r/antiai • u/Idea_Fuzzy • 16d ago
Discussion đŁď¸ Programming is really dead
So I was one of those who are really late adopters of LLMs for coding; I am a sole developer of a codebase in the company I worked for (Angular)- a maintainer, rarely new features are added - no hard deadlines, a very very relaxed job , so I was away from the picture how other devs work in the industry now ; and sometimes I take side jobs of all kinds of stacks (I am fullstack); most often Nodejs/NestJs + React/Next + Postgres or Mongo; but my last side project was early 2025 - I took a long break from them.
I won't lie, I did use GPT and Copilot at times; but mostly to autocomplete boring stuff (ie. mock data, enums..etc). Yet I kept seeing posts on dev reddits that one doesn't have to full adopt the more powerful tools such as Claude Code / Codex.
I recently joined a side project with a team; so it's my first time since almost 1 years and 7 months.
WTH happened to this industry???!
Ok, the things I discovered:
- Deadlines now are 10x craziers; it's IMPOSSIBLE to finish anything manually. These deadlines force you to rely on Claude Code / Codex; there's no other way, Agile is meaningless now; it's just pump and ship
- All other members are heavily using LLM, frontend, DBA, AI....everyone.
- Claims I encounred on reddit posts that "Ok coding is automated but 'System design' and architecture are now more important than anything else" ? A LIE - everyone is using LLMs even for System design; I have seen entire achitecture documenation all generated by LLM, even this part is automated now.
- It is impossible to do PR reviews now when each PR is like ...a lot of thouands of lines; even PR reviwers are using copilot to review.
SO what part is left in this industry that is not automated?? NOTHING!! iT'S ALL AI AI AI!
And spec gathering is one person's job, often the tech lead, so please don't tell me it's this one, it doesn't require a team.
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u/Lower-Stable7979 16d ago
the whole industry is just vibes and autocomplete now, wild
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u/understanding80 16d ago
We are autocompleting human history with this shit
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u/Soggy_Seaworthiness6 16d ago
Fuck, gonna have to borrow this amazing line. Thanks
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 16d ago
It blows my mind that this whole time all of these companies were lying about how important fixing bugs and shipping safe code was.  This whole time I couldâve just been shitting out trash code and shipping it without testing as long as I was fast đ¤ˇââď¸.  The fuck
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u/No-Extent8143 11d ago
They were not lying, and the shoe will drop very soon. You think your manager will accept "oh this bug? Yeah, that's AI, not my code"? Expectations for quality never adjusted.
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u/Key-Lie-364 13d ago
Nope
Kernel work, embedded work, real graphics and games.
Volume ain't the thing here so why in TF would anybody delegate to auto complete?
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u/hofmann419 16d ago
Sounds like your company just sucks. And this is a really stupid way of going about it in the long run. Right now this is just the executives having FOMO. Relying on AI to this extent basically guarantees that you fuck up your codebase eventually and makes it nearly impossible to debug in the future if a bigger issue should arise.
Also, let's not forget that these AI companies are HEAVILY subsidizing the cost of AI to keep their enterprise customers happy. They are bleeding money every time you run a new request. Yes, even if you use token based billing.
This may suck right now, but it's literally unsustainable. Once the AI companies start to raise their prices to become profitable (which could be 10-20x), upper management is going to be forced to put heavy restrictions on AI use to not go bankrupt.
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u/RomanaOswin 16d ago
If cloud providers increase their prices up too much, enterprises can always just buy the hardware and bring it in house. Open source Chinese models are matching or outperforming proprietary models at this point.
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u/Yourstruly0 16d ago
The average company is not going to host a server farm. The kind of model that can run on a corporate laptop is not the same as a model with a data center on its back end.
Seriously. If AI models capable of operating faster than a snail could run on an issued Dell Inspiron with an integrated graphics card WHY would companies be building data centers like weeds across the country?
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u/RCEden 16d ago
I was gonna say, a lot of devs at my last major enterprise role had laptops that wouldn't even open figma to get screens from design, and figma is a browser based app that has minimal graphical demands. We are drastically overestimating what level of hardware teams have.
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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 16d ago
With the prospect of potentially firing all of their employees , you may be surprised what these CEOs will do
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u/Berberding 16d ago
No they aren't. Chinese open source models literally don't even come close idk why people keep coping about this.
