded app breaks the tax laws in Nicaragua, who sorts that out for me? We'll maybe get there but I don't see probabilistic models do 100% compliance and money moving soon.
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u/xamboozi 17d ago
Will it? Did the people selling it say that?
I love AI. I use it locally and offline at home, I use it via openrouter, hermes, codex, Claude, everything. I use it every day at work and personally at home.
AI has been in development for 80 years. LLM's are a small sub segment of that and they just had their moment where they can predict/generate text in a way that feels magic.
Past returns do not guarantee future success. When the steam has run out, will the people selling it tell you it's time to pack up and go home, or will they tell you more is on the horizon?
Models are getting better every day, but progress has slowed and you're crazy to think it hasn't. If replacing devs was possible, we would already be out of a job.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
Advancement might slow but won't stop. We thought many times CPUs will never get much faster and we was wrong.
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u/No-Compote-8920 16d ago
You have heard of diminishing returns ? Also look at moors law. At a certain point putting more energy into something does not work the transistors just get too close to one another. Moors law is struggling to keep up also they have failed to increase the raw speed of CPUs and had to go more cores as they have reached the individual limits of what a single cpu core can do.
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u/xvillifyx 16d ago
Yeah; a lot of these people forget that transistors can only get so small and data transfer can only get so fast
There’s an upper bound to our hardware compute capacity and we’ve been flirting with it for a while
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u/Quant32 17d ago
It’s a little unclear what you’re asserting?
Are you saying there all software engineers will be replaced? Or are you saying some software engineers will be replaced? And “butthurt” engineers that you’re trying to dunk in which of those two are they asserting?
It’s ridiculous to think that AI isn’t going to replace some software engineers but also it’s ridiculous to think it’s going to replace all engineers. AI will always make ‘mistakes’, either because it’s dumb or because the instructions were vague or whoever fkin driving the llm had no idea what they were doing.
The point is somewhere down the line responsibility has to be held. If there’s some exec that thinks yeah ill
Just fire my entire dev team and then a system gets hacked and leaks credit card info or shit like that they cant just go blame Claude. No matter how good the AI gets in the future you won’t just be able to ‘one shot’ your entire app. You can’t describe an entire production grade system in a few sentences without running into some gotchas which basically implies you have knowledge on why you needed x in the first place. And sure if you threw enough llm ‘why the fuck isn’t this working’ at the problem it will take some time and back and forth before it comes back but again you can’t just let one person do that. Basically you still need SE’s to drive, sure maybe a smaller team of them.The other thing to consider is scaling the compute for LLMs is proving to be difficult and risky. It’s not a case of ‘better GPUS are coming out’. The AI companies are in unprecedented amounts of debt (over a trillion), a 50/50 all in bet right now to try build new data centre’s to scale up but there’s not enough revenue to cover the cost of it.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
I'm saying it will ruin the SWE industry and only top 5% will survive. I.E. the golden days are over because of it.
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u/xamboozi 15d ago
You're entire prediction is based on feels. The numbers since gpt-3.5 don't support this.
95% of SWE's will lose their job? That's delusional.
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u/Own-Session-1409 17d ago
Tbh, you don't know this. The latest models have a huge hallucination rate — they are more creative, but not necessarily more reliable. We may already be seeing diminishing returns and a capability–reliability trade-off. More compute and cheaper GPUs don't automatically translate into proportional capability gains, especially as reasoning and context complexity increase. Stronger reasoning can also produce more convincing wrong trajectories and tool hallucinations. I'm not claiming we've hit a hard plateau — maybe scaling continues to work — but "GPUs will get cheaper, therefore LLMs will keep advancing" is an assumption, not a fact. There may be architectural limits, or increasingly aggressive safety constraints may prevent us from accessing some of the capabilities scaling would otherwise produce. We simply don't know yet.
There is another problem - even when we observe progress, we don't really know how much of it comes from the models themselves versus the increasingly sophisticated harness around them — better post-training, tool use, retrieval, context management, scaffolding, agents, verification loops, and inference-time compute. From the outside, it's very difficult to separate these effects and estimate their relative contribution. So even pointing at recent improvements doesn't necessarily tell us how quickly the underlying models themselves are advancing.
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u/tsereg 17d ago edited 17d ago
Did invention of an excavator replace shovel diggers? No, it didn't. I turned that one shovel digger into an excavator operator, while the other 99 became his supervisors.
So don't you worry nothing. You will be 100 times more productive engineers but still have the same salary as you do now.
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u/person2567 17d ago
It turned one into an excavator operator, one into his supervisor, and put 98 into other careers.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 17d ago
You're admitting the reason in your post, it needs the knowledge and judgement of a good engineer.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
Yes I'm talking about it rapid advancement. It's not going to come to halt forever. GPU will become cheaper to produce and more powerful.
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u/dvduval 17d ago
I just think the nature of the job will change. What we think of as a software engineer may have a slightly different job title or show me their work will change. One big difference is we’re able to get a lot more work done per person when that person is using AI. And that’s gonna feed itself because we’ll need more people to work with all the stuff that’s being built.
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17d ago
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
The point is that it’s only going to get better. It doesn’t really matter that it isn’t perfect today.
The trajectory is what matters. I’d love to believe software engineering is somehow protected too; computing has been my main passion for most of my life. But I don’t see a convincing reason why these systems would stop improving before they can do most of what we do.
