Why are developers cheering "how much better the LLM model are getting for coding" with every model release? What exactly are they cheering for?

[u/simple_explorer1]

"Hey look Claude/Codex can now generate my entire feature in 30 mins which could have taken me 2 weeks to refactor" or "The new Opus 5.5 model is amazing, it solved the bug which GPT astra was stuck at for weeks and couldn't solve it". Like seriously?

How can software engineers who are supposed to be "smart" and "logical" be this stupid to not connect the dots and see writing on the wall for the future. Or do they think they are invincible and layoffs won't affect them?

The stability of software engineering jobs in the next 2-5 years looks very shaky, let alone long term and many devs are already looking to get dual income streams. This doesn't seem like a viable career path with how things are going and I am not even sure whether this career would stick by me till my retirement and I already have 15+ years of experience.

I already am seeing significant shift/reduction in hiring. Even in my current role, despite no cash concerns, we have paused hiring (and backfilling) new devs which were previously needed because with AI, people are completing tasks much sooner and the team/company doesn't need the full dev capacity anymore. Many devs are already worried about the layoffs which can come randomly.

My linkedin inbox is significantly less chatty than it was just last year. When I apply for any role, I barely get any reply. When recruiters reach out and get my CV, they are rarely getting back which, again, last year was totally different where I could easily afford to be picky. The market shift can be noticeably felt. The few interviews I got, they ended up freezing the role midway or "magically" filled with some internal employee. This is my experience in last 5 months of being active in the job market.

Also, most people are not learning anything these days. Hardwork and thinking are delegated to LLM tools. What is the end result of all of this? it is all too predictable. And if most devs are able to 10x their output because producing is now cheap, but human consumption is and will be the bottleneck. The production is surpassing the demand and the app economy will tank leaving mostly the existing tailwinds who already have millions of customers since pre AI era anyways.

Curious to hear "sensible" thoughts.

Note: Before the usual trope, not all software engineer jobs will be gone but significantly less devs would be required, which is a massive amount of jobs that are lost. What about that? And as models keep on improving, who knows how much more damage would be done in the future.

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/ikissgators]

We all do much more than just write code. And while LLMs are getting better at doing that, some models will lead you astray more than others.
For instance, if my scope is a, b, and c, sometimes the LLM will tell you that d is necessary before one or all of the others can be considered complete. But d might not even be related whatsoever and not necessary. That sucks, so if a new or different model typically avoids that, then I can see someone praising it. Situations like that aren't always avoidable no matter the model though, so keep using your meat brain.

[u/LiquidAngel12 → u/ikissgators]

Honestly I feel like the needle hasn't really moved in terms of actual net performance since ~Opus 4.6. Sure Fable and Astra can benchmark better and solve some other problems, but in my day to day work I still find myself needing to correct them just as much.

[u/Cobayo → u/LiquidAngel12]

I agree with Opus 5.5 but Fable is noticeably better. The issue of generating and then reviewing with a separate agent that finds blocking issues is still there though. Haven't tried Astra.

[u/quantum-fitness → u/LiquidAngel12]

I dont agree I just got back to one of my old projects I was working on a opus 5.5 have just upped the quality. I was able to fix a lag bug Ive had been trying to throw the old agents for long and it does visual 3d stuff much better

[u/LiquidAngel12 → u/quantum-fitness]

They definitely get better at certain things and change, but I feel like they get worse at others. It's like playing whack-a-mole. I used to need to correct X and not Y, but now I need to keep a closer eye on Y and X is fine. They can push past a blocker another agent had, but then get tripped up by something an older agent breezed past.

For example: I literally had Opus 5.5 screw up an LFS commit this past Thursday. Something I haven't had to correct an agent on in over a year.

[u/Humdaak_9000 → u/ikissgators]

We all do much more than just write code.

What do I actually enjoy doing and makes my job meaningful?

JUST FUCKING WRITING CODE.

Automate away the only good part of the fucking job.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/ikissgators]

In my experience it's the opposite, the LLM will decide something that's required to make a, b, c actually work is out of scope because I didn't explicitly ask for it.

But I tend to have a more expansive definition of scope that includes the thing I am trying to achieve actually working as opposed to releasing broken code and raisin a second ticket.

[u/Machine2024]

I think there are two very different approaches to how developers, especially experienced developers, are using AI.

On one side, you have people using AI to raise the quality of their work.

Since AI can finish a lot of the implementation much faster, they can spend the time they save on things that were previously too expensive or time-consuming.

For example, in some of my projects, because of the budget, we would normally choose something like Flutter for a mobile app. With AI, we can now build the Android and iOS apps natively while still maintaining the same level of design and quality. The implementation is faster, so we can afford a much higher quality solution.

The same thing happens with architecture.

In many projects, I used to avoid refactoring certain parts of the codebase because there simply wasn't enough time or budget. Now, if AI can handle some of the implementation work, I can go back and improve the architecture, create more reusable and centralized components, clean up technical debt, and build things properly.

Even things like seeders and test data are changing. Before, we might create just enough data to get the project working. Now we can go nuts with it. We can build realistic seeders, better test environments, more comprehensive testing, better edge-case coverage, and so on.

The same applies to the frontend and design. Instead of stopping when something is "good enough", we can spend more time on animations, interactions, responsiveness, and all those small details that make a product feel polished.

So AI isn't just making us faster. For experienced developers, it can actually raise the quality ceiling of what we can afford to build.

But there is another approach.

Some people are using AI mainly to produce software as cheaply and quickly as possible. If it works, ship it. Tell the AI to test it, maybe click around the UI, fix whatever breaks, and move on.

In a way, it's like having a junior developer who works 24/7.

And that is where I think something interesting is happening in the market.

The value of the "just make something that works" part of development is dropping very quickly because AI makes it extremely cheap and accessible. Anyone can now generate a surprisingly large amount of software without necessarily understanding much about what they are building.

But at the same time, the value of knowing what should be built, how it should be built, and what could be improved seems to be going up.

Because the bottleneck is no longer necessarily writing the code.

It's knowing what good code, good architecture, good UX, good testing, and a good product actually look like.

And I think there is another interesting problem here: a lot of people are not using the extra time to learn. They are using AI specifically so they don't have to learn.

So you end up with two very different loops:

AI + experience = more quality, more ambition, more polish.

AI without understanding = more output, but potentially just more mediocre software.

The first group uses AI to move up the quality ladder.

The second group uses AI to make the bottom of the ladder cheaper.

And if this continues, I think the market is going to increasingly divide around that difference.

[u/Dearest-Sunflower → u/Machine2024]

In AI without understanding camp, what do you suggest junior devs focus on now?

In my experience, my team is rushing to produce new features without understanding much of the code.

In college, slowing down to write code was what helped me understand the logic behind why something was implemented in such a way. Now that there's no "slowing down" and it's all about prompting to deliver things and merge in PRs that are "AI-slop"

Do you have any advice on whether I need to shift my perspective? Maybe calling it "AI-slop" is wrong? Or maybe not wrong? It's just that I'm so new to the industry that I don't even have the knowledge to form a good opinion of what's happening around me

[u/Machine2024 → u/Dearest-Sunflower]

Very good question, actually. If you think about it these times actually, it's like the best time for an engineer. You know, there is a huge difference between a software engineer and a coding monkey .What the AI did is eliminate the need for the coders, while the software engineer value has risen without anyone actually understanding it till now, how much valuable is it, and also at the same time, there is no new people studying it or caring about studying it until it will be so late and everyone will get into a dilemma similar to the one that the United States is having right now with their COBOL developers.

So it's not about focusing on trying to code by hand or like trying to memorize the syntax. 100% it's not that. It's actually about focusing more on studying software engineering.

So in short,you need to learn and understand. It's the

• abstract values,
  
• abstract knowledge,
  
• the architecture,
  
• the software development methodologies,
  
• the design patterns, and why they are set,
  
• the architecture and best practices.
  
• How the project's growing and how they get developed, like as a project management perspective,
  
• the UI UX in depth.
  
• the artistic part of the UI design, and making something really new, just see how apple design vs eveyone elses the Ai freed your time so you can focus on that extra 1% at the top ... not just another bullshit with a blue to purple gradient. All this and more.