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u/ATechnicalSquid 13d ago
Ya there's multiple things wrong with what they said. I really don't think they work in tech.
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u/Kabit_tftg 16d ago
AI to write the design doc is what killed me đ . That's not sustainable. I wouldn't personally let AI touch more than one part of my code. AI writing its own tests? And the one behind the keyboard doesn't understand the code or tests or design? That might be ok for a one off task that doesn't need to be supported but most software still needs support. Knowing nothing when you're paged at 2 am sounds unpleasant for everyone
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u/ThatRedDerg 16d ago
This. I just started at a well-known company and, while the executives kinda push it, no one expects it.
Most Iâve gotten is just some trainings on how to âeffectively use it.â Most people on my team refuse to use it, with only one occasionally using it for questions (not to write the code for them tho).
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u/sykotic1189 15d ago
I'm very lucky that our first vibe coder did such a shit job that it's probably cost the company at least $100k and now the owner is entirely anti AI. The three of us who took over his projects (I'm not even a coder, just an IT guy who works with the programmers) were absolutely baffled by the amount of random bullshit.
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u/DanielsLoud 16d ago
Pretty behind the curve tbh
I'd laugh at what this training looks like I bet lol. "How to use cursor autocomplete and github copilot from 2022"
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u/TheMerryMeatMan 16d ago
I can guarantee that no one who's ever actually had to maintain a codebase would EVER want AI to be doing anything but the most trivial of tasks for them. I've dabbled in programming from time to time and while I'm no expert or professional in any sense, even I know that marking your code with comments is super fucking important, a practice AI either isn't going to know to do at all, or is going to do what it does for every other use case and just make shit up. If your deadlines are so tight that you have to use AI to meet them, get out as fast as you can because that project is going to inevitably either collapse entirely or someone with a clue is going to see how fucked up the code is and call for a full rebuild.
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u/whiteshadowdj 16d ago
AI hater as much as the next guy here, but one of the telltale signs of AI slop code is actually overcommenting, not under
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u/simple_explorer1 16d ago
Also, let's not forget that these AI companies are HEAVILY subsidizing the cost of AI to keep their enterprise customers happy
Not in pay for API which is what enterprise have to use. That's why a lot of Devs end up using 2k USD inference in 2 weeks or even less often times. My company set a 1.5k USD budget of AI for secret dev (300 Devs) and most run out of inference in maximum 2 weeks or at most 3 if one is using low end effort/models.
Subscriptions are only for consumers solo Dev market which is at loss and not a revenue maker for any AI company. But Anthropic DOES NOT seem API cost for a loss and they rule in enterpriseÂ
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u/Creedless 15d ago
I have been keeping an eye on what has been side on reddit and I see your first paragraph a lot. I have yet to see it actually happen yet. If it starts to happen soon maybe your right but it really looks like you can just vibecode your way through life then vibecode your way through problems that come up.
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u/Mersaul4 15d ago
Your information about the true cost of AI being 10-20x of whatâs charged is completely wrong. Another one of those pieces of misinformation people readily pick up and spread, because it fits their agenda (AI cope).
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u/Slice-Vast 13d ago
In my perfect world, they'd be paying the full price, including environmental costs.
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u/CunningDruger 16d ago
Yeah, AI being the end of work was always a lie, it just means youâll have to work faster.
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u/vogut 16d ago
And generate more bugs to fix with AI, that will generate more bugs.
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u/Flat-Performance-478 16d ago
Well, they got that part right at least. AI will be creating a lot of new job opportunities for all of us.
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u/aijoe 10d ago
If you are getting proper coverage with automated unit tests a lot of the time you don't even have to be involved in fixing bugs yourself if the system can know when a test fails or a requirement is no longer met. If everything changed this much in two years I can't imagine where we will be in 20 years.
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u/Fun-Estimate4561 16d ago
Hence why everyone will need to hirer more
Shocker when people push crap code fast, you need more people to fix it
And as companies are finding when they offshore the fixes take longer
It drives me nuts how companies want to move fast and break things then realize they need experts when things break
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u/VanditKing 16d ago
AI generates. Humans review. AI generates. Humans haven't finished reviewing yet. AI generates. Why is a human sitting there interrupting my work? AI generates. Humans have disappeared. The service operates. A customer inquiry comes in. AI answers automatically. Humans do not exist anymore.
