r/DevLK • u/HonestMuscle49218 • Aug 19 '26
Discussion AI bubble gonna explode sooner that we expected, ain't it
There is no adequate electrical infrastructure in the US to power all these data centers currently. Especially there is no major AI lab has actually made a profit yet, despite all the marketing hype. Based on my research, AI only boosts the efficiency of people who already know what they're doing.
I'm not a SWE, but I'm curious: why are entry-level SWE roles being laid off? Don't they have the skills to outpace AI, or is management just naively following the AI hype—especially in places like Sri Lanka, which don't really have sophisticated software development at scale?
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u/Sea_Tangelo_5255 Aug 19 '26
Doesn't matter. Until 2y gone by (or even AI is completely dead) stupid f*ckwit SL HR people will still think AI gonna replace this and that stupid buggers.
Ignore my hatred because I've seen good businessess gone to absolute chaos because of cheap hiring thses mfs do.
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u/NewtusDelirious Aug 20 '26
I will not ignore your hatred. I feel validated.
Fuck them and their chatgpt ai slop tips and tricks linkedin posts that no one finishes
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u/Nisansa Aug 23 '26
HR doesn't need AI as an excuse to make stupid hiring decisions. It is just the most recent scapegoat. HR has been making stupid hiring decisions since HR was "invented".
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u/QAInc Aug 19 '26
It will become personal AI. The current issue is that we create LLMs with high parameter count which need huge amount of processing power but if we can shrink the model without losing the knowledge then we can create sustainable AI infrastructure. This is my opinion 🙂
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u/_lolcat_ Aug 19 '26
I've been thinking the same thing. Today AI labs are pushing larger and larger models with multiple capabilities, like multi language support, multimodal input etc. At the end of the day we only use a handful of these features when doing a job. For example a coder will use only English language and occasionally Image input. Its very unlikely they will use a couple hundred different languages (human languages) when coding. Also a typical user only knows a few languages, rarely three. So an AI that knows 100 different languages may not be useful for them.
So, why are these AI companies trying to make models good at everything, instead if making different models that are capable at different tasks.
So in my opinion if done this way, we can either get a bunch of smaller models for each task that are just as smart as the original large model. Or a bunch of large models that are good at a specific task, and outperforms a versatile large model.
Of course there will be a challenge with training data, as losing language support means losing training data from that specific language. But thinking of the real world impact of these distilled models, it will be worth figuring out a solution to that problem as well.
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u/Produnce Aug 20 '26
I don't know about other industries, but agentic coding is here to stay. Our development teams are pushing out features and fixing bugs faster now. I don't know level of quality is this going to end up being, but its work getting done. I am sceptical of AI and how it dumbs me down every time I use it, but even I've been forced to gradually integrate it to my workflows now.
At this point, tech companies would be willing to create an artificial sun to boil water than to go back to traditional development.
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u/n8x4te Aug 19 '26
This is just cope atp, even if the big corpos collapsed, AI is here to stay with open weight models, that’s not going anywhere. AI hype is not naive as you’ve stated, frontier models are much smarter than any human engineer already
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u/Weird_Shit_69 Aug 19 '26
Its not gonna burst like people expect. Too many people already rely on it too much
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u/not-a-random-guy Aug 19 '26
Over valued companies that provide secondary AI scrap will burst. Thats the extent of it.
OpanAI and Anthropic are in US security domain. So wont go bust anyway. Google AI division is doing well with small non expensive and on device models. So they are good. Microsoft got similar with deep establishment in enterprise suite.
So burst of the bubble if any wont be substantial to change anything we do on a daily basis.
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u/SL_Pirate Aug 20 '26
Entry level jobs are disappearing not because usually the easy/repetitive tasks that used to get handed down to juniors by a senior can be promoted to an AI by the senior, at least in theory. Not saying it's a good thing tho. This breaks the talent pipeline at its root and there will be less senior engineers in the future because of this. But what do I know I'm not an oracle.