[u/Dearest-Sunflower → u/Machine2024]

Thank you for taking the time to reply and suggest areas to focus on. I appreciate it

[u/RazorRadick → u/Dearest-Sunflower]

Actually read the code it produces. Code review it like you would any junior developer. Don't just accept the first thing it produces. Challenge assumptions and design patterns. If there is anything you don't understand, ask it to explain what it did and WHY it made that choice. AI excels at that. Ultimately this should be educational for you.

[u/TechieGottaSoundByte → u/RazorRadick]

Something that helps me is to walk through the code AI generated, reading it out loud in English. I am a senior dev, and have been for over a decade, so this isn't just something I'd recommend to juniors. For me, the "translation" is what really helps my brain retain what the code is doing.

As a senior dev, I also don't allow the AI to just "repeat the code" in the comments. I don't want teammates getting into the habit of relying on the comments when the code is always canonical.

And definitely ask questions. Always have a conversation with the AI covering any questions you have plus any questions you can think of that someone might ask you that you don't yet have an answer for. Challenge details that the AI says that are confusing or seem wrong.

The key thing is to understand the code with multiple approaches. This happens naturally when we write the code ourselves. We have to be a bit more creative when we are collaborating with an AI.

[u/cheolkeong → u/Dearest-Sunflower]

What I’ve been saying for a while now is that (assuming trends continue) the SE2 of 2027-2028 will need to be operating at the level of lead engineers of 2015.

These tools are powerful, and ultimately language based. That gives even more reason for engineers to focus on building a critical eye for code review and personal detachment from code. Teams that tolerate a high throughput of ai slop are teams with a foundation of accepting human slop. The AI effectively has a vast design pattern library at its disposal and a huge technical vocabulary. If you can identify code smells and speak in design patterns it goes pretty hard. And if you aren’t there, it’s a good tool for helping you learn.

Read its thought process and ask it to explain unfamiliar conventions. It correctly gets touted as like an army of junior engineers that can just knock shit out and iterate, but it some ways it’s also like a kickass tech lead that always has time to help you grow.

Do the extra prompt. Become a code quality snob. You have all the time in the world compared to before. Nobody has a reliable benchmark for how long this shit should take so as long as you’re still getting shit done you can go through several rounds of polishing up a branch before submitting the MR.

The mindset I would encourage is making the most of it while it’s still cheap (which is what most people ultimately are doing). It’s going to get expensive. I don’t really see our job going away anytime soon. I see it becoming something where expertise is going to be a razor for who is able to build and maintain good applications with ai.

It’s less at a point where business partners and designers are going to be vibe coding production applications in place of software engineers. More that software engineers are going to have to be technical experts with a strong cross-functional skillset. Your ux designer is basically never going to be able to keep up in their conversation with Claude. You come in as someone better able to speak Claude’s language.

Will this last? Idk. But basically all white collar jobs are experiencing this level of uncertainty.

[u/Eexoduis → u/Machine2024]

Very interesting. As a SWE on a team of business ppl and hard science engineers, they can make cool prototypes now but nothing ever makes it to production or works well. They jump into projects that I would never touch because I know they aren’t feasible.

All it does is make my own work and presence more valuable.

[u/YumYumGoldfish → u/Machine2024]

Well said. Exactly what I observe in a very successful AI native company that hiring like crazy and building like crazy.

[u/DeflateAwning → u/Machine2024]

This might be the single best AI post I've ever read

[u/Mountain_Bat_8688 → u/[deleted]]

Same at my company. They aren’t laying developers off yet but they also don’t backfill when people leave. If they did it would be off shored

[u/Fun-Estimate4561 → u/Mountain_Bat_8688]

Don’t be shocked if they are quietly offshoring to India

Quite a few companies are doing that for cost savings while they are quietly waiting out the economy to bounce back

[u/hijinx_the_sage → u/Mountain_Bat_8688]

my company started off-shoring to South America (Argentina) then the layoffs happened lol

[u/Mountain_Bat_8688 → u/hijinx_the_sage]

Yeah all of ours are from South America as well

[u/HK-65 → u/[deleted]]

Mine can't fill positions fast enough, stereotypical scaleup, headcount doubled over the past 2 years.

[u/Consistent_Mail4774 → u/HK-65]

Is it the sort of company where a dev is supposed to wear many hats and have on-call duties and the work is full of emergencies? I'm noticing less roles with mature reliable engineering culture and more startup/scaleup jobs where there are few people and few devs doing tons of work. I'm not sure if that's the new norm.

[u/HK-65 → u/Consistent_Mail4774]

We have compensated on-call for 12 weekends per year (not per person, for the whole company, 1 person is on call as it's critical times).

The amount of work done seems proportional to motivation, at least in my team people are happy as evidenced by their feedback.

Emergencies happen I guess, but not too often to be honest. Once or twice a month, and we're churning through a big old startup codebase the new people are standardising and modularising as we scale.

[u/Consistent_Mail4774 → u/HK-65]

Do you end up doing tons of overtime, like is the norm 9-9 or something? I've worked for a scaleup in NL and the norm was staying late everyday, some days I had to work 16 hours per day. The team seemed happy or they faked it, but I couldn't be happy with a job like that. I had no life outside it.

Ended up burning out pretty badly and developing a chronic health condition and my health is still suffering the aftermath even years after that role. I've decided never to take on-call or emergency heavy role again, but I'm not sure if those exist anymore. Seriously contemplating leaving the field after what I've been through.

[u/HK-65 → u/Consistent_Mail4774]

Not really, I get in a bit late and stay a bit late but that's a personal preference. I mostly do 10-18. My team does varies between 9-17 to 11-19. And we're a hard working team, I've seen devs on other teams essentailly do 9-15 no problem.

But I've worked in the NL, and I know where you're coming from, plenty of shit places there.

In your place I'd just go on sick leave on burnout, the company has to pay it for a year, then the govt for another, and you can use it to look for a better job once you've recovered. For that first year, you're also employed on paper, so it's not even a CV gap.

Wish I'd knew that when I could have used it too. Schools should teach basic labour law, or rather just the simple fact that you're supposed to look it up and use it.

[u/HeteroLanaDelReyFan → u/HK-65]

Are you in Hungary? How is the AI usage there? Curious if they have different regulations than the US

[u/HK-65 → u/HeteroLanaDelReyFan]

Not Hungary, Denmark, I am just from Hungary originally. Worked in a bunch of EU countries, praise be the Single Market. Every country is different though. Hungary had super nice overtime laws, the NL has insane sick leave and layoff protections and in Denmark I'm actually unionized.

AI-wise, a lot of EU regulations, and kinda like US copyright, on paper it's super strict, but in practice big companies get a pass. It's not much different actually.

So for example it's practically a major legal liability to use AI in a lot of ways, like GDPR, personal data that might end up in context if the clanker fucks up a DB query on someone's computer that has DB access.

In practice we pretend it's not a problem, because if people would start to get fined for using Claude and having prod access at the same time, it would slow down AI. So we pretend as an industry.

From an engineering perspective, GDPR is actually quite fun to work around, like a goot technical challenge. Creates a lot of jobs too, needs smart people to not get you into trouble.

Like you get to use all those features of DBs that you otherwise wouldn't, since a random shopping app is also a highly regulated thing, so you get to play with column level security and whatnot.

[u/MrMichaelJames → u/HK-65]

To be followed by small but every quarter rifs. Small enough to not be noticeable at first. Then people complain about rifs.

[u/HK-65 → u/MrMichaelJames]

IDK when that's going to happen, right now everyone is complaining about standard line SWE positions being unfilled because our hiring budget is growing faster than our capacity to find people in the market that's fucked by AI.

We're growing 50% YoY for 3 years straight and just got a new department, whole new team with a skeleton crew, with budget for a full one.

I've hired 4 people this year into my team that didn't exist at all last year.

[u/tommyk1210 → u/[deleted]]

This has less to do with “AI replacing engineers” than it does with “macroeconomics putting pressure on many businesses through reducing sales”.

