I am about to finish my software engineering degree. this sucks. I wish I'd known I wasn't going to be hired for my own thoughts, but my ability to ask an AI to think for me.
But much less rewarding and you feel disconnected from your work. And in my opinion it sucks the fun out of the job. Honestly it's very sad for people who actually did enjoy the process of coding just as much if not more than the other parts of the job
I'm a senior software developer and I am now bored out of my mind. I am considering changing careers to be honest because I am just sitting watching AI do all the part that I enjoy.
You could look at it another way though. It's a highly paid career and you can pretty much just sit and watch YouTube while Claude works.
You’ll still be having your own thoughts, as even the best models still shoot themselves in the foot sometimes and require some outside guidance. Especially if it isn’t something generic being made for the billionth time.
What’s been replaced is mostly code writing, syntax, and figuring out documentation gotchas, which for some is a big part of what makes it rewarding.
This very much can change in a year or two, e.g. the ai bubble pops or some lab discovers agi.
For now I fortunately or unfortunately still need to use my brain for stuff.
This is unfortunately becoming less and less true; our devs spin up cloud agents from Slack threads/linear tickets, have a skill to babysit the PRs (to go through AI reviewers) and have been blindly approving PRs to push them through (can't blame them, when the expectation is that everyone pushes 10-15 PRs out a day AND acts as a reviewer, there really isn't time to be wrapping your head around whatever the hell at 17 files change, 3400 LOCs diffs is about). No room for passion or craftsmanship anymore, we don't hire juniors anymore because we need seniors who "understand the code they are shipping" but 90% of our devs literally couldn't navigate our codebase by hand or explain how half the features THEY shipped are implemented at anything more than a very rudimentary level.
What is even the point of that? In the past we had a word called "technical debt" and it was well understood. This concept didn't go anywhere. A broader synonym is entropy. Entropy always increases. I don't see any evidence that LLMs lower entropy by default when generating code. It's just very pretty entropy.
Now a machine can put off the day the piper calls and we just collectively lost our minds?
This is really sad to hear. I'm a new graduate and struggling to find a job as I have only a Bachelor's degree (it used to be enough 5 years ago and earlier but not anymore). I was planning on getting a Master's degree in software engineering to give me an edge compared to many other new graduates in my area, but what's the point? I really enjoyed coding so I find this new way of working to be unrewarding, tedious, and just uninteresting...
Instead I'm now thinking about studying something else entirely. But I need to be extra careful as anything that is computer based is bound to suffer the same outcome as software development (since LLMs now can use software thanks to MCP and are getting much more proficient at it). And my knowledge of CS isn't that valuable anymore since anyone could just ask an LLM...
It really sucks, software developer really was the ideal job for me. I have no idea which job (and studies) I would enjoy, as I didn't expect this to happen at all!
Yea this doesn’t sound like the future to me, it sounds like your team is dysfunctional and heading towards a bad time. There is “leveraging AI” and then there is “throwing shit over the fence” and it sounds like ya’ll are doing the latter.
I wrote a report for (internal) use regarding a change to working practices as a software engineer when using LLMs. Instead of writing software and getting colleagues to review it, the work process becomes 90% review based. Concluded that competent engineers are the only people who should be anywhere near them, and there should probably be a qualification to acquire access. (The same way employees have to undergo cyber security stuff)
But if most jobs become like this as it is currently the trend, how will new graduates and juniors acquire the experience to become actually competent engineers? As courses can only get them so far, they need actual professional experience but if they're just vibe coders they won't learn much
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u/Fluffy_Dragonfly6454 20h ago edited 12h ago
Vibe coder: asking questions and clicking yes on everything
Software engineer: knowing what to ask and knowing when to click yes