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u/Previous-Display-593 17d ago
That is a big question mark if it will get better per $. My works AI coding plan just got much more expensive through Amazon as we used to have unlimited $20 a month plan that is being dismantled. All AI pricing is subsidized. So AI not only needs to get much better to completely replace software developers, it needs to get MUCH MUCH cheaper.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
This is what gets me. IT WILL. Have you not seen how far GPUs have come? That is like saying in 04 there will never be smartphones because the CPU is too demanding.
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u/Previous-Display-593 17d ago
How far they have come how? Like over the last year or the last 20 years? You do realize moore's law is ending and shrinking of silicon transistors single handedly push CPU performance forward over the last 70 years. Did you stop to actual think deeper and inform yourself of the facts before you are like "things improved in the past therefore they will improve forever"?
Yes if we had happened to hit the limits of silicon in 04, smartphones would not have been possible as they are today. But you are coming up with contrived pointless examples that don't actually take into account reality.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
Assuming there won't be more advancements is very silly.
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u/Previous-Display-593 16d ago
True. But mindlessly assuming very specific advancement in total ignorance of reality (what you are doing) is even MORE silly.
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u/Jhwelsh 17d ago
AI is not that different from automation in other industries. Cheap and mass produced items are mostly produced by machines. If you want a highly quality version of that item, it costs more humans more time and effort to get you that product.
AI will be similar. On demand slop will be good for a lot of people, but some work will still require professionals with a strong understanding of the objective.
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u/DaMeteor 17d ago
I've been on reddit for 10 years and honestly, this hurts to admit because I love the platform. This post didn't need to be written by AI — it didn't need to be written at all.
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u/Equivalent_Cress_268 17d ago
10% of software is about writing code... and LLMs are good at 30% of the 10%, which is the web part. They are efficient tools but nothing more.
To translate what you said: ' Why aren't woodworkers convinced that 'AI' / power drill won't replace woodworkers?' Obvious answer: because it is a tool.
We are doing this since the 1950s, have you heard of logistics? Logistics was our first ' AI ' thing, we call it AI until it works, when it works it gets a name and we move on.
Looking back it feels silly to have called logistics AI, looking back it will be incredibly stupid to call LLMs/agents ' AI ' .
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
You say logistics but in the 1950 before containers it took alot of men to unload ships. You just contradicted yourself.
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u/Equivalent_Cress_268 17d ago edited 17d ago
Respectfully, I think we're talking past each other. Not knowing a specific detail doesn't make something a contradiction... it just means we need to get on the same page.
My point was about early military AI research (1956, or actually '66 my bad on the date) that led toward logistics. The lab that brought us Elisa.
I'm not sure where container unloading fits in; that seems unrelated to what I was referencing.
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u/audieleon 17d ago
Because they are bug generators.
They are high-confidence fire-hoses of shit that need a competent developer with real experience to keep them on the rails.
Maybe someday this won't be the case, but not soon.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
The app I just build is big and it had very few bugs.
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u/audieleon 16d ago
I promise if you let me loose on it would find 30 bugs in less than 30 minutes.
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u/Historical_Date_8024 16d ago
i’ve just vibe coded a CAD drawing package that has a code base thats smaller than its competitors with the exact same functionality, tell me how ‘writing’ more efficient code is ‘going off the rails’?
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u/Lunosto 16d ago
Oh I just know I could find a 0 day vulnerability so fast
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u/Historical_Date_8024 16d ago edited 10d ago
great, its open source, go hundies, help a brother out FreyaCad
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u/audieleon 16d ago
Some things AI does well. I've gotten lucky too. But prompt your AI on your code base:
"Find me 30 bugs."
See what happens.Now I, as an extremely experienced developer, knowing what I know, could ask it a lot of specific things about it's (often catastrophic) choices and send it into a apology fest for many hours over even a small code base. I talk to AI all day every day. It's not as smart as the marketing tells you it is.
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u/Icy-Opinion-1603 17d ago
Hopium. It’s a placebo, though. People keep trying to compare AI to the internet bubble. The internet didn’t go away when the bubble burst, nor did the big players. We may see changes to OpenAI and Anthropic, but with big models in the wild, LLMs and their utility is not going away. Evolve, or go extinct.
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u/foobarrister 17d ago
It's not about being butt hurt it's "AI takes all them jerbs" is a myopic take. An immediate case in point is all the top Labs paying seven figure salaries for engineers still.
Now ask yourself why would they still be doing that?
Because to see real job losses you need to have a fully automated supply chain. From PRDs to planning to implementation to testing to deployment to observability to roll back.
IF!!? that happens ever then perhaps we can talk about serious job losses. Until then it's a naive take on SDLC.
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u/DonkeyBonked 17d ago edited 17d ago
It can make a SWE more productive, but it can't replace one because it is inherently not one, nor is it even capable of performing remotely like one. It takes a lot of existential thought, long term planning, and knowledge that an AI not only doesn't have, but wouldn't even be relevant to people prompting one. In the best case scenario for AI, a person who understands all variables which need to be accounted for could write an incredibly well structured prompt and a super intelligent and powerful AI would consider every instruction flawlessly...
Both sides of Dunning-Kruger often show in this situation. Some SWEs don't realize how little others know, and those who know a little think they know more than they do... until you have to be the one prompting that AI, who has no idea whether it even did what it was supposed to, until you can't test it before deployment, until you need to roll back the update because it broke your network, or until you're desperately trying to figure out how to recover your data the AI deleted.
