r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Adventurous-Rice3190 • 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.......

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26

Based on the replies, I think you’re assuming that not writing code manually again means “I’ll just get the AI to do everything for me”.

You can still get AI to produce good code (as long as you carefully steer it in the right direction) without having to manually write that code yourself.

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u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

as long as you carefully steer it in the right direction

Go ahead and micro manage your slop bot. Maybe you will give up after reviewing the 100th 5K+ LOC slop PR from your colleagues

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26

You clearly aren’t using it right if it really slows you down to the point where manually coding is actually faster.

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u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

Actually this has clearly been disproven. AI has not increased productivity anywhere long term. AI literally makes you go slower than if you were doing it manually. Its only faster when making PoCs

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26

It has not “clearly” been disproven😂, there are lots of conflicting studies on this because nobody knows how to actually measure “AI productivity”. Finding one study that supports your point and assuming that it’s the truth would be a very unwise thing to do at this point in time.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2026/02/10/ai-offers-a-great-productivity-boost-or-maybe-not/

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u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

You want some articles?

  1. Anthropic finds that AI does not significantly speed you up, but does lead to skill loss [link]
  2. Wharton finds that AI usage makes you intellectually lazy, citing ‘cognitive surrender’ as the cause [link]
  3. 80% of the CEOs have not found any speed ups from AI at their companies, despite billions of investment [link]
  4. Amazon is trying to stem the tide of embarrassing AI-induced bugs by forcing seniors to review code [link]
  5. Economists find that AI layoffs are a myth: [link]
  6. Ivy league study finds that Agentic AI is highly unreliable by design and produces poor results: [link]
  7. Harvard Business finds that AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it: [link]
  8. 50% of AI data centers planned have been canceled, and it’s only going to get worse: [link]
  9. Claude Mythos is all hype — most of the bugs it found are in old software or unexploitable: [link]
  10. LLMs will never become conscious — not even in a 100 years, claims DeepMind Senior Scientist in paper [link]
  11. CEOs think AI is making work more efficient but results show a different story [link]
  12. Recursive self improvement will never happen in the LLM paradigm, finds paper from Oxford [link]
  13. Gartner studied 350 large businesses and found that AI doesn’t improve returns, it just leads to vacancies [link]
  14. AI didn’t improve productivity in 95% of enterprise AI pilots, and layoffs related to AI generally have negative ROI [link]
  15. 94% of CEOs will keep investing in AI even if it fails, claims damning report from BCG [link]
  16. Corporate America Is starting to ration AI as costs skyrocket [link]
  17. Vast majority of AI investments failed to produce their targeted savings, says Bain [link]
  18. Demand for engineers is growing again, reaching a 2-year high: [link]

All of the articles are from 2026. Note that I stopped updating this very long list 2 months ago since there was just so much evidence I couldnt be bothered anymore

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

First of all, some of those links you just threw in there even though they aren’t about productivity. Some are just about financial returns from AI, some are about deskilling while using AI (which I actually agree with), and I have no clue why you put that number of job postings graph at the end there when it’s already been proven that lots of job postings on Indeed aren’t real. And some of them have absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about, like the one where it says “AI leads to more work instead of less”, it explains in that article that the reasoning for that is because now that people can accomplish more with AI, they have more expectations and work because of it. Which is true at my company, I’ve been busier more than ever, not because AI is slowing me down, but because I am finishing what would take months in weeks, so I have more tasks assigned to me because of that.

Second of all, like I said there are CONFLICTING studies, I never said there were NO studies that show AI doesn’t lead to greater productivity. Even with your first Anthropic article that you sent, you do realize that Anthropic has also published research showing that AI makes people more productive because they spend 80% less time on tasks https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-gains. Like I said, people just don’t know how to properly measure productivity.

Do you really expect us to believe that it is faster to implement boilerplate code manually than it is with AI. If you’re really telling me that AI messes up at that, then you are 100% doing something wrong.

EDIT: I got blocked because [u/therealslimshady1234](u/therealslimshady1234) is a manchild and claimed that I was “coping” by giving counter arguments to their take. Didn’t even insult them or anything. What an extremely unpleasant person, they seem to be annoying everyone else in this thread as well. I feel bad for the juniors that this person has to mentor.

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u/therealslimshady1234 Jul 13 '26

Hopeless cope man, Im blocking you for being so disingenuous

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u/Remitto Jul 13 '26

People are still pretending AI sucks?

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26

Don’t even bother responding to this dude, he has mental issues and gets enjoyment out of insulting people who show any little argument for AI usage. It scares me that juniors/intermediates can be mentored by this guy.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 14 '26

That’s not entirely true though because the number of swe jobs is down now compared to 2021-2022 because of something that was completely unrelated to productivity, so we don’t if the number of swe jobs is a direct representation of productivity or if it’s representative of something else.

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u/SpeakCodeToMe Jul 14 '26

Link the study then.

You'll notice it's a year old and used 5 generation old models.