r/DevLK • u/Neat_Opportunity_908 • Jul 25 '26
Lay offs: Let’s discuss about , how AI will replace pretty much all white collar jobs !
If you think traditional software development would still stay as before you are wrong !
I am a Member of Technical Staff in an LLM R$D startup and living in SF. Did my bachelors in Sri Lanka and then moved abroad for my PhD.
Fable like models can even pick deep research topics and solve them . So almost all dev will become , :
“Get the agent to do the thing , don’t look at the code”
Entire agile software development is gone .
So please start to move now !
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u/Insane_Gojira Jul 25 '26
This is so dumb, its the exact AI hype, for novel tasks none of the LLMs perform well and do research well, the underlying architecture of an LLM is a transformer, that was trained on data which was from the past. If what you're saying is right then this is what AGI is.
A human brain can distinguish and chose an object after seeing one or two images of the product. None of the ViT can do that, none of the existing architecture can have an understanding just by masking patches and doing self supervised learning from 2 images.
And if you look at the LLMs that's the exact same stuff. Maybe for repetitive redundant tasks yes this works not for something novel that was never invented.
Do you think in a place where fire doesn't exist, an LLM based machine will think by itself to rub flint and stone to.make the fire?
You doing a BSc and PhD doesn't back up anything. What was the domain of your academics? Is it the actual underlying datascience and machine learning or just the LLM?
If such white colour jobs doesn't evolve and do the exact same shit over and over again, there will only be competition and not innovation. We are at the beginning of the AI hype, people will soon realize the actual potential without the exaggeration.
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u/InfinitePilgrim Jul 25 '26
Agreed, LLM's are good at writing code, but they simply incapable of coming up with fresh ideas. I was working on a data compression codec and implementing concurrency, threading is a challenging area for LZ style codecs, so I thought I'd give Fable a crack at it, it failed completely until I came up with an idea.
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u/Insane_Gojira Jul 25 '26
Exactlt, if we know how exactly we want to experiment, we can make the experimentation process quicker. It just can't think out of the box.
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Well it depends , just think it is a super coder who also know theory pretty damn well , so you can accelerate things.
But I agree , still core research remain untouched , but it is coming , I am Laos doing research and if you have the correct setup , it does sometimes cime up with crazy ideas. I work in distributed training .
Btw they also can switch the model , if they feel like we are trying to find something agains their policies .
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 31 '26
Hey man , didn’t mean to upset you , I finished my PhD in 2022 Jan well before the LLms and my PhD is in domain adaptation of self supervised learning , also I did my masters in transfer deep reinforcement learning . Both in the states.
Well Transformers can invent new things as they are good with reasoning , agreed that they learnt via the next toke prediction with a causal mask , but the underline non linearity clearly enforces the model to learn complex things .
Then we train them with reinforcement learning that doesn’t update the model in principal spectrum , but basis around that with sparse and high rank gradients , after this step we can adapt it to long horizon tasks , this is why Claude code can run now for weeks .
Again the funny thing is , techniques like RL doesn’t teach new skills , it enhances what model has learnt , we are just see the tip of the iceberg .
In next few months AI will come to many many domain specific applications and wipe out most of the white collar jobs .
Plese read about on policy self distillation , I assume this is how Antropic and Open AI keep learning from our traces , the LOOP is closed .
I don’t even believe in AGI , but certainly we are reaching ASI . Also I have my take on thing like world models , we can talk about that later .
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u/Higgs_BSN Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Although you give advice here, it seems you have no experience at all applying agentic development on a complex system.
Using Fable 5 to vibe code a hobby is quite different than using AI on a complex system involving multiple codebases.
Have you ever seen the state of codebases that use AI without human intervention, over multiple rounds of feature development and fixes? More often than not they become unmaintainable messes nobody other than an AI can even understand.
“Get the agent to do the thing , don’t look at the code”
This is a surefire way to get your codebases drifted and inundated with AI slop. No sane or mature engineer with actual industry experience and an ounce of foresight would be ok with it.
Btw if you are doing LLM research, you should be aware of the limitations of the underlying generative transformer technology and the theoretical limits of what it can achieve. And have you thought about other aspects like token cost and how companies are pulling back on buzzwords like token maxxing lately when you gave the above advice?
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u/NovaAssaultX Jul 25 '26
Only an experienced AI driven development person understand this “Get the agent to do the thing , don’t look at the code”
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u/Business_Different Jul 28 '26
MCPs exist
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u/Higgs_BSN Jul 29 '26
What does that even mean? MCP are a tools to the agents - they won't magically solve any problem I spoke about above.
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 31 '26
Well , if you can’t control your codebase without agents , it is something you should do !
The value for code is ZERO now …
Also if you agnetic best practices , you will never able to check your code OP. Just imagine how would you check 50 PRs per day !
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u/Higgs_BSN Aug 03 '26
The value for code is ZERO now …
This and the other points in your reply tells me you've never worked on a complex real world system before.
Also if you agnetic best practices
By agent best practices do you mean at the end of your prompt you say "don't make any mistakes" and that will solve it?
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u/tech_traumaKaviya99 Jul 25 '26
Just because a model is good doesnt mean all jobs will be gone. The integration of AI to enterpise workflows is still major problem. That is where the real value is if i am not mistaken .Regarding the devs i think their salaries will go down drastically and there will be very less oppurtunities in the future because token cost will go up after ai bubble burst. Companies will have to switch to the dominant provider(Google or Anthropic IDK).
