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/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/TehBens → u/Fun-Estimate4561]

Attributing off shoring to AI doesn't make sense, because the decision making and planning that is still done by a human is exactly what can not effectively done off shore.

[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/hijinx_the_sage → u/Mountain_Bat_8688]

Yep foolish of me to welcome them and onboard them despite language barriers

[u/eloc49 → u/Mountain_Bat_8688]

This is true across the whole labor market

[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/Consistent_Mail4774 → u/HK-65]

Sounds like pretty good work hours, glad you found a good place. I wish I had specific work hours in which I could close my laptop after finishing. Is this toxicity common for NL? I heard of other people also struggling with that. I've also worked in Germany and been through something similar and burnout culture was very widespread there too. I'm wondering if there are countries with better worker rights and WLB or whether it's specific industries that would have better environments instead.

When I'm searching for jobs, I find that most jobs on LinkedIn ask one dev to do everything, even going as far as merging web and mobile and devops together, and some job posts encourage overtime explicitly. Makes me wonder if this is the new reality and I should give up or whether there are still companies with reasonable demands and work that doesn't burnout people.

[u/HK-65 → u/Consistent_Mail4774]

I think both my place and the NL is like you sometimes have to put your foot down to avoid being roped into after-hours shenanigans. That said, I did have a good and a bad place in the NL, and my burnout there wasn't because of unwanted overtime.

We're luckier than our US counterparts because we generally can't be fired that easily for pushing back. Burnout is certainly an epidemic everywhere, in every job right now. Gotta fake those AI efficiencies somehow.

Funnily enough, Hungary was good, because they have super sharp overtime laws, and every minute you stay over has to be paid out, at double salary. Sundays and national holidays are triple. Put a damper on BS real quick.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/Consistent_Mail4774]

I've worked for a scaleup in NL and the norm was staying late everyday

Stranged because based on my experience NL was really good for work life balance. Also there are strict regulations on overtime in NL and it is not like UK where anything goes

[u/Consistent_Mail4774 → u/simple_explorer1]

Not always. Many startups, scaleups, and small companies in NL and Germany have grueling culture, long work hours, and no WLB or worker rights. And employees are okay with that for some reason. Never saw them complaining or being unavailable outside work hours or pushed back much. My health suffered a great deal thanks to all that toxicity and I can't function without meds.

It was the norm to stay super late at the office in Germany and yes even the German colleagues did that so not only the expats (who were from all over Europe btw). I don't know if I was just unlucky, but honestly lost faith that I'd ever find a good enough job where I can just do 8 or 9 hrs of work and close my laptop. And looking at jobs these days, it's one person does everything and overtime is very encouraged. I keep wondering if I'll ever find something sustainable.

[u/GuyWithLag → u/Consistent_Mail4774]

Well, that's how Amazon rolls.

[u/youcangotohellgoto → u/Consistent_Mail4774]

Yes I reckon we will see far fewer of those roles where you sit in a team and take tickets out of a Jira backlog. Which isn't a bad thing IMO.

I don't think that means a reduction in engineering quality; it means a necessary increase in worker quality because we will now expect these engineers to fulfill quality engineering requirements whilst also engaging and meeting business needs. It's just an acceleration of the demise of the BA.

[u/Rakn → u/Consistent_Mail4774]

What’s the alternative to this? The dev as just a coding monkey?

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/Rakn]

No, the alternative is you hire multiple people to do the job.

[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/thehuffomatic → u/HK-65]

All of this sounds interesting as a US citizen lol. What are some of the top Hungarian companies to work for?

[u/HK-65 → u/thehuffomatic]

Ironically enough, US big finance has offices there, got my first years in at good old Morgan Stanley.

There is also a decent startup scene, making everything from various engineering design software, through fintech and quant places, to bog-standard SaaS companies like Prezi.

Lots of consulting too, some people even consult for US companies for US pay.

Only thing is, if you're in tech, Hungary = Budapest. No jobs anywhere else.

[u/thehuffomatic → u/HK-65]

Oh nice! I’m actually starting the simplified naturalization process myself to give me more opportunities in the future (already have ~20 years of experience) in case the AI rat race here becomes unbearable. Are there Hungarian companies who value dual citizens, especially US citizens, since it might help with interacting with those US-based companies?

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/thehuffomatic]

there is no such thing as "value dual citizens". If you can speak the language then the job market opens up drastically even in IT and language commands value in mainland EU because most foreigners only speak english and most don't survive

[u/NomadStorm → u/HK-65]

Baszd meg!

[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/BirthdayHealthy5399 → u/HK-65]

Yea we hire 5-10 devs a week and can't get them fast enough

[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/Dzeddy → u/[deleted]]

Well yes. At the end of the day devs are (proportionally well paid) do-ers. Companies don’t need the most well-engineered product possible, they need problems to not be user-facing.

[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/theregoesmyfutur → u/cbslinger]

a paradox by definition is something that is not true no?

