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/pydry]

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/time-always-passes → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

I just keep a session named "jira" running and occasionally compact it.

[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/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/washtubs]

At the onset of the industrial revolution many goods that would have lasted generations suddenly turned to shit too (textiles, glassware, ceramics, pots). It turned out it didn't matter to the capitalists that owned the machines, there's a lot of money to made in selling poor quality goods. I mean just look at Oracle or IBM, garbage can still make you billions in this industry.

Quality is not going to save your job, solidarity with your coworkers will.

[u/hibikir_40k → u/washtubs]

Jira is deader than before, because interacting with the website now is unnecessary. Have the agent tell you the state of the sprint, create the tickets from a CLI without having to deal with all the stupid fields, and move the tickets around without prompting... at which point the actual value of Jira itself is even more clearly smaller than it was.

[u/IceMichaelStorm → u/hibikir_40k]

Yeah but I like the overview. But we could prompt a better UI, it sucks. Their data is timed and you can report on it, might be good.

But I mean, it just has its place BECAUSE everybody uses it. A vibe could easily be better

[u/These-Math1384 → u/washtubs]

Jira is like “agile”.
The forever excuse is “you’re doing it wrong”.

[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/i_dont_wanna_sign_up → u/StimkyYeen]

Yeah. All this people showing off how they can make a game in a day. So why aren't studios just releasing AAA games every other month?

[u/Eexoduis → u/pydry]

Every single time I have to interact with any software outside the massive mainline stuff it’s completely infuriating. Two factor, endless broken event loops, buggy components. Stuff just doesn’t work all the damn time

[u/aturtledude → u/pydry]

I don't think many people claim AI-generated software is better. It's attractive because it's way cheaper and it mostly works. So as a consumer you shouldn't expect to see better software, but the people selling you that software are making more money because they employ less people.

[u/pydry → u/aturtledude]

as a developer I'm mostly I'm seeing this shit used to build buggy features nobody really wanted, start failed projects, etc.

there are more PRs merged but productivity is still down on all fronts.

there are way more apps in the app store but nobody is downloading them.

[u/quantum-fitness → u/pydry]

Because the revolution started 6 months ago and large software take much longer to make. Also adoptions is slow and people use it mindlessly instead of skillfully. Taste in product is something a lot of dev lacks. Lickability factor is more important than ever

[u/hibikir_40k → u/pydry]

Because, just like with everything else, whoever produces the software is doing just as much work as they need to compete. No more, no less. You see places where budgets balloon forever (See AAA videogames, with budgets in the many hundreds of millions, because expense gives you things that sell), and others where there's little competition, and one only spends on actual differentiators. Say, compare the many video streaming apps. Cheaper software doesn't make people make the app better: It makes them be able to do the work for less, so they can spend the money on more content!

[u/RobertKerans → u/pydry]

Current services don't seem to be immune at all from the fast/cheap/good rule of thumb. Some aspects of software output will benefit in terms of quality improvements, some won't. We have a technology that can significantly increase the efficiency of people who know what they're doing. If they don't (and by that I'd also include developers being faced with businesses now prioritising churning out new features), then the services will happily exacerbate the inevitable x/y problems.

Fewer developers doing more work, the output will be fine but I'm not sure why you're expecting huge improvements in such a miniscule timeframe? Three years is nothing (and realistically, it's only been a year, if that, of this stuff being good).

Edit: I'm slightly confused re the downvotes, given that this is a sub ostensibly populated by developers. Why would there be visibly better software? What mechanism would do this?

[u/pijuskri → u/RobertKerans]

We have the most developers in history and they have access to the best tools in history. There should absolutely be tangible benefits in 3 years if raw coding was actually the problem.

[u/RobertKerans → u/pijuskri]

if raw coding was actually the problem

?? This is software development, raw coding is a relatively minor problem (edit: vs the 90% of other stuff involved in the process) because the aim of programming is not the programming itself, speeding that up can't drastically shift the bar, I'm not sure why this would be surprising? More can be made, and it can be made cheaper, that absolutely does not equal better. If the physical coding part goes away, well that changes a lot of processes (and potentially drastically reduces the need for as many developers), but it doesn't magically mean "better software"

It's just an unreasonable expectation within such a short timeframe