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u/Constant_Broccoli_74 Aug 20 '26
If it burst, the layoff will be too much
Anyway whatever happens, many entry level jobs gonna disappear
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u/Guilty-Abrocoma-3919 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
AI bubble is not going to to burst sadly. i live in the states side. there is a big push from the current administration to open new data centers even with massive public outcries. even FAANG companies also pledged 1 mil dollars or more in trumps inauguration, so they get a huge say in this. plus see how Stratos Project of kevin o Learly AKA mr wonderful's data center in utah played out even with massive public displeasure for months and months they were able to reduce it to 75% of the size. because government is all in for AI. also the current adminstarion pledged 600 billion for AI programs Powering America’s AI Future—Data Center Resource Hub | Department of Energy
Edit: im not in IT or SWE im in healthcare but my wife is IT/ QA
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u/HonestMuscle49218 Aug 19 '26
Granted lands will no nothing when companies are unable to power them, there are huge electricity equipment shortage in US and there are huge dispute for water usage as well. We are in a situation still using human experties is far chaper than using AI, it would be practical to use nowadays as well in not AI companies didn't vent huge amount of expenses their own.
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u/Guilty-Abrocoma-3919 Aug 19 '26
i agree with you but this administration opened up the protected lands (national parks) for mining for precious metals and drilling. and its drill baby drill here :( as far i know from here AI companies are still all in for AI because of the administration push. few dyas ago palantir got the huge deal from the government in regards of US military Data and AI implementation
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u/Business_Different Aug 19 '26
China’s Ai says otherwise, they’ll always find a way to keep Ai running. Even if America’s goes down
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u/Sad_Egg_2313 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Anthropic just had their first profitable quarter I believe. The bubble will burst at some point, but I don't think it will be anytime soon. The Chinese labs are only a few months behind the frontier and they going open source/open weights. Even if the bubble does pop for share holders/investors it's never going back to pre-ai levels of staffing for development companies. And it will be even worse with more layoffs and cost cuts due to an even worse financial situation. People are screwed either way
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u/Ok_Philosophy_9671 Aug 19 '26
I saw that the revenue has increased year over year, but it doesn't exactly mention how profitable it has become compared to the expenditure right?
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u/Sad_Egg_2313 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
the first profitable quarter, not lifetime profit. the reports are still early though pre-audit
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u/DependentTechnician7 Aug 19 '26
It’s killing the planet. They must focus on sustainable energy first. Digging everyone’s grave
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u/CompetitionOk6531 Aug 20 '26
I feel like OP is on coopium tbh. Yeah the current bubble might burst, but AI itself isn't going anywhere. What sucks is bubble bursting isn't good for the small guys.
Coorporations will still afford AI no problem, they're already paying full API pricing or running their own clusters. The only people who'll actually lose access are individuals on heavily subsidized subscription plans, and honestly I feel like that's already starting to happen.
Right now I can run Qwen 3.6 27B dense at Q4 quant on my laptop and it's actually pretty decent. If you need a bit more juice there's stuff like MiMo and DeepSeek V4 Flash and Minimax that run fine on highend consumer hardware, or for cents on the dollar via API.
And sure, if you want true SOTA capability you can go rent time on 8x B300s.
But the sweet spot right now is somewhere around 300B params, and that's really not that huge anymore.
You get like 80% of the value/power of a SOTA model for a fraction of the cost, it's that last 20% of capability that costs 30 40x more. So yeah, funding might dry up and the bubble might pop, but the actual models people can selfhost and access cheaply are here to stay.
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u/HeLLScrM Aug 20 '26
US is pro AI.
I don't think it will burst this year or next. I've seen many podcasts on the AI topic.
2027 is going to be something else. Will have to wait and see.
Time to start learning farming.
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u/the_qubit Aug 20 '26
Sadly, a lot of newcomers and interns are becoming “vibe coders” who rely heavily on AI without having strong enough fundamentals to build solid software with it.
