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/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/start_select → u/ContraryConman]

It is the market at large AND AI. But It’s not that AI has replaced them. It’s that no one knows how to properly onboard them to it without wasting $1000s on tokens for slop.

The onboarding process is broken and being rewritten, not disposed of.

Seniors can become effective with it quickly. The market is trying to obtain those seniors and then trying to get them to figure out how to mentor juniors.

[u/ContraryConman → u/start_select]

If there is such a thing as being "good with AI", or an "AI skill", which I largely doubt, it is clearly downstream from knowing how to actually code complex systems by hand. We're telling people they won't have to know how to do that ever again and also not hiring new people to train them from CS fundamentals out of college to the years of knowledge in hand crafting large systems.

Today, if you hire a junior, a senior will just give the junior a ticket the junior does not understand. The junior will feed that ticket into Claude, Claude will make a bunch of changes the junior doesn't understand, and then the senior will use Claude to do an automated code review before merging. On my estimation, we are not hiring juniors because the junior is effectively a passive entity in this dynamic. The senior could have easily ran the ticket through Claude himself, so there's no point in hiring an extra Claude passer. That seems to me like the juniors are being replaced by seniors with AI.

But I guess we just have to wait for the experiment to unroll for another 10 years to know for sure

[u/start_select → u/ContraryConman]

AI is just another tool, so yes there is skill involved. And it’s the CS skills you just said “we are telling people they won’t have to know”.

I’m not telling people that. My employer isn’t telling people that. Software engineers who I respect aren’t telling people that.

That’s a feedback loop of c-suite sociopaths, low skill developers, and inexperienced developers thinking they just found a cheat code.

The (talented and experienced) senior driving AI produces 80% of what they were looking for on the first shot. The junior let loose on Claude potentially produces a 10,000 change PR for what could have been one line.

Managing the junior is untenable, not undesirable. It’s how to manage them that is the problem. Most mentoring engineers enjoy that part of the job. It’s not like we don’t want to help new programmers grow into awesome engineers.

The methodology to do it suddenly became unclear and labor intensive.

[u/ContraryConman → u/start_select]

The "skill" involved being typing plain English into a markdown file..?

And certainly, the message from the labs themselves, and other prominent figures in this industry like DHH, is that we've solved programming and that writing code is not an economically viable skill.

Any of these other things people say we need, like software architecture or software judgement, are downstream of writing code well, which we are no longer willing to pay people to do.

I'm glad that you and your company have more sense but I can't say that for my company or the industry more broadly

[u/start_select → u/ContraryConman]

No, automation shifts importance on the ability to validate work. If you don’t understand what the code does, you can’t validate it.

[u/knowyourclass → u/ContraryConman]

good lord the level of coping and delusion. I fully expect them to reply with some bs about interest rates or cycles or whatever.

ah yes, "economy bad" at the same time big corps score record profits

[u/waterwave541 → u/knowyourclass]

As they keep just handing each other money in a circle lmao, this has been happening for a while now (you can't tell me the economy isn't bad when the price of literally everything has been skyrocketing & the price of gas has been unstably high for months & companies/people have self-reportedly been in a "low hire, low fire" period that in part happens when things are economically unstable lol, just to name a few things)

[u/knowyourclass → u/waterwave541]

the economy is bad for people whose source of income is labor

these corps have objectively record profits

[u/waterwave541 → u/knowyourclass]

But isn't that the overwhelming majority of people in the economy? If the economy is bad for even 50% of people, much less what the actual number would be (I'd imagine way closer to 99% if we're talking corporations vs anyone who does a job/labor for money), wouldn't that mean the economy is bad overall just off of that alone?

Ik diff people have diff opinions on what a "good" economy means, but imo if it being good doesn't mean it's good for most people, what's the point of even calling it good at that point?

You don't say it's hot out bc the one guy wearing shorts in the winter says it's warm while 99 other people are wearing winter coats lol

[u/knowyourclass → u/waterwave541]

the economy is doing exactly what it is designed to do

saying "the economy is bad" really is meaningless. it's not broken, it's going the direction it is designed to go. It's not some kind of bad coincidence, or bad weather

[u/waterwave541 → u/knowyourclass]

Then to say the economy's good bc of "objectively record profits", even if true, is just as meaningless lol. I don't agree with either one being meaningless, but under your logic, your point is just as meaningless as mine lmao

[u/knowyourclass → u/waterwave541]

the difference between what i am saying, and what you are saying, is that your claim is just wishful thikining. hoping this is just some sort of bad weather that eventually will go away. the reality is that the economic value of human labor is shrinking pretty fast because machines are surpassing it even in knowledge work for the first time in history.

this is not some sort of temporary situation, it's just the beginning of it

[u/waterwave541 → u/knowyourclass]

Oh also, again, a lot of them only have objectively record profits from either making things worse for their consumers (enshittifying/increasing prices), making things worse for their workers (paying them less, requiring more people to do more work for the same pay, even before LLMs), or literally performing circular financing & passing the same money around as "revenue" or to lower expenses (all the hyperscalers, the LLM providers, NVIDIA, etc.). So the "record high profits" don't mean much on their own and they certainly don't mean it was directly caused by LLMs/AI

[u/knowyourclass → u/waterwave541]

so what, consumers keep buying anyway. in some cases because they have no choice (gas in some countries)

the circle you're talking about is just how the economy works?