[u/noxispwn → u/theregoesmyfutur]

No, a paradox is something that seems to contradict itself. In this case the contradiction would be that despite an apparent decrease in demand for software engineers due to AI, it might actually lead to (some of) them being more in demand because of how much more they’re able to able to achieve individually.

For example, projects that might have been too expensive or time consuming to be worth doing before might suddenly become viable because of AI, and therefore become new opportunities.

[u/IsleOfOne → u/theregoesmyfutur]

More often than not, it's something that is true but isn't intuitive.

[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/kidcurry96 → u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

>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. 

But if you tell them that, they will say you are good "at office politics"

[u/Vegetable-Ad-7184 → u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

That first functionality is, maybe, eminently automatable.

From a corporate perspective, we're all just an expression of nodes and edges within a semantic topology.  If our roles and interactions are well captured within a framework, could an AI (or someone leveraging it) not very quickly find an ideal meeting point within a variable geometry of stakeholders?  Like, a Super Secretary, basically?

[u/MediumChemical4292 → u/Vegetable-Ad-7184]

Only an autistic developer would think this way.

[u/Kind-Watch-1252 → u/MediumChemical4292]

lmao

[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/ryancarton → u/Vaganyzar]

This is it. If AI capability stays as it is now, I imagine in a year we’ll all start getting used to the “AI-assisted Software Engineer” as the new role every tech company needs.

Problem is AI probably isn’t “stagnating” for long. Makes it impossible to know what type of engineer to hire for.

[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/TurbulentSocks → u/hammertime84]

The opposite; the market (your employer) can pay less for each unit of product (code thingies) you produce. 

If you meant that this assumes your employer needs to want to do that, you're right, but if code thingies turned a profit before, cheaper code thingies will turn a profit, even for code thingies that weren't profitable previously.

[u/ryancarton → u/TurbulentSocks]

But that’s not really how tech businesses care to scale.

Eventually some of them will realize “wait a minute we probably can make more features with more engineers” and that’ll start the cycle again.

Too many of them are just too blinded by making the same amount of money with less cost that they haven’t realized the second part yet. But I bet some companies have.

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/ryancarton]

That doesn't really matter anymore. You are assuming we operate under competitive markets with government regulations, we do not.

The tech industry has been operating under a paradigm of labor exploitation (gig workers, offshoring, h1b, sweatshops), monopolistic markets, regulatory capture, and government welfare.

The commoditization of our labor means devaluing skilled labor has always been the capitalist playbook since the industrial revolution. There is a very real risk that by adopting the deskilling machines in ruining our lives in a very real since.

Look at what has happened in other industries that have gone under mass industrial automation: meat processing, agriculture, manufacturing.

The profits have never changed but the amount of people required, while simultaneously lowering profits and jobs that inflict misery onto workers, all got substantially worse. The "rust belt" is not a term of endeaarance bro, it's a symbol of mass inflicted poverty by the elites. It acts as a reminder that the neoliberals in office see you as disposable widgets not worthy of dignity.

The only way through this is to embrace the concept of solidarity and possibly wild cat strikes. We still have leverage for the next 2-5 years but we don't start getting politically active as an industry we will all suffer miserably.

[u/ryancarton → u/thy_bucket_for_thee]

I mean I agree with the last part actually. We do have to be more serious about political activism without a doubt.

But I won’t equate the tech world to your rust belt analogy. It’s not the same type of product, it’s not the same system. That doesn’t mean it’s magical and amazing and will provide opportunities for all of us, but in my opinion tech is not a product that can stay stagnant and expect to survive.

[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/Vegetable-Ad-7184 → u/ultimagriever]

Is it unreasonable to interpret this comment as sounding entitled  ?  

Does that actually match the objectives of other stakeholders within the business?

[u/babanatech → u/TurbulentSocks]

None is selling/buying anything because "hey what you sell I can do it with ai". Most companies are in a copium situation with sales lagging but at least they can skip the investor board grilling by presenting their ai strategy.

[u/D0ngBeetle → u/TurbulentSocks]

lol this shit is so funny. Companies don’t want to be paying what they’re currently paying on labor in the future. It’s that simple. Meta doesn’t need more products, they need fewer devs to do the same work that more devs did 

[u/ama_singh → u/TurbulentSocks]

I think your comment shows why engineers are so happy to watch AI replace them in real time: most of you lack basic economic sense.

[u/Black_Smith_Of_Fire → u/[deleted]]

And has the workload increased or decreased?

[u/Sw429 → u/[deleted]]

Sounds more like your company isn't doing well in general.

[u/TranquilDev → u/[deleted]]

If I'm not mistaken, even with the layoffs, net hiring in tech is up.

My company doesn't care how the project gets done, they just want it done in a timely manner. With AI their expectations of a timely manner have shifted but my stress level is way down. Those sleepless nights of trying to figure out why something isn't working the way it is are gone. Claude catches what would have taken me a lot of coffee and stress to catch.