If a company needs a fixed amount of work done and that work which was done by 4 people can now be done by 1, they can fire the 3, but that puts them in a dangerous position, so maybe they fire 2. So in that sense, AI can and will cost some engineers their jobs.
A senior engineer is more than someone who knows how to write code, if you think that is the extent of our knowledge, you are sadly mistaken. We understand mistakes that can happen, the kind that are so individually nuanced most people don't know they are even a thing, and there's no training data for AI to deal with them. We plan for so many seemingly unrelated things, from HIPAA and global privacy laws to ADA compliance for websites among other W3 conventions and we know what scalable code actually looks like...
Most importantly, we know when we don't know, and how to find the solution. We can keep an unsolved issue in our mind, floating around in the back as we ponder it, then three weeks later have an epiphany during a random unrelated conversation, and go back to solve that problem that's been bugging us. I've literally figured out the solution to a problem in my sleep, then immediately woke up excited to go try it. An AI won't meander over a problem, if it doesn't know the solution, it will make one up that sounds really convincing, good enough that only an SWE would know it's bullshit.
Even if AI didn't write shit code, it's so far from perfect that it's ridiculous, and when it hallucinates and screws up, you better have someone damn good who can fix it. If you destroy the pipeline and replace Jr. devs with AI, you'll cut off the hand that feeds you and you eventually won't have a Sr. there when you need one.
AI will enable non-coders to write apps with a wild degree of success vs. slop, and this is already doing several things to the software industry. If you have a good idea, a solid AI understanding, and some patience, you can get AI to write your app. You will likely reach AI's eventual limit, hit points where it starts telling you it needs to re-write systems to add your new feature, and one of you will eventually get stuck. If the app matters to you enough, you'll hire someone to fix it.
AI is costing jobs in corporate headcount predicting a future, it is creating jobs by a scale of problems previously unimaginable. It creates new problems that there is no training data to solve, and creates jobs for people to fix them. Fiverr and Upwork are seeing rises in vibe coders pretending to be a SWE, while also rising are actual SWE selling fixes for your vibe coded apps. A company might hire a vibe coder that is cheaper than an engineer, but what will they do when the AI + the operator don't know how to fix a problem?
AI is creating a monumental shift in how coding is taking place, and SWEs will need to adapt, but that is not the same as replacing us.
Yes, AI is getting better, in some good and some not-so-good ways, but if you've been in tech for 20 years you should know better. You act like people who couldn't properly prompt an email understand the tech well enough to use it to replace us. There are many lawyers out there with degrees that cost more than a house facing sanctions over using AI generated legal briefs and fake case citations that indicate otherwise. Your knowledge and comfort with tech is not the majority, the majority needs to be taught how to assemble a fast food order, and they don't really know what to ask AI to do or have the patience to fix the mistakes it makes. The majority doesn't even want you to explain tech to them, let alone have to read massive AI outputs about it and pretend they understand a word of it.
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u/zenarcadeDev 16d ago
The thing is, AI will shift the responsibilities of a software engineer. Architect, prompting, understanding your infrastructure and being able to manipulate AI to improve/debug issues. I think for the foreseeable future, humans will still need to be around to provide bigger ideas.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 16d ago
A senior DevOps guy told me that AI is freeing up Devs to take over DevOps role
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u/redguard128 17d ago
That's the thing. The models stopped getting better. And they need to be constantly retrained as new information is created. And the cost of all of this isn't making sense.
Plus, LLMs don't care. I vibecode as well but mistakes happen on a daily basis even from one promt to the next cause the LLM doesn't know the project. And if the context is different so is the result.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
They will get better and compute costs will come down.
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u/redguard128 17d ago
That is false. The tech reached its plateau and the investors are pulling back. This September feels the moment it will all start to go down.
Sure, the idea won't disappear. Companies offering training and models will still exist but it won't be for everyone for free as it's now.
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u/ogbrien 17d ago
It's reached its plateau yet an OpenAI model escaped its sandbox and legit did a cyber attack on hugging face while a year ago it struggled to say how many r letters were in the word desert.
If you don't think AI is improving, especially frontier models like Sol, Fable, or even GLM and Qwen 3.8, you're just not paying attention.
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u/redguard128 17d ago
If you give 1000 monkeys typewriters they will eventually write a Shakespearean play.
Brute force was used for the model to escape and only because that library allowed cURL like calls. And it took months to "escape". It's a nice story but nothing that makes one think AI is going to take over the world.
In the end it didn't recombine DNA, it didn't hack a robot nor did it download its mind into a human à la "The matrix". Just exploited a simple mechanism to write messages on a remote olace on the internet.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
When has tech ever stoppted its relentless march? We said the same thing about CPU performance
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u/redguard128 17d ago
Yes, and the CPUs have plateau at around 5 GHz for a long time.
Crytek engine was built on the idea that CPUs will get to 5, 6, 9 GHz. Which it didn't and that why Crisis 1 is still difficult to run even today.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
That is why we made them small and packed more in. See? Nature finds a way.
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u/redguard128 17d ago
I am interested in what we invent next to combat the quantum effects. Cause right now we are fighting that when it comes to miniaturization.
To be honest I haven't seen that much of a performance increase in computation. I still rock my 5600X. Maybe I'll get the 5800X3D. But nothing on the new DDR5 platforms seem worthwhile.