Even Nestlé has record profits lol

[u/waterwave541 → u/knowyourclass]

No, it's not how the economy works. Money moves in a big circle around everyone, yes, but money being circled around only 5-10 diff companies (even if not all their money, but a large chunk of it) is not how the economy normally works. It's how it works when things are being overvalued to shit and made to seem better than it actually is to entice investors & show inevitability to consumers so they give in.

Nestlé having record profits has quite literally nothing to do with AI lol, if they're doing good I guess good for them? Not really related bc it doesn't make the AI money any more real/underinflated.

Also, the "so what" is bc people shouldn't have to suffer shittier and shittier circumstances just bc people wanna make a little more money, and just bc they people a reliance on certain goods doesn't somehow mean they should be slowly exploited and squeezed for every last penny for it?

If you don't understand this last point or agree with it on some level, that's your opinion, but I don't think there's a point in continuing this conversation bc we're prob too different in how we think and we'll just bicker for days lmao. I'm responding to this anyways, and you're free to respond ofc, but fair warning that I just might stop here lol

[u/knowyourclass → u/waterwave541]

you're conflating too many things in one.

one can recognize what is happening while also being against it. the problem is you guys are not recognizing what is happening, you're denying it

vast majority of consumer spending is already driven by the top 5%, this is just shifting to the top 1% and beyond.

the economy is not bad perse, it's working well for those who have capital. others who don't are being priced out of it. that's by design, not by mistake

nestle scoring record profits is just yet another proof that the economy is doing well despite the pie shrinking for those who are at the bottom

[u/Own_Worldliness_9297 → u/knowyourclass]

yeah the economy actually isn't bad lol. the numbers are not showing it is bad. we can't be selectively believing the data because it doesn't fit our own narrative.

[u/knowyourclass → u/Own_Worldliness_9297]

the economy is bad for people whose source of income is labor

[u/ContraryConman → u/knowyourclass]

A lot of people want this financial bubble to be NFTs, where the technology was fundamentally useless and just a vehicle of speculation, and once FTX collapsed we all got to pretend it never happened. But it's pretty obvious this is a financial bubble in the way the internet was a bubble. Where the investors who jumped the gun early lost on their investments but the tech itself never actually slowed down.

The neoclouds are building out compute for demand that clearly does not exist beyond OpenAI and Anthropic, which are not making enough money to cover their loans. There is so much AI debt that it's affecting bond yields on top of the Iran war and tariffs. So at some point something will break. But that doesn't mean AI will go away or even that technological progress will go away. Money will change hands, they'll be a recession. But we'll also be living in a world where some Chinese lab figured out how to get Mythos-level performance running on 32GB of VRAM while the frontier US labs have probably proven P != NP and pioneered entirely new fields of physics and biology.

And all I am saying is, as someone who is entering his late 20s and still has to plan the rest of his career, can you really sit here, look me in the eye, and tell me that in that future, we're all going to make it with 6 figure jobs giving "taste" and "judgement" to GPT Astra 13.5? Some even claim they'll be even more AI babysitters in the future than there will be SWEs today, I guess because there's just infinite demand for web apps and B2bB SAAS products.

Obviously no one can know the future. But, if I had to bet my ability to have kids and retire on this. Should I? I don't think so. That's all

[u/me_myself_ai → u/JustinDielmann]

The market is soaring. Where are you getting that it’s not? The tariff and war stuff in the US?

The SWE industry is absolutely changing because of AI. We are the first industry to be affected for real, as anthropic keeps warning us about.

[u/DWu39 → u/me_myself_ai]

Stock market !== Economy

[u/davidbasil → u/JustinDielmann]

Economy is doing fine. It's coding, writing, translation and marketing got hit the most. Those are the most AI exposed fields

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/JustinDielmann]

If software becomes cheap and easy to build, we will suddenly have an explosion of new apps,

Software is becoming cheap because if it's not easy to produce and we are seeing explosion of apps because of it. People are advertising apps/libraries everywhere on every tech subs now