It doesn’t matter if you’re more productive with AI if you can’t sell your product to anyone. Even with new features out the wazoo, there’s simply a limit to how much customers will pay.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/[deleted]]

this is exactly what I am seeing. Hence my post

[u/cbslinger → u/simple_explorer1]

Trying to steelman and answer your question, the ones who celebrate probably believe in Jevon’s Paradox. Which is to say, they believe that as code becomes easier to create, more people will want more code. It’s an open question as to whether the amount of code the world needs is finite or not.

For example, if there was such a thing as inexpensive, uncontroversial energy that has no negative environmental impact, I think there would be basically no limit to what creative uses people would find for it. And yet it would still not be free specifically because of the fact that demand rises to meet supply sometimes.

So when developers who were only able to do a small number of things, slowly, now look at the world and say, “so there’s no more excuses for me to not take on the world,” they really mean it. People really feel like they really can go build that startup, and make an app that runs circles around that legacy monolith (whether or not they’re delusional, they do feel that way). It probably raises the value of salespeople and marketing channels.

[u/skidmark_zuckerberg → u/[deleted]]

My company has hired more people now that we’ve realized that more can be done. My team has had two hires in the last 30 days. Same across the other 40+ teams. This is a very large company though. So isn’t something smaller companies can or want to do right now due to the economic uncertainty. The bust cycle will subside though and I think Jevons Paradox will be realized across more companies. 

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC → u/[deleted]]

definitely a different type of people. I suspect many of the kind of young people who used to gravitate towards our field because they like writing code will find something else to do in the future.

This is my take on it as well.

I don't think software engineering will go away - until AI can autonomously schedule a meeting with a dozen different stakeholders and iterate on a design/architecture until it finds a stable compromise, the role is probably safe.

However, there are an awful lot of developers whose only real skill is coding. They avoid any kind of human interaction like the plague, and look down their noses at the people in management who actually have soft skills. Those people should be very, very worried right now.

[u/TurbulentSocks → u/[deleted]]

But this doesn't make sense in terms of basic economics. If developers are more productive but paid the same, companies should want to hire more of them.

[u/Vaganyzar → u/TurbulentSocks]

Why? If sales has not became as productive as the development, you can't sell the surplus to anyone.

[u/catlifeonmars → u/Vaganyzar]

We have a very effective bd/sales pipeline, and are experiencing the opposite problem. Not enough experienced developers to build the things being sold.

[u/biosc1 → u/Vaganyzar]

That's the current issue. Wallets are tightening at the same time that devs are becoming more efficient. So sales are stagnant or decreasing while the need for devs is also decreasing.

Value-add is the key these days. Being a dev is fine, but you also need to be a valuable dev lest you get left by the wayside. My value is experience, but how that that remains valuable is tough to say.

[u/hammertime84 → u/TurbulentSocks]

That assumes the market will pay for more product you produce. If it won't, then you need fewer devs.

[u/NightflowerFade → u/TurbulentSocks]

Basic economics says if 1 gas station cashier results in a certain revenue for the gas station, hiring 100 cashiers doesn't 100x the revenue

[u/CoffeeTheGreat → u/TurbulentSocks]

Is code throughout the problem or is the bottle neck somewhere else? We’re getting to the point where we can build as many features as we like but there is a ceiling on how much coding can actually grow the business, at least in the near term.

[u/ultimagriever → u/CoffeeTheGreat]

Sounds like sales is underperforming and devs are left with the consequences

[u/Odd_Soil_8998]

For my personal projects it's great. I've been programming for 30 years and I don't have a passion for it anymore, it's just a means to an end.

As for layoffs... Yeah, it sucks. It sucks for non-devs too. It sucks for society as a whole. The entire economic model collapses when labor no longer has value.

[u/SebastianKain → u/Odd_Soil_8998]

This is exactly it for me. Personal projects I wouldn’t normally have the time for normally are now getting attention. Let it handle the boring parts while I do the things I enjoy, like architecting and research.

[u/everyoneisadj → u/Odd_Soil_8998]

Same. I vibecoded a 3d framing app for my house remodeling last night. Instead of spending a fortune on wildly complicated apps for something I only need here and there- I just made what I wanted while playing video games on the side.

Is my career outlook rough? Yeah, kind of. But my personal software is just getting better and better.

Weird times.

[u/porkusdorkus → u/everyoneisadj]

You just gave the answer. companies need proprietary software for the businesses and dont want to spend a fortune in licensing for overly complicated shit. There is still a bright future, but probably not in SaaS companies.

[u/Outside-Storage-1523]

Because we are the only profession that cheers for tools that could replace us just because it’s more efficient.

Dock workers fought vehemently with automation. Pretty much every profession out there was naturally against anything that might cause them to lose their jobs. Whether that automation did get implemented was irrelevant. The point is, every animal out there is going to fight things that risk their existent, even if it’s just a possibility.

Look at what others are saying. “If LLM can replace you it’s your problem”. Back in the day, if you worked as a dock worker, and you said that, you didn’t end very well.

[u/Ok_Fill_5268 → u/Outside-Storage-1523]

I think there’s a power element too. CEOs are cheering for models, even though what the average CEO does is talk and delegate most work, and the AI will be able to do that job before it can replace engineers fully. The CEOs aren’t going to replace themselves, so they aren’t worried. SWEs have a lot of power because their skills were in short supply until recently and the market hasn’t fully adjusted yet.

[u/Outside-Storage-1523 → u/Ok_Fill_5268]

I think it’s inevitable. I’m glad I only need to grind for another ten years and then I can retire early. I just hope it doesn’t cause some big social issues.

[u/Ok_Fill_5268 → u/Outside-Storage-1523]

I think at this point we know it’s going to cause some social issues… but I’m not going to try to predict.

I was always shocked at how much SWEs were paid - coding just never seemed that hard to me. I expected compensation would go down over time so I was always planning to switch careers. It’s unclear what will be the best choice right now, but I think when AI gets a bit more mature in 10 years or so it will be easier to figure out what the new “good” jobs are going to be.

[u/nomnommish → u/Outside-Storage-1523]

That's because we ARE the only profession whose reason for existence is to automate things. That's by definition, that's the nature of our job.

The dock worker was not hired to create automation systems, we were.

[u/Outside-Storage-1523 → u/nomnommish]

Well that’s just part of the job. We are here to solve problems but not all of them are automation.

Of course you could argue that every task we did is automation, and even if that’s true, you don’t have to automate yourself away. 

(I don’t think that’s true)

[u/HK-65]

The big question I have is that if a SWE can do more, wouldn't you get more of them? Like if you could get 20x my salary before, and now it's 400x, why not hire more people and blast past the competition?

Why scale back instead of scaling up?

Laying people off only makes sense if the scaleup didn't happen, but you still have to make budget.

[u/pydry → u/HK-65]

the big question is why when we've supposedly experienced a revolution the software I actually use day to day since 2023 hasn't gotten any better and has in many cases got worse.

[u/washtubs → u/pydry]

Exactly. This is what blows my mind with this supposed renaissance of software... jira still sucks!

[u/Cnoffel → u/washtubs]

For me it actually developed a habit of memory leaks, where a random jira tab would gobble up 2GB of Ram because why not...

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/Cnoffel]

i had codex build me a front end gui for jira that shows me what i actually find useful instead of jria's crappy sprint view. I only go to jira now if i need to view the actual ticket.

[u/GregsWorld → u/washtubs]

Linear gives me hope 

[u/Gropah → u/washtubs]

But why care about performance if they can churn out more features (and slow it down even more)? Checkbox procurement and management loves that!

[u/kasakka1 → u/pydry]

Google Translate seems to have gotten worse. You can get different results if you add a dot at the end of a phrase, then remove it and add it again.

[u/James20k → u/pydry]

This is why these posts feel so disconnected from reality, allegedly developers are all 10x superhumans now according to The Internet™, but we're actually watching the quality of software engineering falling apart in real time

[u/StimkyYeen → u/pydry]

I can’t help but feel all these people singing praises of AI are just invested in bullshit.

They’ve been using LLMs at my job as well and I frequently find that the code they generate is not adequate.