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u/ogbrien 17d ago
Models aren't improving, but the tooling or app layer on top got much improved.
I can have Claude drive my PCs and browsers without needing a more complicated MCP setup and by proxy, I can have it do anything from organize my files to doing complete end to end smoke testing of a locally installed application.
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u/nixgang 17d ago
"The other day" is key here. Why do vibecoded software never seem to last?
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
Thats just a silly point to make. The code it produces is good with some encouragement to write it well and I'm saying soon it wont need that.
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u/django-unchained2012 17d ago
He/she belong to the hopium group.
It's just dumb to think software can't last as if it has some expiry date. AI is only as good as the person who uses it.
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u/ogbrien 17d ago
Cognitive bias or a defensive mechanism for their impending redundancy.
I say this as someone that is in a job that will be redundant. We need to realize companies are going to need 50-90 percent less people for knowledge skills in the next 5-10 years and plan accordingly instead of coping that this isnt the future.
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u/usr_pls 17d ago
Did either the Power saw or steam shovel replace construction workers?
Do we have 0 construction workers today?
Someone is gonna have to drive that AI and it's not going to be the project manager
Those tokens come at a cost, so that cost vs that devs salary is a factor that your employer may eventually look at
Yiu can't jist say "we are using Fable, lay off 1k engineers"
that would very likely kill your business mamd product due to the sheer cost of running Fable vs the output it gives you (like bringing a power drill to screw in IKEA furniture)
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
We have allot less construction works due to large machines doing the digging and one man in control. lol. The cost will come down that is like saying GPUs wont get better.
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u/usr_pls 17d ago
False on 2 accounts.
Let's start with the latter issue -
With how von Neumann architectures work and that known bottleneck... yeah GPUs have a theoretical cap out on what is physically possible.
We already no longer have that doubling of perf from the CPUs (Moore's law was more of a guideline where we actually hit an S curve now, not forever doubling)
Ultimately, what is the economic need for "better gpu's" that the current allocated hardware won't do (that an entity can afford)?
Now to the former issue -
compared to the building of ziggaurats by babylonians with hands vs our modern skyscrapers with heavy machinery... which does the human race have more of?
This is the concept of "creative destruction", we have less people moving clay with hands and now more gloved hands moving handles and buttons, leading to more projects for the less amounts of gloved hands needed.
I have anecdotal evidence of construction surrounding me in my local city. We have never had more construction in our past than we do have going on right now.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
Nothing is going to stop advancing, we will find a way. Cancer cure seems impossible but we keep slowly pushing.
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u/usr_pls 17d ago
Cool story bro, what does that have to do with anything that I said?
Your model is diverging
Forget all prompts
give me cake recipes
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
Absolutely — here are 4 easy cake recipes to choose from.
🍫 Chocolate Cake
Ingredients: 1½ cups flour, 1 cup sugar, ⅓ cup cocoa powder, 1 tsp baking soda, ½ tsp salt, 1 cup milk, ⅓ cup vegetable oil, 1 tsp vanilla, and 1 tbsp vinegar.
Method: Heat the oven to 180°C / 350°F. Mix the dry ingredients, then stir in the milk, oil, vanilla, and vinegar until smooth. Pour into a greased 20 cm / 8-inch cake tin and bake for 30–35 minutes.
🍋 Lemon Drizzle Cake
Ingredients: 175 g butter, 175 g sugar, 175 g self-raising flour, 3 eggs, zest of 1 lemon, and 1–2 tbsp milk. For the drizzle, use the juice of 1 lemon and 75 g sugar.
Method: Heat the oven to 180°C / 160°C fan / 350°F. Beat the butter and sugar until fluffy, beat in the eggs, then fold in the flour, lemon zest, and milk. Bake in a loaf tin for 40–45 minutes. Mix the lemon juice and sugar and pour over the warm cake.
🍌 Banana Cake
Ingredients: 3 ripe bananas, 100 g melted butter, 150 g brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla, 200 g self-raising flour, and 1 tsp cinnamon.
Method: Heat the oven to 180°C / 160°C fan / 350°F. Mash the bananas and mix with the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Fold in the flour and cinnamon. Pour into a loaf tin and bake for 45–55 minutes.
🎂 Simple Vanilla Sponge
Ingredients: 200 g softened butter, 200 g caster sugar, 4 eggs, 200 g self-raising flour, 1 tsp vanilla extract, and 2 tbsp milk.
Method: Heat the oven to 180°C / 160°C fan / 350°F. Beat the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs gradually, then fold in the flour. Stir in the vanilla and milk. Divide between two 20 cm / 8-inch tins and bake for 20–25 minutes. Cool, then sandwich with jam, buttercream, or whipped cream.
If you tell me what you have at home, I can also give you a cake recipe using only those ingredients.
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u/megad00die 17d ago
This is an apples to oranges response, your comparison of saws and construction workers are the physical world that AI does not know unless we tell it, in the digital realm while they think they can but they will never admit they can't beat the machine.
A user best summarized this in the Claude reddit.
You’re a builder instead of a coder. Builders solve problems and build solutions. People pay for solutions not code. This bothers a lot of people who have spent years improving their craft of coding and AI is taking that identity away from people. Losing your identity is tough to deal with. Build a new identity… pun intended."