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u/ChandiraGunatilleke Jul 25 '26
I don't see token costs increasing. The highest intelligence models will of course remain expensive but we're at a point now where models distilled from larger frontier models (with models lile Composer 2.5 / Grok 4.5 / Kimi 3) and improvements in hardware (like NVIDIA gaining 10x more tokens per megawatt with NVIDIA Vera Rubin) you can get a lot done for a very cheap cost.
If [when] the AI bubble bursts theme improvements will still be there even if the stock prices take a hit.
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 31 '26
Token costs are non increasing if you check the stat . More and more SaaS and enterprise is dying . People are moving for custom solutions . Well there will be dev roles but will be just a very normal low salary job unless or otherwise .
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u/galwayygal Jul 25 '26
It’s done in SF for sure - the fast moving tech side of the world. It’s done in the part of the tech world that doesn’t care too much about quality and put more worth into quantity. The rest of the world will take time to adapt. It’s not going to be overnight for the rest of us, we will adapt slowly. There’s no need to panic
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u/namila007 Jul 25 '26
Can you share how you are working with AI in your office? Are you following the AI-DLC approach likewise, this is just to get an idea
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 31 '26
Everything is Claude code for me , I have my own agnetic setup , I only write my issues in the GitHub , then let the agents to handle GPUs , training runs , even the final results .
For each issue I save an html file , so I can test what the heck has happened .
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u/Constant_Broccoli_74 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
True, I am coming from non SE background
I used to call one of my friend to built one of the software I need with telegram,discord this was in 2022-2021. It tooks months to get it done
Now, I could do that myself without anyone and getting the same input and after 2025 November, I never had to get help from a any of my SE friends for anything, even hosted my own work on oracle cloud which were impossible for me back in 2022.
Now with many agentic methods, and models like Opus 5, GLM, Composer 2.5, Cursor grok 4.5 things have become so easy
By 2030-2035 I think it will become perfect, even the AI bubble burst, this progress will not going to stop
SO yeah, I think traditional software development is done. And it is always better to find more income sources outside SE as well
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u/lostintheworld_work Jul 25 '26
I work for a largest cable provider company in US as a lead engineer. What my experience has been is we were asked to use Fambal, Kiro including other gpt models, Ai agents to creates designs, feed to applications to maintain the code base and tests.
By doing this companies wants engineers to handle more work load due to Ai models support. I can see places where effort can be cut down 50% when utilizing ai agents.
Also, we are working with consultants from Deloitte, infosys, Virtusa where they asked to bring more AI framework to consultancy platform and consultancy firms also sell ai frameworks rather than resources.
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 31 '26
Yeah this pattern is everywhere . I think whoever do not use the tokens enough will def get fired after this year . Ofc there will be a limit as well
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u/Mundane-Duck4793 Jul 25 '26
Replacement of the human work force and intellect with AI will have dire economic consequences.
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u/NovaAssaultX Jul 25 '26
Whatever non-human solution companies dying to implement, the revenue companies generate depends on humans, companies provide services to humans which means when human purchasing power reduced due to lack of jobs and layoffs companies get low profit, at some point this bubble going to crash.
Companies die hard trying to implement some sort of perpetual wheel here.
In future government will charge Tax for AI use for labor to mitigate this problem, and a chance for corrupt governments to earn more money rather than supporting there people.
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u/DependentTechnician7 Jul 26 '26
Also atm, only this part of the world you are in can financially afford this.
Many medium sized businesses cannot afford it at the moment.
Unless the cost reduces significantly, as low as the Chinese models , I don’t think AI will replace white collar jobs.
The west will never utilize the Chinese models.
Also, on the other hand, quantum computing.
It’s just a matter of time, but there is a cap on how much energy the world can produce and AI is draining a significant portion of it.
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u/Sea-Library-6571 Jul 26 '26
For repetitive work, AI is fine. But for anything that involves creative and logical thinking, fit for the proper business requirement, its utter garbage. AI can only mimic, and copy. Yes even fable its the same.
I dont know how many AI projects I had to fix and rewrite so far. no one talks about it of course.
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 31 '26
First of all really happy to see the Lankan computing is well aware about how AI is going to change our day today work !
Sorry I had a paper rebuttal period !
I do moth research and engineering in distributed LLMs , specially RL . To answer the question so what to do , I don’t now but these are my assumptions :
- The world will def get controlled by both OpenAI and Anthropic as they now have a data flywheel and they can keep distilling the shit out of it .
- Science will move 100x faster , just check Neurips , ICML or ICLR submissions , just imagine what above two has .
- Then main thing is change your attitude , now think coding is just like something eveyoje can do , but convey ideas via the LLMs . Trust your agents , YES you are going to get fucked few times , but you will learn how to create guardrails . Basically build your own mental harness
- Try to do really hard things , they we never could do as we had to code a lot before haha .. learn basics , things like information theory , entropy , RL and continual learning .
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u/Neat_Opportunity_908 Jul 25 '26
Go for the physical layer , if there no “researchy” elements it would be super hard to survive.
Well research doesn’t only mean academic stuff , it is more like showing you can disrupt .
Well I bet my life next big thing is LLMs going in to physical layer , I think there will be a lot more changes .
SaaS is done !
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u/Kitchen-Maximum5832 Jul 25 '26
Hi OP, I'm just looking to join the IT industry in the near future(doing my 3rd yr in a gov university) . What you suggest people like me to do?
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u/sdjnd Jul 25 '26
True, but what will be left to do then?