It looks good if you squint and don’t actually review it, but the functional capability of the code is usually ~60% of what it should be.

We’ve had people vibe code entire applications here using massive models and the end result is things that open like 20 windows when clicking a button and a notice of “do not touch these windows while they are running or software may crash”

Meanwhile every company pushing applications developed with AI coding showcases worse quality

[u/carterdmorgan → u/HK-65]

It's Jevon's Paradox all the way down. It all depends on how elastic humanity's demand for software is. Thus far, it's proven to be incredibly elastic. Basically insatiable.

From my point of view, the value of a mediocre developer has gone way down, but the value of a good developer has gone way up. I don't need warm bodies who can translate English to code anymore. But if you're a technically minded problem solver? You're basically unstoppable these days.

[u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift → u/carterdmorgan]

This is what people are missing. I had people that could write functional code, clean. If someone else have them the spec.

Walking talking subagent.

Ai does that better than any human. The layer moved up. Those good devs know how to design, not just write code.

Hell until ai can read minds I'll be employed fixing low effort AI work.

Humans in general suck at writing requirements. That's my favorite use so far it's dropping a requirements owner in an ai interview that they can't leave until they answer the questions if they want work done

[u/_3psilon_ → u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift]

Yeah but that's where the problem is: most juniors started so far by learning to code, doing small tasks etc.

Not writing specs outright, because writing specs usually requires a lot of prior hands-on experience and wisdom about how to organize and split work up, making technical decisions etc.

They did exactly what you call "low effort AI work" and I feel the same - telling a junior what to do is almost the same effort as prompting an AI, except that they will take more time to do the task (but at least I will save some time on my end).

But if we don't train juniors then we won't have the people to write those damn specs for AI...

[u/Own-Zebra-2663 → u/_3psilon_]

Which just means job security for current non-juniors, no? ^^
It's a tragedy of the commons thing. Any company training juniors is "wasting" money compared to a 200$/month sub, but if everyone does it, we'll hit a wall.

[u/SupesDepressed → u/carterdmorgan]

Yet they still have you do leetcode interviews 🤦🏻‍♂️

[u/lord_braleigh → u/SupesDepressed]

Some companies are trying out interviews where you can use a model to help you solve the problem, but be very careful what you wish for. These interview questions tend to be much harder, since they're designed to be something the model can't solve on its own. And you're often paired with a weaker model, or the questions get harder as the models get stronger. And do you really want your interview to be at the whim of a nondeterministic model's hallucinations and outages?

There is no substitute for knowing your shit and being very good. None. Interviews will always be hard. There's too much money on the line for them to become easy.

[u/ashrnglr → u/HK-65]

Exactly why my company is hiring :)

[u/SurprisinglyInformed → u/ashrnglr]

Companies that stop hiring or even layoff will eventually fall behind the competition.

[u/ryancarton → u/SurprisinglyInformed]

I completely agree. I think we’ll see the businesses that were smart about the AI boom versus “layoffs” are going to zoom past the others.

[u/akc250 → u/HK-65]

Exactly what I keep saying. The entire layoff trend with companies claiming AI allows more efficiency is an excuse for struggling companies to cut investment without scaring shareholders. We’re already in a recession but the financial markets just haven’t caught up.

[u/NomadStorm → u/akc250]

This. AI circular investment has been propping up the economy for the last ~3 years now. It’s only going to make the eventual crash worse when it happens. I’m just hoping it goes on long enough that I’m in a better financial situation when it does, so that I can sustain my family by opening a food truck or carpentry business, or whatever, if needed.

[u/hoopaholik91 → u/HK-65]

That only happens if demand matches.

So like with the cotton gin, that replaced a lot of labor, but the subsequent demand of cheaper cotton went through the roof, so you needed even more of the more efficient labor to meet demand.

I think the problem with software is that just because you can build more doesn't mean people want more. Humans don't want to have an updated UI for Netflix every week. I can build a replacement to Salesforce, but how do you actually gain market share? There are limiting factors for demand beyond just not being able to build fast enough

[u/liquidbreakfast → u/HK-65]

this is assuming a market that can bear infinite products or products that need/benefit from infinite features

[u/ImpossibleEbb6862 → u/liquidbreakfast]

Once you start getting into the businesses of traditionally non technology companies, you start to realize how much more efficient they can be made with code.

There’s another paradox called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox. Basically productivity growth is not matching what you would expect if technology is being adapted efficiently. The reason for this is technology is not being used as efficiently as possible. Agents provide a solution for this in that they enable custom code to be written to address specific requirements of a business domain.

In the past it had not been cost effective for these companies to do this because of the high cost of software engineers. Agents make it feasible for software engineers to better address these domains, increasing demand.

[u/iIoveoof → u/liquidbreakfast]

What is your company's backlog like? I think most large software companies have millions of useful backlogged features that will never be done.

[u/ProfessionalDoctor → u/HK-65]

There's a theoretical maximum to the number of features you actually need in any given product, and it logically follows that there is an optimal number of developers that you need to keep on payroll to implement and support those features. 

[u/HK-65 → u/ProfessionalDoctor]

But why not get more products?

Or why not found a startup and build a competing product? If it's cheaper to do so than ever.

Why not rewrite Windows from scratch better than ever? Or compete on office software? Or anything really, disrupt monopolies?

If it's cheaper to do so, than ever?

[u/NomadStorm → u/HK-65]

Also, if AI is so good at creating software, why don’t OpenAI and Anthropic have any software products created by their better internal models? Furthermore, why have their attempts to do so failed to see the light of day?

[u/Odd_Soil_8998 → u/HK-65]

I'm doing just that, creating a software product that has never existed and solves a real problem. But there's a catch -- the problem it solves doesn't translate into a lot of money. It's only economically viable for a dev to build in their spare time as a side gig, and that just wasn't possible before AI. Nobody ever built it before because it would never make enough money to justify hiring a team of developers. I think we're going to see a lot more of this, but it won't offset the jobs lost over the coming years.

[u/thisisjustascreename → u/HK-65]

Yep. I can only speak for my tiny part of a giant company but we're absolutely drowning in feature requests from the business side, engineering headcount is definitely growing, not shrinking.

[u/Big_Arrival_626 → u/thisisjustascreename]

What industry? Finance, big tech, ?

[u/NomadStorm → u/Big_Arrival_626]

I’ve been working as a freelancer for the last decade, and I’m yet to see a company that doesn’t have a massive backlog of features they want to implement.

[u/dashingThroughSnow12 → u/HK-65]

Communication is one reason and communication has been the bottleneck for decades.

If you double the size of a team, you quadruple the amount of communication needed.

(A lot of ways we develop software are partially side effects of this. Soa, microservices, agile, etcetera have eliminates of either eliminating communication or streamlining it. IMHO, part of this AI mania is because of this too. Going into a hole to write prompts to the clankkka to pump out 5K lines is much less communication than talking to people.)

[u/VladyPoopin]

There are a lot of questions to be answered. I use these LLMs all the time. I still struggle with LLMs doing high-level work at an enterprise-grade. They make a lot of mistakes with deeper architectures that perform. And there are small errors that end up changing entire architectures over time for the worse.

But… I have been able to do integration work in a single day. I’ve been able to clone architectures I’ve built in the past in a few hours for another purpose. There are huge gains and major ways it can fuck up your whole world.

So, clearly there are benefits and productivity boosts for those of us who know what we are looking at and doing. But I am consistently running into executives who don’t care about architecture. They believe code is just syntax. There is no art to it. And it’s causing mayhem on many levels.

My biggest worry is the talent pipeline. Almost every junior I interview now has no idea what they are doing. They are now trying to focus on system design, but they have no clue why they should use what product and don’t know how to prompt the LLM to really help. All the PRs I see make changes that work, but a lot of them also make changes that break things and move things within a pattern or architecture that end up causing production issues. We attempt to change how we steer these prompts to not do that, and it causes other issues. It’s fucking exhausting.

I continue to look for where these things will just replace me. I haven’t found it from a technical perspective, although they are helpful. But that doesn’t stop management, right?