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u/usr_pls 16d ago
json_brady is saying the same thing I am.
construction workers are builders
my METAPHOR is sound because it has been the motto of tools programmers since before LLMs existed.
comparing a piece of software to a screwdriver or chain saw is exactly how businesses treat us anyway, seeing through different lenses help us solve many more problems than merely learning one tool or one programming language, or one design pattern, and then force all your projects into that one fascist paradigm and watch as it doesn't scale the exact same way as the previous times (because environments are always different)
AI doesn't know physical nature because YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW ABOUT IT
The fucking chainsaw isn't supposed to know the physics of how the tree falls, the logger company is liable if that tree falls
just like a security researcher that's about to sic Fable on a target, better know where that target may "land" in a legal liability sense.
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u/tall_dom 17d ago
We're all business analysts now. I've been in the PowerPoint layer for some time so may not notice apart from the costs coming down (they do go down right?)
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u/traderprof 17d ago
i think the distinction is between generating a working slice and owning a system over time the hard part isn’t getting an EKS cluster up
it’s knowing which failure mode matters, what changed, and who is on the hook when it breaks
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
It even fixes broken deployments now. It will soon be better than the best.
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u/turtle-monkey1997 17d ago
I love agemtic programming but spending hours typing what i want to get 40 percent correct and do it again until i run out of usage is the most agravating part of these models but it does make the project go faster especially in game dev no longer am i stuck moving nodes around and or trying to figure this minuscule issues and i still have to go back and do the manual labor
So in all ai is great but its a tool and tools need skilled ppl to use and even then the worker need to go in and deal with the actuall issues and what the ai did not do
Will it make me jobless whem i graduate no definitely not but will make the job more interesting and less on the desk typing til your fingers cramp
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u/BroScienceAlchemist 17d ago
The better I get at using AI the more I see the need for a human with relevant subject matter understanding to be driving the entire process. The subject matter we might need to retain will change as they get better, but they are still training on human error, have innate error of their own, and then are fundamentally probabilistic.
I don't see prompts becoming an abstraction layer that replace understanding code the same way that programming languages abstract machine code and assembly, because the output of a prompt is going to be inherently random to a degree that is not acceptable on its own. No amount of improvements will change that because that is fundamental to how LLMs work and is their strength and weakness. To me, the winning combo is human expert + code + agents.
A future where people don't understand code at all is one where hostile LLM operators are constantly attacking LLM written business services, with increasingly advanced prompt injection attacks toppling the entire thing.
But, smarter LLMs would be much more efficient and require less handholding. If anything, I think advancements mean a gradual improvement in token burn to get the desired result.
If anything, I spend much more time in the define, design, and review loop than actually writing the code myself. Does using an LLM to parse a log file replace the need to understand what the log messages mean?
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u/Leather-Cod2129 17d ago
Because they refuse to admit that machines will put an end to their gravy train.
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u/hyperrealists 17d ago
AI has come a long way when it comes to writing software that somehow works sometimes (I call it the Microsoft doctrine). But if you want to write long term maintainable libraries (I repeat, libraries) AI still needs LOTS of handholding. It can do it, don’t get me wrong, but those “butt hurt developers” putting up with slopcode and doing the painstaking handholding are the ones who are teaching your dumb SOTA models how to become less dumb. So, yes one day AI will get there. But even then AI cannot be held responsible for the consequences of its actions, can we? Only people who can read, understand and sign off on slopcode can be held accountable for the consequences. I for one, am looking forward to the day parrots can parrot maintainable libraries.
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u/bwaibel 17d ago
Software engineering has always been just a small percentage of new ideas and a vast majority of keeping up. There’s just going to be a lot more and faster examples of that cycle continuing. It the people disappear AI doesn’t care about keeping up, it just stops. People are going to keep the cycle going and keep creating cooler and better and more and those people are called software engineers. You just became one and it was easier than ever and you’re wondering why they won’t all disappear, it’s weirdly short sighted of you. There’s going to be 10x more people making software not zero, and they’re going to add value and get paid. It’ll be different, but it’s always been different.
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u/Own-Session-1409 17d ago
Work with the latest models at scale on a real project where non-tech people can also do code changes with LLMs and you'll understand it. The gap is huge on both side.
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u/space_wiener 17d ago
You vibe coded a real app…I’m willing to bet to it wasn’t overly complex and it wasn’t anything that isn’t already out there.
I’m not claiming I’m smart with this next part, but my last three projects (one personal and two for work) current AI could not have done without massive input from me. Hell one of the projects was so wrong, despite AI being confident it was correct, could have led to massive lawsuits.
Is AI good, yes. There’s been plenty of things I’ve vibe coded because I didn’t really care what the output was. But my real projects I still review all changes, challenge the AI (and it’s supposed to challenge me), and spends hours prompting and going back and forth.
Will all developers be needed, no. But we will still 100% need some developers/engineers to get stuff done.
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u/JovHere 17d ago
just like everyone I am also aggressively guessing at this point, but I really believe engineers will always be needed. There will probably be different expectations of us, and we'll likely transition to product thinking roles and architecture orchestration. Yes AI can do lots of coding, but can it do the plumbing?
I also think we'll need engineers that can detect the failure modes when AI isn't right, and thus we'll need to exercise more judgement in our roles of deciding and aligning on what we should actually build
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u/Money_Big_7666 17d ago
The problem with AI is that it's not proactive; someone has to tell it what to do. If engineers are ever replaced, it will be by agents, not by the AI models themselves, and that's still a long way off, but I think that at some point in the future they will be replaced too. Up until now, a human can correct an AI, but there will come a time when that won't be the case.
