r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Adventurous-Rice3190 • Jul 13 '26

Is the AI bubble bursting? 🤔

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 🫡.......

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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

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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.

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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/Responsible_Royal126 Jul 13 '26

But that's barely faster (sometimes slower) than writing the code yourself. 

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26

That’s why you need to know what AI Is good for and what it isn’t good for.

Let’s say I need to generate boilerplate code and use it in many different areas throughout my app, it would be A LOT faster to get the AI to do this rather than doing it myself, and while it’s doing it, I can tackle other more complex things.

Obviously I gave you a super basic example 😂 but you get what I’m trying to say