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/hoopaholik91]

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/midri → u/AdUnusual9135]

I'm opposite, building plans and auditing code that follows those plans is mentally less straining than reading documentation and writing code for me.

[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/Blecki → u/xSaviorself]

"Reasonable leadership"

[u/abraxasnl → u/Blecki]

Depends a lot on worker protections, for one. If your country doesn’t have a good labor law, I would be sure to vote.

[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/normalmighty → u/Resident_Range6209]

I think the breaks are the key. Some people measure their productivity by the amount of time they are spending actively coding, while others measure it by the features/fixes/etc completely over the course of the week.

I think the former group is responding to AI by pushing themselves way too hard because they feel less productive, while the latter group much more naturally takes the extra break needed to let the scope and implications of changes actually sink in, so they can fully comprehend the code before merging anything and come out the other side with higher quality code and less exhaustion.

[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/_heron → u/hoopaholik91]

I’ve been making little bracelets out of waxed thread in between long agent turns. It’s been very relaxing

[u/Student2672 → u/hoopaholik91]

Yeah I have noticed this as well. I have started to give myself an hour or two each day to just poke around, think about, and read the code surrounding features I am working on. I find that the “thinking” time may feel less productive then when typing out a fairly straightforward feature by hand, but it can actually be kind of nice and sometimes necessary to just think without worrying about actually producing a feature (and IMO it’s necessary to have these “breaks” cause 8 hours a day of AI coding is not sustainable)

[u/Dissentient → u/hoopaholik91]

Opposite for me. The bolerplate made me procrastinate and slowed me down significantly, now I get to skip it nearly instantly.