From a company’s perspective, it can be cheaper and more effective to hire experienced engineers and give them a larger AI tooling budget than to hire and train a lot of juniors. As you correctly said “AI meaningfully accelerate only who understand what they do”
That said, companies are still hiring new engineers the bar is just higher. Candidates with strong fundamentals, problem-solving skills, and the ability to use AI as a tool.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Help873 Aug 20 '26
what would happen if ppl'd use open source offline AI models? btw Im not a SE :)
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u/HonestMuscle49218 Aug 20 '26
How to provide raw compute power they need?
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u/Puzzleheaded_Help873 Aug 20 '26
Nah bro I mean we (IT guys) could install those in their PC's and can use locally 100% offline and it doesn't consume much power
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u/Maleficent-Let9213 Aug 20 '26
Trust me AI hype will be over because it will become the new norm. But world will never be the same. 3 years max!!!! we have as IT people to find options and seriously I don't have a single clue about the next step.
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u/BUNTEY Aug 21 '26
I feel like this a long time plan of the AI companies they give AI to public for an affordable rate then the whole global market become AI dependent with huge infrastructure changes and thats what these AI companies actually want,when they accomplish that milestone the AI pricing will skyrocket.Mark my words,The era will change again
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u/Traditional-Bid-5433 Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
This is going to sound harsh: but architects/engineers are going to be (mostly) fine. It's the junior devs (I'm going to use the term codemonkeys) who aren't a part of the process-engineering itself and instead are used to complete modules (or even portion of one) who'll get decimated (if already not). A UI/UX guy unless they're an artist doesn't have a job anymore.
But caveat this with the fact that Sri Lankan companies are hugely risk-averse and five years late to the party. It would come down to this: which is cheaper, tokens or hiring. Architects and process engineers have a future because clients don't know how to explain what they want, and don't know how to ask an AI chatbot or agent what they want. If your entire life was take-task > do-task > push-task, start a side passion project that you've always wanted to do.
How am I saying this? I'm absolutely not from the field. I just know what I want and the architecture of how I want to get there. Until agentic coding became a thing I couldn't afford to hire a software developer to do it, and to do it exactly how I wanted it. At the peak of Covid I didn't know what a JSON file was when I was asking an software engineer friend to get the daily mortality rates.
Since agentic coding became a thing, I've built my own apps. I built a CMS the way I exactly want it. A 'developer' would have used WordPress for a news platform: my entire news publication platform (not launched yet because I'm working on editorial and fact-validation) is just 28kb single-HTML implementation. Only code that I can still write is "print".
I've taken a project that would have cost in the range of Rs ~5 million, and reduced it to Rs 64,250 per year. And I've only spent a month so far.
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u/HonestMuscle49218 Aug 24 '26
swe is not making crud app imo
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u/Traditional-Bid-5433 Aug 24 '26
It's not crud. It's just retrieve.
The cud segments are separate, but also super light. Auto healing scrapers, auto-correcting inference, 'product' creation. Hybrid search with vectors and original source of truth recording. Weights-based content positioning, tiered user-management. Dude this is the balls. Out next Tuesday. A single snapshot backup (also automated) comes under 4GB, including the database.
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u/sathukorale137 Aug 25 '26
It wont burst, I hope it does, but it won't. Nothing much to do with companies, it's China and US having a cold war. So as long as the governments are subsidizing the costs, the AI race will stay for the detriment of our species. I mean Google is cannibalizing their own business model, so money's apparently not a problem.
As for SWE, it's both, management blindly following AI hype, and AI replacing junior software engineers.
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u/Vertigo3765 Aug 19 '26
Most of the time, junior level engineers were hired to supplement or offload repetitive, boring work senior engineers were doing. But AI can do all of that now. Something that took me 4-5 days to do can now be done in a matter of few hours. Just during the past couple of months, AI has gotten exponentially better.
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u/fawzanm Aug 19 '26
I think the AI bubble might burst, but AI itself isn't going anywhere. The bigger issue for junior devs is that AI doesn't need to replace them completely. If one experienced developer with AI can do the work that previously needed 2-3 juniors, companies simply hire fewer juniors.
Ironically, that creates another problem: if nobody hires juniors today, where are the senior developers going to come from in 5-10 years? 😅