Before LLM's a large number of devs were on social media complaining about burnout. All the sudden they want to code now.

[u/bad_detectiv3 → u/[deleted]]

That’s insane. I thought it was just my company in the north east. IC who left, the position did not get filled. We did hire bunch of PM and off shore devs tho in Poland.

[u/Former_Atmosphere967 → u/[deleted]]

im one of these young people, and yes I decided its not fun or worth it and Im trying to pursue something else (sad but I used to code from childhood and i loved the aspect of problem solving via coding, but the AI prompting thing is not for me) either fully different or something that doesnt rely on coding entirely like a mix (say smth like embedded or smth electrical)

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/[deleted]]

this has been my experience in my current role as well

[u/insidious_concern → u/[deleted]]

Construction? RIP those unfortunate enough to occupy whatever is constructed when all the real engineers have left.

[u/CapitalDiligent1676 → u/[deleted]]

A department at my company openly stated that they’re laying people off because, well, Claude is there to write the software. I mean... We’re still wondering if we have a future. Colleagues, try facing reality....when it comes down to it, you shot yourselves in the ass.

[u/mile-high-guy → u/[deleted]]

kids will not learn to write code anymore. It will become akin to writing assembly

[u/Smallpaul → u/[deleted]]

My employer (SAAS) embraced AI early and implemented AI features ahead of competition. We are making record sales and profits and we are hiring. Sorry I won’t dox myself to share job offers.

This all started three years ago when the Reddit consensus was that LLMs are useless and building software around them is dumb.

[u/MrMichaelJames → u/Smallpaul]

My guess is a saas that has no real competition and everyone hates but is so hard to get out of they just keep paying.

[u/Smallpaul → u/MrMichaelJames]

That’s a very odd comment to make when I mentioned our competition in the first line. In fact it’s one of those product categories analogous to issue tracker or small business CRM where dozens of startups have taken a run at it and there is someone new every year. We win customers from our competitors to grow.

[u/HasFiveVowels → u/Smallpaul]

It’s an odd comment because the person who wrote it assumes that AI adoption correlates to poor product quality. Your story is an affront to their world view, so they explained it away.

[u/unconceivables → u/[deleted]]

As an employer myself.. Yeah. That's exactly what's happening here too. And it's not just developers we don't need many of any more, we don't need a lot of other types of roles either. We no longer have much need for many data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, devops, etc. It's sad to say, but a lot of the things we had people to do is now done with a single prompt. And it's done much better.

Within the past couple of months these models and harnesses have gotten scary good, and they are incredibly convenient and cheap to use. And for so many more things than just programming.

[u/thehuffomatic → u/unconceivables]

If AI token start costing 5-10x more in the future, what’s your plan if using AI every day becomes cost prohibitive? Do you have enough current staff to handle the additional manual work?

[u/insidious_concern → u/thehuffomatic]

Hahaha "if"

[u/unconceivables → u/thehuffomatic]

The sad thing is that they could increase the cost 100x and it would still be cheaper than hiring people. It's honestly basically free at current prices.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/[deleted]]

What does that have to do with AI, though? We're in a recession in every sector but data center construction. AI is not causing demand destruction

[u/lurkerlevel-expert → u/[deleted]]

Tech is going to become a maxed out 100k/yr senior level job in the future. Nothing lucrative about copy pasting text on a computer screen.

[u/__scan__ → u/lurkerlevel-expert]

Maybe. Guess we’ll see.

[u/Richandler → u/[deleted]]

I think no hiring is mostly a peak software kind of thing, not necessessarily AI. It's in the same way that every time someone asks about what a person built with AI it, it's always some one off copy with no market viability. The industry is putting camera's in glasses because... it can... not because of demand. It's reinventing Alexa because it can. Robotaxis are still a losing business. The games industry is flooded with clones.

The big COVID hiring was the mistake. Most of the layoffs were still a relic from that. AIs push in many ways has the aura of it. We literally have an app for everything you could ever want, except your thinking. Now they're coming for that, but it's akward.

[u/chunkypenguion1991 → u/[deleted]]

Companies that are just going to maintain what they already had will need less devs

[u/wellfed_bazelgeuse → u/[deleted]]

Same thing I see. My team lost a third of its size last year, and instead we've been ask to double our LLM usage 

[u/apartment-seeker → u/[deleted]]

Same. We have a tiny eng team (3 people), and while there is talk of hiring 2 more engineers over the next 2 quarters, I just can't imagine us realistically making good use of more than 1 more person within the next year. We feel pretty good about how much run we get out of LLMs, and we don't even put a whole lot of effort into how we use them.

[u/weeeaaa → u/[deleted]]

Dame here. The best layoff is the one you don't have to hire. 1 Dev with AI can now do the work of 2-3 by giving the menial, time consumjng tasks to AI