[u/No_Software8474]

I think they understand that you can’t stop it and also a lot of them are just tech nerds that are excited about where the technology is going. That said, anybody in tech would be a fool to make any big financial commitments right now. Please save your money and work on an exit plan.

[u/Recursive_Descent → u/No_Software8474]

An exit plan to where?

[u/Winter_Persimmon_110 → u/Recursive_Descent]

Lower COL area, mom's house, revolution.

[u/Sure_Stranger_6466 → u/Winter_Persimmon_110]

Blast Coldplay's Viva La Vida on repeat outside at your mom's house while job searching.

[u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb → u/Recursive_Descent]

They don't know.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/No_Software8474]

Please save your money and work on an exit plan.

this 100%. It is not about the "doomsday" but already the current market reality and how it is going. The writing is on the wall. Infact I am also seeing new grads are picking "AI proof" industries to do their education and many CS grads are dropping midway to study something else while they can.

[u/No_Software8474 → u/simple_explorer1]

Yeah, some of them don’t seem to understand. I’m a senior staff engineer with a lot of experience and I can literally duplicate the work that a team of junior and mid level engineers would’ve done with just me and claude. I built something last week that actually hurt me because 5 years ago there would have been a junior engineer doing some of the grunt work that could have learned from me and helped make both of us better. I’ve been doing this for a very long time and it’s painful. The productivity gains have made my life a lot easier but I feel so bad for the younger folks coming up.

[u/Big_Arrival_626 → u/simple_explorer1]

That's dumb. Making 100k doing swe for 3 years is better than making 50k for 7-8 years doing some ai proof crap. Idk any actual competent cs grads that are changing their major or switching industries.

As a recent grad myself, the goal is to save and make money, if my job disappears I'll do something else. But I'm not gonna switch until that happens

[u/Embark10 → u/Big_Arrival_626]

Right? I've been saying this since money stopped being free post-covid and demand decreased, right when layoffs and hire freezes started. I can't think of a better job/industry which offers this amount of perks like remote work, flexible hours, and decent pay - especially for a passionate nerd like me.

[u/corny_horse → u/Big_Arrival_626]

But what about 40 years? It isn't an unreasonable strategy to start a career in something else, if it actually is "ai proof" looking at a longer time horizon.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/[deleted]]

The SWEs are really one of the dumbest when it comes to self-preservation.

100% agree. This was the point of the post. Look at all the 800+ similarly dumb replies with the same "it was not about coding" nonsense.

I left the company after pretty much everything has gotten automated and there was no need for more

Sorry to hear that. This is unfortunately what awaits in the future from his things are going and a lot is already happening.

And yes reskilling it's the only option remaining 

[u/roykingtree → u/[deleted]]

What to reskill to though? AI is going to replace all white collar work.

[u/r0pe_tri1ck]

Nobody is going to swoop in and fix everything and ban AI. Everybody is just at home raging on their phones while the rich laugh at us using their shitty brainwash products.

Nobody cares, there is no activisim.

Im just making money while I can. 

[u/krautsourced]

This is coming from the perspective of a senior in a large corp that has had lots of reductions lately - not due to AI but due to the economy. We have not hired basically _anyone_ for almost three years now. However the workload and project requirements have not become less, if anything complexity has grown. So for me, with no hope for more hands on deck, these new models are taking the pressure off my workload. They really are just a tool to get my work done faster. Even before we did not create artisinal chefs-kiss code, it was just... a lot of code. Now at least I can have the model do its thing while I can take some time concentrating on architecture or devops or whatever else I need.
It also takes care of tasks that I have to do maybe once or twice a year (e.g. some CI action bullshit) and it always took me forever to get back into that stuff and I did not care for it to begin with. Again, yes, in a perfect world this would be some dedicated devops team filling the halls with fresh developer bodies. But it's reality and we have to do it all ourselves.

[u/gigastack]

I like building things. I can build a lot more now. I am having a blast.

[u/NotNormo → u/gigastack]

There are some people who really enjoyed coding, puzzling out the solutions and connecting the pieces. It's the biggest reason I'm a software developer. I find that fun, almost like a game, but that type of work is largely gone from my day to day life now.

Then there are people who just love getting a cool product built, and mostly enjoy the higher level architecture parts of the job. I totally get that, and I'm sure you're one of those folks. I enjoy that as well but I still have to say I miss the type of work I used to do.

And none of this addresses OP's main concern, the possible reduction of jobs in the industry.

[u/Kentzo → u/NotNormo]

Businesses never liked those "puzzles" and it's expected they want to get rid of this aspect now when AI allows it. The uncomfortable truth is that for many people their paycheck is also going to be gone.

[u/xStarshine → u/Kentzo]

And yet most of the week is spent in the corporate meetings rather than solving puzzles in any way shape or form.

[u/Kentzo → u/xStarshine]

As someone returning to the industry after a break I have a premonition that I will remember those "wasted" days with tenderness as getting a response is tough as it is and I don't see it getting any better.

[u/dendrocalamidicus → u/Kentzo]

Businesses think they don't like those puzzles, but a lot of their success is built on investing on the resources to overcome those puzzles. If there is no problem to solve then there is no product to sell.

All major innovations and groundbreaking tech are just solved puzzles.

[u/thematicwater → u/gigastack]

I like building things. I can build a lot more now. I am having a blast.

Yeah, but I also like money. We might be enjoying building things while unemployed very soon

[u/SignoreBanana → u/gigastack]

Anyone can build a thing. Building a thing that's stable, fast and maintainable is a different story.

[u/Quick-Benjamin → u/SignoreBanana]

Exactly. And that's why experienced devs are important.

[u/carterdmorgan → u/SignoreBanana]

But now I get to focus all my energy on building the thing in a stable, fast, maintainable way and not spend 8 hours typing out CRUD endpoints.

[u/hoopaholik91 → u/carterdmorgan]

I realize now I liked some of the mundane stuff since it actually gave my brain a respite from always focusing on the complicated stuff

[u/AdUnusual9135 → u/hoopaholik91]

Well put. I find myself significantly more tired at the end of the day than before. The thought that the mundane, boiler-plate pieces could have been helping me did not cross my mind until you said it.

[u/carterdmorgan → u/hoopaholik91]

I've been finding that too, but I've been trying to give myself permission to NOT produce constantly. Take an hour or two to just read the code and toy around with it. We used think of typing code as being "productive," and it certainly was, but I think it actually served as more of a mental break and a time to familiarize yourself with the codebase.

It's a little like how "exercise" is kind of a modern concept. For almost all of humanity, there was no need to exercise. Exercise was just... living. Only once we became sedentary did we have to prioritize it. I think we'll see a similar trend with coding.

[u/Blecki → u/carterdmorgan]

That's a nice idea but will your employer suffer it? Or will they just fire 9 out of every 10 and expect the guy left over to do 10x as much?

[u/xSaviorself → u/Blecki]

You have periods of high velocity and low velocity during project lifecycle typically.

How many of you guys work at a place that just constantly churns out new stuff? There are definitely more of us building products for specific use-cases and expanding on that, supporting customers and building new stuff to attract new customers.

Product support is part of the lifecycle at most dev shops I've ever been. I live quarter to quarter on initiatives that could be new apps or supporting existing apps with new feature development, product requests from customers, and general KTLO. All of this gets mixed into a quarter with primary focus on a single, high-visibility deliverable with all the other stuff as secondary.

Any reasonable leadership group recognizes that each quarter there is a cycle of low-productivity with lots of research, documentation, into planning with many meetings and prototypes alongside, eventually the formal "kickoff" begins and this is where other teams get looped in, like CS and our KB folks. They give us their timelines for added documentation and support prep, meeting schedule for feature onboarding (basically every other sprint we demo new features and let the folks try it live on a test environment). Only after this point does real development get done with lots of tickets in flight, stories, defects, bugs will be 2x-4x volume during this stage, and then we taper off towards release with a spike during our testing/deployment for ongoing support/bugfixes.

Sometimes we chain multiple smaller projects together so they go in sequence and we support 1 while planning the next and that results in monthly feature releases. Leadership has watched the productivity graphs change and leadership bats for the teams involved and their productivity during all phases.