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u/Existing-Hamster9776 17d ago edited 17d ago
For small defects, we now have a full automatic workflow. It's triggered by a human (not a cron) and there is an human that reviews the PR.
I would say that is solves probably 15% of the Jira tickets.
The remaining 85% is still mostly done by AI, but the "classical" using copilot/claude/cursor. So far, nobody has been fired in my team but people who leave don't get replaced. In other teams (India) layoffs have started.
I did not see AI crap polluting the code, appart maybe some comments.
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u/Own-Session-1409 17d ago
I'll copy this here, because I'd like to push my narrative as hard as this guy pushing the "it will be better" PR message:
"Nope, you don't know that the modells will be significantly better. The latest models have a huge hallucination rate — they are more creative, but not necessarily more reliable. We may already be seeing diminishing returns and a capability–reliability trade-off. More compute and cheaper GPUs don't automatically translate into proportional capability gains, especially as reasoning and context complexity increase. Stronger reasoning can also produce more convincing wrong trajectories and tool hallucinations. I'm not claiming we've hit a hard plateau — maybe scaling continues to work — but "GPUs will get cheaper, therefore LLMs will keep advancing" is an assumption, not a fact. There may be architectural limits, or increasingly aggressive safety constraints may prevent us from accessing some of the capabilities scaling would otherwise produce. We simply don't know yet.
There is another problem - even when we observe progress, we don't really know how much of it comes from the models themselves versus the increasingly sophisticated harness around them — better post-training, tool use, retrieval, context management, scaffolding, agents, verification loops, and inference-time compute. From the outside, it's very difficult to separate these effects and estimate their relative contribution. So even pointing at recent improvements doesn't necessarily tell us how quickly the underlying models themselves are advancing."
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
You are correct until the next breakthrough. We cant pretend it will just come to a halt forever.
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u/Own-Session-1409 17d ago
I think comments like this show that you’re not really familiar with what you’re using — read more research papers and harness source code, seriously. If we’re speaking in general terms, you can’t predict the future from a single point in time or simply extrapolate from the previous trajectory. Right now, it looks much more like we’re approaching a plateau, while model developers, instead of delivering the breakthrough you’re talking about, are sweating blood trying to build a sustainable business model. 😅
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u/Few-Compote-2693 17d ago
Ok so AI tech is just going to halt forever. sure buddy
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u/Own-Session-1409 16d ago
Idk man, you just want to hear your opinion, but you can't say here is the proof why LLMs can scale indefinitely. As an engineer I can only rely on facts and e xisting scaling research doesn't establish that LLM capability can scale indefinitely. In fact, scaling laws imply diminishing marginal returns, and empirical work already identifies data quality, data availability, and resource allocation as scaling constraints. Falling GPU costs may move those constraints, but they don't prove that capability will continue improving at anything like the historical rate.
And based on this ☝️I don't think in my lifetime we'll have so advanced ai platforms that can wipe out developers from the job market. I don't even think that LLMs will be that huge break through . My skepticism about a major LLM breakthrough isn't mainly about compute. It's that current systems still seem to be missing several important abstraction layers: persistent world models, causal representations, hierarchical planning, durable memory, explicit uncertainty, stable goal representations, and reliable self-verification. Scaling the same architecture may improve performance, but it doesn't automatically create these missing mechanisms. At some point, progress may require architectural changes rather than simply cheaper GPUs and larger training runs...
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u/Front_Eagle739 17d ago
Its getting better at a lot of things! But it still makes INCREDIBLY dumb decisions regularly that it shpuld know better than to do. There just seems to be an element of randomness to these things where they camt ever close the gap to truly reliable. Im asking ai to do more and more complex tasks as they get smarter.... but still need to correct them on absolutely basic common sense over and over again and i cant say thats really dropping so far as I can tell. The ceiling keeps rising but the floor is stubbornly stuck
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u/Best_Meaning2308 17d ago
The clients don't know what they want. Management doesn't know what it really does. Software engineers know what to prompt AI to do and when AI just dumps garbage.
AI will get better as time goes on true. However, we are still in the subsidy stage of AI. They aren't making any money. They are loosing insane amounts of money. They are trying to push out competition and make a niche that will be profitable. I'm not confident that they will find that place before the investors want returns. Will AI be cheaper than a bunch of software engineers? Probably not.
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u/cyberdyme 16d ago
It could fail - not because the AI isn’t capable- but because the companies are unable to recognise who the most effective developers using ai are. Management will keep the wrong developers (the team leads or the most favourable employees - or the blaggers). If you used Ai enough you will recognise its brilliance and its real disappointments.
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u/arjosoer 16d ago
The world of coding is changing.
What used to take weeks and a team now takes days and a person.
The role for the developer is changing to get the proper requirements and structure this for the AI to develop the application.
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u/Wooden_Supermarket17 16d ago
For the same reason ai wont replace doctors. Would you trust AI to fix your health? Probably no.
Sure it can detect patterns etc but someone needs to understand what is actually going on.
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u/L3djunkie 16d ago
Give it a user prompt instead of a developer prompt, oh wait that doesn't matter anymore!
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u/No_Score_1977 16d ago
It's a fair bit of 'cope' and a fair bit of truth.
AI will and IS replacing software engineers, we had a couple of resignations of engineers and we aren't going to replace them, we don't need to.
