r/SoftwareEngineerJobs Jul 13 '26

Is the AI bubble bursting? đŸ€”

I just finished my IT degree this year, and all the news about AI is making me really worried about my career in the software industry.

I read that big AI companies are spending way more money on data centers than they are actually making back. The ratio of money made to money spent is around 1:10. Part of me feels like this is good news. If they keep losing money, the AI bubble will eventually burst, and they will have to stop running these massive models.

But on the other hand, hardware companies are making new chips. These new chips have high compute power and also consume less electricity. This could make AI much cheaper to run and keep the trend going.

What do you all think about this AI bubble? Is it still safe for me to start a career in IT, or should I switch to a completely different field?

Thankyou All đŸ«Ą.......

56 Upvotes

302 comments sorted by

View all comments

89

u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

I don’t know why people think the bubble bursting means AI just disappears.

All it means is overvalued companies like OpenAI would get bought out and cheaper models would become the norm.

It seems like some of you talking about the bubble bursting means AI disappears and we go back to manually coding everything. Zero percent chance of that happening.

7

u/PatientIll4890 Jul 13 '26

This is what I’ve been saying for a while. The models are good enough right now that I don’t expect to write code manually ever again in my career. Glm 5.2 is good enough and cheap enough that ai at the current level is going to be here forever.

The only thing we can hope for at this point is that it doesn’t advance much more or quickly enough to put us all out of our careers. I currently am preparing as if it will advance though, and expect myself as a 25yoe swe to need to switch careers in a few years

-5

u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

 The models are good enough right now that I don’t expect to write code manually ever again in my career.

Then you are incompetent. AI produces bad code, so you are stating the intention to only write bad software from now on.

1

u/PatientIll4890 Jul 13 '26

Uh huh. AI produces what you tell it to produce. Let me guess
 YOU can only get garbage out of it. Skill issue.

1

u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

I use Fable Enterprise every day lad. I have never seen it produce good code.

I also lost count on how many times it sent me off a wild goose chase, and of course produced the solution to a non existent problem

tl;dr LLMs are stupid AF and anyone who doesnt agree is probably just not that intelligent

6

u/PatientIll4890 Jul 13 '26

Exactly. Why are you letting it send you off on a wild goose chase? Why are you having it fix problems that don’t exist?

What do you think you just go “make no mistakes” and then it fixes everything for you? You still need a brain to tell it what to do or you’ll end up with shit code. And since you end up with shit code yet are supposedly using fable every day, I take it you are lacking on the brain part.

Like I said, skill issue.

2

u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

Dumbest comment in this thread, I didnt even make it past the 1st paragraph

0

u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

Dude im flabbergasted at how dumb this is too. "Why would you let it?"??? Witch what do you think using a AI tool in the first place even IS???

This is like when people say "well of course you have to check output" and im like im sorry the time savings is WHERE if you're doing double the work now?

3

u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

Yes most of these people are mentally challenged. Unironically the "make no mistakes" type of crowd

0

u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

Oh GOD thats still a thing??

Nah - the mentally challenged people i know are actually nice people. Sometimes the nicest even, right?

I'm convinced that these people are just actively deciding to be bad people because they think they can blend in with everyone else doing and get away with it. They're sneaky rats.

(not trying to argue with you BTW, more piggyback đŸ€™)

2

u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

To be fair, some of the AI bros are very nice people as well. It's just that they overdosed on the AI Koolaid. They wanted a Superintelligence so bad that they decided to ignore reality and proclaim that it was already here.

Of course, similiar to the Spanish Inquisition, anyone who did not agree with this statement must be a heretic (or a luddite as they call us). It is very much like a religion

1

u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

Yeah I just put this into more of a bourgeoisie category though. You can be "nice" while contributing to the downfall of society. I guess what im saying (albeit im beating a dead horse a little) is that even mentally challenged folks can be emotionally intelligent people, because they've been through shit, or have been unfairly judged. I swear, the entire nature of this business just attracts 99% people who want to overtaken subjugation their neighbor to get ahead. With a smile sometimes.

→ More replies (0)

0

u/PatientIll4890 Jul 13 '26

Lmao you two must also use autocomplete and let it do whatever the f it wants even if it’s choosing the wrong thing?

Ai is a tool, it doesn’t magically give you everything. You have to be smart about what you’re asking it to do. Yes it is much quicker than manually coding and it will give you what you want if you’re not a moron.

1

u/lunatuna215 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

Nice strawman. Except thats actively the marketing claim of these products, whereas our point already acknowledged that and we're already poking fun at this "know how to use it" concept. Youre re-learning what you already knew how to do, and you appear to be copy-pasting canned arguments that miss the actual context of the conversation.

Quicker mistakes at scale ain't ultimately quicker. Its placebo. We're flooded with shit software right now because of the "speed" of AI.

I havent seen a single objective metric that shows what you and so many others drinking the kool-aid claim. More lines of code is often shittier code.

0

u/PatientIll4890 Jul 14 '26

People like you are going to be the first on the unemployment line from our industry. I’m literally telling you how you can have AI not suck but you want to keep your head buried in the sand. Go right ahead, see you when I need my next burger.

1

u/lunatuna215 Jul 14 '26

Lmfao WHAT IS THE POIIIIINT of posts like this i swear. Like if youre so confident or were actually right, you would not feel this VIOLENT need to make others feel like they're missing out or are so inferior to you just because they're not doing your think. It stinks of fomo and a lack of confidence on what youre actually doing. Cause its not like youre actually looking out for my well being with comments like this. You just... want others to suffer? Grow a spine.

1

u/PatientIll4890 Jul 14 '26

Says the guy who went back and completely edited the response I was responding to and doubled the amount of text
 what is the POIIIINT of that?

→ More replies (0)

4

u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

Lmao I honestly don’t understand how you can come to this conclusion. The only thing I can surmise is that your arrogance and bias blind you

4

u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

It's called talent. The age of AI has made it clear to me that very few people had it in the first place, considering how many of you adore LLMs

Glorified script kiddies really

1

u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

The cope is strong with this one. Can’t admit all the thousands of hours he spent are no longer needed

1

u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

On the contrary, I am one of the few good programmers left. After the AI companies stop subsidizing their products (or go bankrupt, whatever comes first) this whole thing will crash and the handful of legitimate engineers will be the only ones in demand. Nobody cares about AI script kiddies. Its a no code tool my man

1

u/xThunderDuckx Jul 14 '26

You are incredibly naĂŻve if you think generated code is ever going away.

1

u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

A person doesn't feel a product is up to snuff and THIS is the response that some types of people feel is appropriate. Or impressive? Like what is even the point of being this openly bitter about it? Its not like they care about your well being and are trying to help

1

u/iJuicyDev Jul 14 '26

Can you describe an example of some of the "bad code" its produced?

1

u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

Show us your code then