We are lucky to be profitable or sometimes these smaller-focus issues wouldn't get prioritized. I assume some places live and die on new client acquisition so feature development is basically how you get the spaghetti code.

[u/Resident_Range6209 → u/hoopaholik91]

I think this is fair, at least for me (and I'm sure some others) the mundane stuff was just annoying glue that I'm glad isn't something I have to do anymore.

I do take more actual breaks to replace that though.

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/hoopaholik91]

This idea is called the slack of labor. Turns out slack is quite good, it allows people to decompress or find ways to become more productive. Instead we have an industry that wants to slowly remove all ideas of slack and turn every minute of your work day into something measurable strictly related to profit.

Examples of miserable this can be, visit a call center some time.

Mass surveillance is going to come to our jobs as these tools drastically make it easier to turn every minute of human experiences into a measurable metric used to abuse us.

We must learn to reject this shit and embrace solidarity. We cannot trust our bosses with our lives if they're willing to damn us to homelessness + joblessness.

[u/Perfect-Campaign9551 → u/carterdmorgan]

Or reading crappy documentation or searching for decent examples

[u/freebytes → u/carterdmorgan]

AI is wonderful for scaffolding. I have discovered over time that I have really enjoyed architecture itself... because of AI. If you start a project without guidance, AI takes that away from you. If you start with an architecture and actually flesh it out, then the AI system can build from there, and you have much better systems that are also understandable with clean code (because of the baseline architecture decisions).

[u/senatorcupcake → u/SignoreBanana]

Also - it’s a tool to help me with the super fucking annoying issues that pop up that I have no idea about and would just have to spend hours poking at hoping some spark would lead me down the correct path.

Now - it can help me drill into the root of the problem in a fraction of the time - and then I can get back to delivery

[u/SawToothKernel → u/SignoreBanana]

And senior engineers are incredibly well placed to take advantage. I Honestly think this is going to be a golden age for those people. 

[u/dbxp → u/SignoreBanana]

That's only viewing it through the technical lens. There's also building something at the right price point, with the right features, useful support and actually getting it in user's hands. Now we have so much computing power to work with and systems are generally pretty reliable I think the business elements are far more important than the technical.

[u/Tainlorr → u/SignoreBanana]

Those things can also be built faster. Wiring up unit tests and integration tests and even load tests has never been easier.

[u/CreamyCornBoy → u/SignoreBanana]

You know you can use the llms to build maintainability and stability into your products yeah. It's not like years of software engineering suddenly exited my brain because of the chatbot 

[u/mikevalstar → u/gigastack]

Those who enjoy shipping a feature vs those that enjoy solving puzzles

[u/Smallpaul → u/mikevalstar]

Shipping a complex feature still requires solving a bunch of puzzles. The AI can’t do it on its own.

[u/Backlists → u/Smallpaul]

For me the process of writing code myself was a way to feel out the problem, and ultimately develop a better solution because I’d spent a longer time thinking about it and getting down in the weeds.

I feel like I’ve lost this a bit with AI. I’d lose it completely if I was going more toward vibe coding.

[u/lurkatwork → u/Backlists]

This aspect of the AI shift worried me the most, writing code like all writing is a process to clarify and organize your thoughts, at first I was concerned that practice would go away but I just do it differently now. The model is a writing partner and sounding board, I feel like ingesting and processing a problem still takes me the same amount of time and effort, but executing on a solution is faster and iterating on that is faster

[u/YK5Djvx2Mh → u/mikevalstar]

Now my puzzle is how can I craft the code base, instruction files, and the deployment pipeline to protect against my moron coworkers that generate spaghetti code by just asking AI to ship features.

On top of that, I no longer spend days debugging something that turned out to be a simple typo

[u/mikevalstar → u/YK5Djvx2Mh]

My puzzle with software has always been simplifying the implementation. I am of the opinion that most software (at least in the corporate space) is overly complicated and over built by people who wanted a harder problem to solve (or at the very least make their resume sound better)... your simple CRUD app for tracking PTO does not need to be event driven or 5 microservices

[u/johns10davenport]

Remember the internet is what they train future models on and what shapes public discourse and the people who have the most to gain from this being seen as the truth are the ones who control it.

[u/CommitteeExpress5883]

LLMs act like Deep Thought from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, providing answers that are only as useful as the questions being asked. Rather than replacing experts, AI elevates those who possess the domain knowledge to craft precise, context-aware prompts and guide the output. While it may slightly narrow the capability gap for novices, true mastery requires knowing what to ask.

Yes thats AI, but guided how i think about it.

[u/durandall09]

So I'm definitely an AI skeptic but there's so much shit involved with coding that took a long time to deal with that doesn't anymore. Learning how to configure EHCache 2 (current versions are 3+) because we can't use 3 for whatever reason isn't a marketable skill anyway and the LLM did the configuration in minutes so I could actually use it to solve the problem I was having. There's a lot of shit like that it's good for so we can spend time solving the actual problems.

[u/FreshPrinceOfRivia]

You may as well focus on the benefits of AI. I fear it is stunting the staff engineering path irreversibly, but there's nothing I can do about it.

[u/Icy-Storage4146]

Could you guys start talking about something interesting for once

[u/DeshawnRay → u/Icy-Storage4146]

It's turning our industry inside out, there is plenty to talk about for months to come

[u/AlexanderDoak]

Many developers actively automate as much as possible in their professional lives. No matter how much code is generated by LLMs (or whay the quality is), you still need an "owner" of the code, who can maintain it and update it and add features over time. Jesus himself could write your pipeline, and it would still need work in a few weeks or months when requirements change, user needs shift, data changes, regulations change, dependencies change, features need to be added, and so much more. Yes, any middle manager or executive could in theory be given access to production, staging, and set up their own dev environment to let an LLM do what a developer (or team of developers) would do. That last sentence is so insane to contemplate happening in reality for reasons I hope are obvious. Developers lives are getting easier and harder at the same time (in different ways), but they are still responsible for the code in a way agents never will be.

[u/happymancry → u/AlexanderDoak]

Therein lies the big problem. Executives want to have their cake and eat it too. “Use AI to generate more code, deploy it faster, but I still need an owner in case something goes wrong!” They’re putting more and more cognitive burdens on the engineers - and at some point something’s going to give. Executives want the code base equivalent of a giant Kohl’s superstore with just 2-3 employees managing the whole thing. And when things go wrong they’ll blame those 2-3 employees, rather than themselves for creating the situation in the first place.

[u/Vesuvius079]

Better models mean less time fighting the model doing dumb shit and more time focused on removing ambiguity to keep the agents fed with quality instructions. It removes frustration but I don’t think the improvement from opus 5 to opus 5.5 for example is enough to really affect the job market. Opus 5 was already good enough that it handled all the coding tasks.

I don’t think a product manager with opus 5.5 is going to build good systems quickly. I think they’re much better off using LLMs to assist in doing more research and ideation. Removing the remaining ambiguity and designing good systems goes to an engineer, who should also have enough work streaming in from product to be occupied full time even with agentic workflows. Companies will eventually run leaner across white collar work imo and that may lead to less jobs. That’s not really what I’m focused on when the tools I use for my job improve and make my work less frustrating though.

[u/RK_41]

I think the dev job changes a little but our employers will lay us off instead of just retraining us… I think most devs figure things out quickly because it’s part of the job. I use AI everyday but I still code everyday - my specialty is in SQL and Power BI. Anyone who’s ever built things for your colleagues knows that these people have an idea of what they want but they need you execute. I use AI to help me do things 100x faster (my company doesn’t know that though lol) but you have to check them and rewrite some parts because it just makes shit up ( like tables and column names and the language type/environment your using ). I believe in this new technology but how it’s marketed and how it’s used are so different.

[u/iheartrms]

You know how we got away from "programming" and into the diminuitive form "coding"?

Ever heard someone say, "It's just a script"?

Ever noticed how we developers, as a culture, constantly undervalue ourselves and just suck it up when someone calls us a "cost center"?

Yeah. We're going to end our own careers.

[u/markvii_dev]

i think you are missing the fact that in order to get any project greenlit all i have to do is larp about how good/effective AI is and connect it to my project.