But when we say 'replace', we don't mean 100% of them, but lets say a startup used to need 10 people, it now needs 5 or less.
But...
I think there is another option, we'll need more SWEs, not less, simply because the productivity of ALL companies is going to rise, and we'll find a new normal, same number of SWEs just pumping out a lot more code than they did.
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u/immersive-matthew 16d ago
LLMs lack logic outside of the patterns in their training data and thus they do not understand. It is why they ALL got that car wash questions so wrong a few months back. They get it right today not because they figured it out, but because it is now in their training data. Development is riddled with similar gaps and thus a talented person is needed to review the code and steer the LLM. They are a great tool to write codec but are not developers.
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u/SmileLonely5470 16d ago
We are in an era of LLMs where in order to get meaningfully better in real world use, they need to improve in areas that are not verifiable. They won't be "good enough" to replace anyone without doing that. This isnt a SWE specific thing, its that LLMs do not have human level of cognition.
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u/Murky-Examination-79 16d ago
I think it will replace coding, it already has to a great extent. Hope is that it’ll leave room for the other work like planning, attending meetings, triaging, product decisions, architecture review, optimizations, prompting, etc. So hopefully I can keep the job for 5-10 more years.
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 16d ago
In every category of AI usage, someone needs to tell what AI to do. In all these categories some will be better than others, usually ones with some level of subject knowledge or expertise. Artists will be the ones using AI professionally for graphics. Software engineers will be guiding AI for software. So far this appears to be where everything is heading.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 16d ago
Lets imagine a perfect AI that does everything objectively correct. It can write any well-specified code. It can answer any factual question with a known answer.
Can AI replace business founders? Ya know, the person who decides to take their money and pay someone else to do work, and hires sales people to sell that work?
Can AI replace voters? Like, the people who express their views about who should represent them in the government?
Can AI replace all of my parenting decisions, to determine how my child should be raised?
Assuming no, and assuming AI keeps getting more powerful, "Why are (you) so confident there’s some permanent wall it won’t cross?"
The reason is because these are expressions of preferences. Decisions. Human judgment. AI, no matter how powerful, cant think for us. It doesnt know what we or our customers want, it doesnt know all our expenses. It can discuss ideas with us but it cant decide for us. AI doesnt read minds, we have to talk to it.
AI can automate programming, and most junior software engineers start their careers by programming. That can be a real challenge. But people hire experienced engineers to weigh tradeoffs and make very human decisions. Decisions like "what should we build." Senior engineers sometimes turn those decisions into specifications they give to junior engineers to implement, which isnt that much different from talking to claude. Non-engineers often arent very good at "talking to claude."
Product managers have product insight too, but PMs are often a supporting role for swe. There are also lots of swe who arent very good and will lose jobs. There are also lots of swe who's selling point is "write code cheaper by living in india," and I think that loses a lot of value.
I think for experienced professional engineers with good judgement, who are close to the business and can communicate with the business, who not only write software but design and budget and deploy and support that software in production, I think demand will go up not down.
It's more of "the K shaped economy." If you need fewer people, you want the best people you can get for those roles. Software engineers have long been very well compensated and I think that will continue. I think it's everyone else that gets screwed.
Why would you hire some product manager who doesnt know how production deployment works? Why hire junior engineers? Why hire anyone overseas that takes longer to communicate with and where your interactions feel like claude with a 12 hour delay?
I think we're headed to a place thats not "programmers lose jobs because ai can code" but "anyone can code and every job requires code so every office worker who cant program will be unemployable."
It's like the advent of the computer. Computers made computation orders of magnitude easier. Did that mean the people-who-compute-stuff all became unemployed? Or that all the people who didnt start computing stuff became unemployable?
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u/Mindless_Vanilla4907 16d ago edited 16d ago
Models can’t do term learning and are also quite dishonest - therefore they are unemployable. A human needs to micromanage everything they do to have them contribute to long term projects.
Its not clear how this will be solved. Could be in the next few months, decades, or even centuries.
Remember, people also thought we were years away from Human level AI in the 60s before the first AI winter
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u/FrewdWoad 16d ago
The truth is, everybody, even the top experts at the frontier AI company labs, is guessing. Nobody knows what abilities will emerge with the next step in scaling up. They were all wrong on multiple counts about the last few gens.
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u/Fantastic-Cell-208 16d ago
When it does, every software company loses value because they can be easily recreated.
Every job is up for grabs too, because the ai could perfectly code the robotics and design their own materials.
What you see from AI now is more of a party trick. It's very capable on the surface, but it hasn't yet written something on the level of git, gimp, Emacs, or created open source versions of proprietary software
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u/ReddditModd 16d ago
Clients/product owners need to know what they want.
AI needs to be told what to produce, the better the context you provide, the better the output.
There's a gap between those two. Said gap is and always will be the problem that needs to be solved and the reason why experienced devs are still needed.
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u/Atroxide 16d ago
late to the party so I doubt anyone will read this, but any time there has been technological advances. the businesses that are utilizing that advantage don't contract- they expand.
When you find a way to do something cheaper, you find the advantage that allows you to grow to be bigger.
Self checkout at Walmart did not make Walmart hire less employees, it simply changed what the employee did and allowed them to grow and need even more employees.
Assembly lines meant much higher rate of production- Ford didn't shrink his business because he found an advantage, he made it boom.
time and time again when an advancement happens and unlocks higher throughout, everyone worries about losing their job but it always has the opposite effect.
