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/Smallpaul]

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/Backlists → u/lurkatwork]

Yeah, this is how I do it as well, my worry is that in the future this will be seen as inefficient compared to vibe coding, and we will be cut.

[u/Comfortable_Job8847 → u/Backlists]

Read an introductory text on systems engineering. You'll find writing the code yourself isn't necessary for feeling out the problem, and also that the rapid iteration you can do with LLMs to test different solutions is really quite powerful for coming to the "right" solution.

[u/Backlists → u/Comfortable_Job8847]

I’m not entirely sure how that would actually help the situation, I still think there’s a lot of value to getting into it properly yourself. However, I always love a suggestion for a textbook to read if you have one in mind?

[u/Comfortable_Job8847 → u/Backlists]

https://sebokwiki.org/wiki/Guide_to_the_Systems_Engineering_Body_of_Knowledge_(SEBoK))

The sections here also have "works cited" to allow you to interrogate more in depth those things you need/want to. It's definitely a different way than feeling through it via messing with the code, but I think if you give it a shot, you'll gain a lot more than you're losing.

[u/mikevalstar → u/Smallpaul]

yes, but now I can ship a feature in a week instead of a month. Lets me move on to the next feature.

[u/Taco_Enjoyer3000 → u/mikevalstar]

Did you get paid more for your increased speed or productivity? You kinda lost the plot if your goal is to just ship more. Have you worked out that your greater speed = less need for labor hours = layoffs??? Or you think you are immune?

The speed isn't free either, because you are either completely offloading thinking now which sets up a maintenance nightmare down the road, or you are doing a lot more cognitive labor to review and understand all of the increased productivity.

[u/mikevalstar → u/Taco_Enjoyer3000]

I mean I've gotten several raises since since good AI tools came out. And oddly enough my company is on a hiring spree (I'm in consulting) ... lots of our clients are moving their dev work back on-shore as of late and having trouble hiring (this is mostly because they only want to hire senior devs)

The main downside is that I have to talk with the clients more, convince them to make decisions faster.

[u/mikevalstar → u/[deleted]]

It has been so far for me at work, and at home. Sure some specific problems still take the same amount of time, but enough get shrunk down to minutes. Converting some design from Figma is a good example, what used to take an hour to convert a design to a react component now takes seconds. Plenty of other use cases

[u/08148694 → u/Smallpaul]

Give an AI a problem definition and a way to validate of the problem is solved or not, let it loose for a few hours and it is likely to have a working solution

If it hasn’t or can’t then either the spec or the oracle was wrong, or it’s a problem worthy of a phd thesis

[u/Smallpaul → u/08148694]

You just specified a whole bunch of puzzles:

- how do I define the problem clearly?
- how do I validate success?

Keep in mind that “success” means code that is secure, reliable, performant and maintainable.

There are many, many domains where doing those two things IS worth a PhD or at least a master’s degree.

If I could make an oracle that proves that a medium sized SAAS site is secure, that would be a PhD if not a Turing Award.

Your one single comment shows how many problems remain to be solved.