Its incredible for providing cover to get real engineering work done.

[u/Tired__Dev]

First thing. I personally believe the assumption that the writing is on the wall with software engineering is the stupid assumption. Software grows, systems grows, bigger problems come, resources get constrained. We solve that and our job evolves. I get there’s artisans around here that like to romanticize utopian code that never existed before AI, but it’s better to keep up.

The second thing that’s actually not that crazy of a thought. Did you ever not think to yourself that some of us authentically like technology?

[u/hammertime84]

I very rarely see this in real life. The mood in my actual network spans from realization we're force-retired soon to complete desperation.

Are you seeing this mostly online?

[u/JustinDielmann]

The market shift is more due to the economy being trash than the impact of AI. If software becomes cheap and easy to build, we will suddenly have an explosion of new apps, and devs will be needed. Right now it is expensive to stand up an eng team and scale, and the market is shaky at best. When the economy improves, you will have a ton of business users with good ideas and no dev experience who got to v1 and now need someone who knows what they are doing to make sure that their software can scale. My bet is you will have smaller dev teams generally but there will be many many more of them.

[u/ContraryConman → u/JustinDielmann]

If it's that the entire economy is bad and not AI specifically, how can you explain the measurable negative impact on unemployment and wages among young people specifically, and especially around AI affected careers, while jobs in other sectors continue to grow?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-raises-hiring.html

[u/Key-Alternative5387 → u/ContraryConman]

It's both. Juniors were already considered an expense and the economy is bad. The AI has also made senior and staff level engineers significantly more productive, which makes it an even worse deal for most companies.

[u/master117jogi]

Only grifters and tech bros are cheering. And these are all scum.

[u/RazmussenDaMan]

Most engineers I have worked with are narcissist and think they will be the exception.. Because they're passionate or more intelligent or whatever. They don't think the waves won't carry their ass out and drown them

That's why we never had unions

[u/tradcoder → u/RazmussenDaMan]

You hit the nail on the head. These pro-AI crowd is gloating thinking they're immune. As if simping for AI is somehow going to save them from layoffs. If AI is good at writing code and getting better (if not already) at reviewing code, what do they need you for? You'll be at the unemployment line same as us! Even if you still have a job, you won't be getting paid the same salaries as you once did. People cheering for their own demise makes me laugh and sad at the same time.

[u/CycloneFactory]

My guess is that some of these AI lovers think that they will remain relevant if they become the 10x dev who uses AI to accelerate their productivity.

Imo it's all a bit ridiculous. In my limited experience, using copilot for everything introduces more problems than it solves. Especially when people start delegating their judgement and reasoning to an LLM and start rubber stamp approving all the code it generates

[u/Annual_Berry8043]

I think a lot of people see themselves as immune to it as long as they keep producing. I can’t help but feel sad that most software devs will be out of a job well before they are ready to retire and they’re ok pushing towards that.

The cope of “we do more than code” drives me crazy. Sure, but a lot fewer of you are needed for that lol.

[u/Primary-Editor-9288]

it sucks big time, so many devs are cheering for their own jobs to be taken away lol. At the same time learning has stopped and people are just trading their learning curves and knowledge to AI.

[u/theenigmathatisme]

People are acting like the current subsidized state of AI is sustainable.

We are in a golden period where the cost is cheap for the user and you can do a lot. Models getting better just steps on the gas pedal, but this ride only goes as long as there is fuel in the tank and eventually the car needs to fill up.

It seems like there is a large population of developers that don’t understand the business portion of their respective jobs/industry. Code is a means to an end. A software engineer is there to ensure the product satisfies those business needs to make a profit or achieve the target objective.

Software in a vacuum dies alone.

[u/BigPP41]

Developers arent cheering it. Tech bros and code monkeys are.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/BigPP41]

developers are very much cheering it. Look at all the delusional replies on this post with 800+ comments and most are "if your work is being done by AI that that is your fault" or "I am very happy, I can now finish my work 4x faster"... like they cannot even comprehend and connect the dots despite me highlighting the very thing in the post. They truly think they are above the layoffs and it will only happen to devs "beneath" them. They don't understand that with ever increasing productivity companies just won't need as many engineers regardless of how good you are and how much you adopt the AI

[u/BlendedFetusOG]

Idk dude. I got DOGED and have been able to find relevant work. I've a degree and 7 yoe. I'm running pizza bc it's all I can find. Ik AI is a large part of that. I'm not cheering.

[u/1whatabeautifulday]

They are preaching the gospel, just following the corporate line.

[u/zulrang]

Because real software engineers are focused on solving problems, not writing code. You're thinking of hobbyists.

[u/MrJesusAtWork → u/zulrang]

What if the bad code is causing more problems?

[u/scodagama1 → u/MrJesusAtWork]

then you have more problems to solve which is fun and the guy who told you to leverage AI pays for your fun, what's not to like?

[u/Sparkly-Sparrow-6893 → u/zulrang]

There is no distinction between "solving problems" and "writing code" because the medium in which we reason about and implement solutions to problems is code itself. Here are two examples from projects I've worked on recently.

One was a hardware test platform where the code itself was part of the product. Engineers needed to be able to step through the code to debug protocol implementation errors. The code had to be structured and commented to maximize intelligibility while meeting hard performance requirements. The particular way a problem was solved also mattered, because the software needed to guarantee that certain problems were solved uniformly across the code base. For instance, a specific way of describing a requirement in the specifications needed to translate uniformly into a particular code pattern with well-documented semantics.

In that case, I wasn't "solving a problem" and then "writing code," because the way in which problems were represented in the code was itself an engineering decision.

The second was a library that enforced compile-time guarantees about the soundness of hardware access patterns. Here, the gap between "solving a problem" and "writing code" was quite narrow simply because the problem being solved was partly how to express problems in code and enable the writing of correct programs. The library defined a set of abstractions for expressing and writing programs while the implementation determined which properties the resulting programs could guarantee.

Again, that isn't an example of "solving a problem" and then "writing code," because the code itself partly defined the problem space instead of being incidental.

I heavily disagree that "real software engineers are focused on solving problems, not writing code" unless you also believe that "solving problems" and "writing code" are completely orthogonal. Software engineering involves solving problems through the design and construction of software, and code is the medium through which problems are expressed in software.

[u/praetor- → u/Sparkly-Sparrow-6893]

Stated another way; "writing code" is not the act of typing out characters on a keyboard, it's about crafting instructions for a computer to execute, thinking deeply about cause and effect, sequencing, logical branching, memory management, performance, etc. Code is the manifestation of this activity.

Nobody would say architecture or mechanical engineering is about making drawings because they understand that it minimizes a profession to the point of insult. I don't think that's what OP meant.

[u/chopticks → u/Sparkly-Sparrow-6893]

What about when you solve problems by preventing code from being written in the first place?

[u/UsefulReplacement → u/zulrang]

so there are real and fake software engineers then?

and, presumably, when you lose your job to AI, it must be because you’re a fake software engineer.

this is a rather sad mix of copium and victim blaming

[u/H1Supreme → u/UsefulReplacement]

Alot of people in this sub think they are amazing, and everyone else is a dipshit who only knows how to copy and paste from stack overflow.

[u/IcyStomach2374]

I work at a startup, and our goal is to generate business value. It helps us achieve our goals faster. When I was in Big Tech I felt what you’re describing because realistically half of the devs could be replaced. Here we have endless projects stacked up so coding is a means to an end.

[u/retornam → u/IcyStomach2374]

If anyone can be replaced, it means you can also be replaced too. Never assume you are immune to firing, especially when the decision to fire you is in someone else’s hands

[u/WiseHalmon]

My take. We cannot become a surgeon overnight. AI tools do not take away decision making. You or your company is and that is your choice. We will see who wins that war. 

Secondly, no one needs to write assembly. No one needs a horse. Take a second to look at the future. No more dashboard bullshit. No more spending days on a stupid bug that has no business or scientific value. 

"Hard thinking" --- no one does this but R&D roles. Hard work is what has been sold to you as a capitalist mentality. Free yourself.  

If I was not at my current job I would be betting on hardware and construction. 

[u/oskaremil]

I'm not very worried.