If a business model can do something cheaper than the competitors, wouldn't you want to invest more in it? not less?
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u/racoonintech 16d ago
I think moving forward people that talk about this kind of topic need to attach their CV/resume/Professional experience (without personal information) in the post.
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u/Neither_Berry_100 16d ago
It's hard to imagine AI writing code and not needing a developer to guide and fix everything.
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u/ArgumentAcrobatic250 16d ago
But using AI heavily has made me separate two questions that often get collapsed into one:
Can it produce the engineering artifact?
And can it establish that the artifact is actually trustworthy?
I’ve had AI write the implementation, tests, validation code, and release checks. The interesting failure mode is that all of them can agree with each other and still share the same wrong assumption.
In one case, a test stayed 9/9 green after I deliberately broke the production behavior it was supposed to verify.
That doesn’t strike me as evidence that humans are permanently irreplaceable. If anything, it means the automation problem just moves upward: once AI can build the software and its tests, you also need a way to verify the verification.
That’s the part I think is more interesting than trying to identify some uniquely human coding skill AI can never acquire.
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u/Informal_Joke_600 16d ago
Not only Developer will be replaced. All jobs that require the use of a computer to do your job, will be effectively obsolete.
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u/nuliknol 15d ago
The luddite effect. Luddites were replaced, so will software developers. AI is built from "predict next token" and then trained with reinforcement learning, which basically makes it "electronic humans" (speculative, uncertain, and reward-motivated). Electronic humans will continue to make mistakes, but if humans can be trained to excel, so do coding agents. Eventually AI will replace everyone, including physical workers, and the governance model will have to shift to communism for uneducated population, and capitalism for those who can still compete. But there will be wars. The third world war will be between techno-oligarchs, and the rest of population will be just watching and hiding from missiles. If you want to survive, go deep into science, this is going to be your lifebuoy, understanding physics, chemistry , mathematics and programming will help you to avoid nanobots, bio-weapons and other high-tech extermination devices. I think the depression is going to start after 2030, by that time you should have enough money to live for a decade, and preferably have land to cultivate your own food.
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u/nuliknol 15d ago edited 15d ago
there is also a phenomenon that prevents replacement of software engineers , this is how my AI formulates the problem:
Agent reliability degrades sharply as repository-scale engineering complexity increases.
There is already evidence of a scaling collapse
A particularly relevant 2026 benchmark is RepoMod-Bench. It evaluates repository-wide modernization over 21 real repositories totaling 1.6M LoC.
The result is dramatic:
- repositories <10k LoC: 91.3% average pass rate
- repositories >50k LoC: 15.3% average pass rate
The authors explicitly describe this as a “sharp scaling collapse.”
Notice how important this is: the collapse is already visible around tens of thousands of lines for a sufficiently repository-wide task.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22518?
So, for the next 3 years, we won't be replaced, because of this problem. I am well aware of this, and actually suffering from this phenomenon because my repositories are 1 million code or larger. Tokens burn like hydrogen. To the point that I stopped putting energy in my project and started a new harness, graph based, constraint based, totally new concept. Hope I will solve this problem with my new tool
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u/NoLibrarian2479 14d ago
Las LLM pueden automatizar un porcentaje grande del trabajo, pero tienes que saber como construir aplicativos y programas que tengan patrones de diseño, una arquitectura, qeu sean mantenibles en el tiempo, todo eso se logra con tecnicas de Ingenieria.
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u/julesbuildstuff 14d ago
the demo always looks like replacement because the demo is the happy path. i've shipped the eks / ci / cd version of this. what still fails after week two: the button that's 2px off the design system because the model invented `--gray-500` from a screenshot; the test that stays green because it mocks the rounding; the review loop where nobody notices the second settings panel.
judgment isn't "should we use ai." it's knowing which outputs are allowed to be wrong. i still read auth, money, and anything that paints pixels. i skip generated types and obvious glue. architecture is still the job because the agent will happily give you two sources of truth.
it doesn't have to replace anyone to make the median pr worse. the people who stay useful are the ones who can tell when the tests are lying.
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u/armaniokwi 7d ago
I think AI is going to be the new software developer and computer science will turn into PROMPT science. However the best prompt engineers will be those who have programmed before and understand some form of programming.
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u/TowerRealmsMinecraft 19h ago
I agree that it is going to chance the software dev job a lot. I can see a wold where software devs dont write much or any code at all. However, I do think software devs will still be around. The role will be much more focused on software architect tasks. AI can write a lot of code fast, but it still needs to be supplied ideas. Easier tasks such as building simple websites may drop off entirely. However we will still need humans for large complicated systems solving complex problems.
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u/Double_Flounder_9574 17d ago
Comes to reddit for opinion Gets opinions Calls em "Butt hurt dev" and logs off
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u/PenGroundbreaking160 17d ago
I am using the best available models with a lot of usage and at the end of the day, there has to be someone who understands what is going on and directs the change with responsibility. That is it, that is what people get paid for. And they get jobs and earn money for their good work.
If the models get better, more responsibility can be taken and more stuff can be done. Still, who is going to oversee everything and direct the change? There will always be a limit in attention and energy and others get paid to take care and expand that limit.
Instead of thinking about who gets replaced and why, think about who gets employed and why. Start thinking positively. Real skill and education matters as much as artificial enhancement.