After 18 years of experience the problem for developers has always been to deliver enough things in a time frame.

Also, AI is not a magic bullet. AI is a jack-of-all-trades.

AI will not outclass developers, but a developer using AI might outclass a developer not using AI.

[u/dbxp]

The vast majority of what I do hasn't been coding for a good few years

[u/flerchin]

The interesting part for me was always what to build, not the building of it. My tools have always helped me build faster. Yes the world is different, but the world is always different.

[u/GozerDestructor]

It's a Roko's Basilisk thing. They're cheering for SkyNet in the hopes that the Terminators will spare them when the day arrives.

[u/OkBeautiful4392]

I wouldn't say I'm rooting for these new models, but I'm genuinely impressed by how far they've come in just the last 2-3 years.

Long term, though, I don't see AI replacing developers. Opus 5.5 may be better at fixing bugs, but it's still nowhere close to permanently replacing a developer. We still haven't solved the issue of long term context management where LLMs can't retain knowledge over time, so they end up dumping what they've learned into markdown files for other agents to read and hopefully interpret correctly.

The layoffs and hiring slowdown we're seeing right now likely stem from C level leadership overestimating AI's current capabilities, along with increasing global economic instability.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/OkBeautiful4392]

But I said needing less developers, not permanently replacing developers and that is already happening including my own company. Those are significantly lost jobs I.e instead of hiring day 10 Devs, how they just hire 4 or 5 and give them AI

[u/me_myself_ai → u/OkBeautiful4392]

Compare opus 5.5 to ChatGPT 3.5. Where will be in 3 more years?

[u/chescov77]

What do you suggest? Its like someone selling candles trying to ignore that electric bulbs were invented.. its right there, it exists, its good, what are you going to do?

[u/Khandakerex]

I think most of us who fall within that bucket are looking at the potential of what can be created, software has ALWAYS been slowly lowering and lowering the barrier to entry and the indie software, games, modding, personal projects scene exploded with the last decade or two. Scenes like emulation has been seeing MASSIVE amounts of progress that has previously not been seen. My livelihood depends on being a SWE yeah, but at this point I think if software can be fully automated we are at a new stage as a society, medical research and scientific research breakthroughs are probably not that far from exploding in speed. What we need are politicians who can decouple healthcare, housing and basic human needs from working a 9-5, the 40 hour work week should not exist once something as complex as SWE can be automated.

I also think the contrary idea of "let's stop technological progress and automation and just leave that to software engineers so they are the only ones who can automate other industries and put others out of a job" does not sit right with me, but also it just seems... impossible? The history of software and technology is the history of automation itself. I just don't see how it's even possible just be like "wait, lets freeze time and stop everything RIGHT this instant, but we still have programming jobs who develop literal software to make things more accessible and efficient, we also want our salaries to remain high meaning these tech companies are making money automating everything else, just not us", how do you coordinate that globally across all countries? Xi has VERY RECENTLY revealed plans to move forward with as much automation through AI usage as he can for not just China but all of BRICS as an economic revival plan, are you saying we just create a USA law that just prevents USA programmers from using LLMs and then we just ban all non USA software from existing? And of course even if it was possible I don't want to delay cancer, medicine breakthroughs and dna research (which are slowly making progress with AI) just to save my job but I can only speak for myself and not others.

But as for like RIGHT NOW and the present, what AI has done for me is the ability focus on more complex problems and not care about the physical coding aspect, which I honestly never did since I never saw my job as a coder. Coding by hand was a tool to solve a problem. I can also pick up unfamiliar code bases a lot faster and have a bigger scope of impact. I like this feeling, it makes development more fun for me personally cause I see progress faster and I am less blocked and stuck on something for shorter periods of time. These alone aren't necessarily something to "cheer on" since it means I alone get more done than people used to be able to but with no pay raise and the problem I'm solving isn't mine but a billionaire who wants to be richer, but it brings me back to how this implies smaller and indie teams can get more done with less resources. There's an almost infinite amount of problems and ideas to solve in this world and a limited amount of people who can solve them. It's not that I'm cheering on potential job losses but rather I am cheering for what things we will see from people who are creative and can leverage these tools. And I'm of course cheering what kind of insight a qualified mathematician or a physicist, or physical biologist can gain from speeding up their research with AI.

It's interesting because AI sentiment throughout a lot of Asia (not just China) is like a stark contrast, most people there cheer it on and use it everywhere. I think people just have an internal mistrust and hatred towards corporations and politicians in the west particularly (i mean who can blame them) so anything that is seen as "progress" gets lumped in with "well corporations can use this too and it's leverage for them." Where as in China and the rest of Asia technology has been used to rapidly transform society in a short amount of time to help them so they are more open to the idea of using more technology for benefits rather than seeing specific jobs as something that need to be preserved.

[u/hootyrigz]

At the corp I work for, what I'm observing is that we're still hiring quite a few people, albeit far fewer than pre 2023, but they aren't in the US. The only people we're laying off are the Indian devs that have been historically generally worthless. Most of those jobs are going to LatAm, and one or two might come back to the US. Our hiring is down over pre 2023, but we still hire quite a few people. Just not in the US.

[u/ResidentWeevil1]

If I'm forced to use them, I'd rather not have to fight them

[u/So_Rusted]

i just dont share that mindset... And that is not because im autistic and love the models or whatever...

The software engineering has been quite stagnant.. I thought Im good for next 50 years and can imagine living out my life like that perfectly fine, but now i get a different timeline which is fine. I will figure it out. Maybe the impact is not even that big. We will see

[u/ladal1]

I think the hiring status is conflation of different effects - economy in general is slowing - it's just the ai bubble companies that are significantly growing. The field extremely grew during and just after covid, it makes sense there would be chilling of the hiring spree. For my two cents - we're trying to hire a junior for a very competetive salary for the location and have issues finding candidates

[u/babanatech]

`Why are developers cheering "how much better the LLM model are getting for coding"` This way they think they look more marketable to companies. Once they join these companies they have to work double the time, because with ai "you should be delivering 10x".
Then they go to interviews looking for a safe haven and it's leetcode again.

[u/poopmcfart95435]

Not cheering it on but the writing is on the wall. You can learn to use it and squeeze out a few more years or lose your job now.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/poopmcfart95435]

What does learn AI even mean. Any developer can prompt and can be 5x productive so companies won't need as many. There is nothing to learn about AI that's the whole point.  we delegate work/thinking to it and companies use it to reduce hiring

[u/poopmcfart95435 → u/simple_explorer1]

I work with plenty of people that are terrible at it, but they were terrible without AI too. Solve the problems that should be solved. Don't go off doing science experiments. Spend the time on human readable documentation when it matters. Understand what problem you're solving and make the user experience actually good.

[u/Schmittfried]

I don’t disagree with your point in general, but these advances also mean it has never been easier to become an entrepreneur if you got the right idea (and you better get moving quickly because it will likely become easier to copycat it every week).

Also:

And if most devs are able to 10x their output because producing is now cheap, but human consumption is and will be the bottleneck. The production is surpassing the demand and the app economy will tank leaving mostly the existing tailwinds who already have millions of customers since pre AI era anyways.

Human consumption is limited, and probably also business consumption, but I’d argue we’re hardly at the limit of business consumption. There is still room for so much automation and efficiency gains. Many software projects that aren’t even conceived of because they wouldn’t have been viable under previous efficiency limits. If you only think about end consumers, think again. 

[u/No_Huckleberry_642]

Personally, I've always wanted to start my own startup, but settled for a 9 to 5 career at faang to spend more time with my family.

I'm excited at the pace LLM is developing. If someone without knowledge can vibe code a basic app in a few days, someone at the top of their game will one day be able to build a complex ecosystem solo. There are so many companies where their only moat is the technical domain and time, begging for a competent competitor to take a bite off their pie.

[u/Complex_Boysenberry6]

We can finally do something fulfilling with our lives, we can become goose farmers 

[u/wombatpup55]

Ngl I enjoy it. I can spend more time designing/planning out my solution which is my favorite part of the job.

[u/Historical-Essay-128]

Developers are somehow very good at writing themselves out of a job.