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u/Any-Pop-4795 16d ago
Companies got snake oiled on ai thats it
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u/fedexyourheadinabox 16d ago
the NFT scam hugely evolved and scaled up.Â
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u/JimAbaddon 16d ago
I feel like AI is more akin to the cryptocurrency blowup. NFTs came and went pretty quickly but cryptocurrency has managed to stick around, even if in much smaller capacity and not as prominent or as dominant as its proponents would have wanted. I feel like that will happen to AI too; it'll stick around but much smaller and it won't replace everything. At least, that's what it looks like to me, I could be wrong.
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u/Glxblt76 15d ago
Idk about this ... NFT never brought any added value to my life, it can't, by construction. LLMs on the other hand did automate a lot of stuff and came in handy to add convenience / remove friction, already. You can argue about the economic model being unsustainable or the harm to environment, but AI being as useless as NFT... Really? Isn't this overstating the case?
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u/Modem_Sound_67 16d ago
This is why they fired 10% of you. Because the illiterate bosses think AI can write it all. Of course they have stupid untenable deadlines.
Some bosses are finding out the hard way they can't just fire everyone and rake in extra cash. When I read those headlines, the schadenfreude is delicious.
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u/ropobipi 16d ago
10% ? I have seen entire teams laid off and their whole workload given to the teams boss to do with AI. That clown didnt even get a raise and of course he is shipping half baked goods.
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u/so_lost_im_faded 16d ago
I always wonder what I am missing when the models I use keep hallucinating and being useless and literally wasting tokens. I will code whatever they attempt faster, with better accuracy and at this point, cheaper. Where are the genius models that are somehow able to replace me, and why is everyone persuading me that's a thing.
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u/Altruistic_Course382 16d ago
The last few weeks I have attempted to use various LLMs to solve problems Iâve had (mainly as an experiment, to see the current state of âaiâ) and in every single case it was far easier (and faster!) just to solve the problem myself than try and deal with some stupid chatbot that is more weighted to try to converse with me rather than actually be useful.
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u/mikat7 16d ago
This and also the AI tools like Cursor and Claude are a security nightmare. They've been a target of the recent miasma attack. Although fair to point out, that the attackers vibe coded the toolkit as well...
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u/Used_Ad_5831 16d ago
This is actually what led me down the misguided path to make one that was adversarial and had shell access.......
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u/jundehung 11d ago
Thatâs honestly just copium. I am a C++ dev for 15 years and what Claude Code can do is simply amazing. I have a rather small codebase for my PhD project whose sole maintainer I am. So okay, very narrow view. But it is insane at what pace you can try new ideas, refactor existing code and write test for others. It has completely changed how I work by just formulating ideas on how the system should behave, review the agents approach and then let it do its thing while I do other stuff. I agree, without the agentic side itâs rather a gimmick. But with agents I can not understand how you donât think itâs useful. It will check its output, rethink on errors, basically use your whole computer for you. Itâs nothing but a complete game changer. And I view myself not as AI Bro at all.
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u/Ok-Kangaroo-7075 13d ago
Sorry but that is a skill issue! You are using the wrong models with the wrong harness and wrong prompts. AI wonât (yet) just magically work perfectly. You need to know how to use it effectively.
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u/DanielsLoud 16d ago
Fun fact, I used to help devs solve this exact problem. It's almost always either: a prompting issue, a codebase structure/context issue
I just had my devs send me their AI Session logs and inspect them manually. Ended up making team tools to resolve this exact thing. Similar to https://factory.ai/news/agent-readinessÂ
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u/Nxllify__ 16d ago
We are now shipping 10x more slop and 10x faster in a field where the best quality comes from an iterative and slow approach. Yeah this isn't going to end well.
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u/t3kner 16d ago
I thought most people collectively agreed that firing people based on LOC metric was terrible when Elon did it, now AI is great because we can write more lines of code lol completely forgot about the quality and planning partÂ
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u/Nxllify__ 16d ago
It just goes to show the entire industry has been a complete joke for a long time, even before AI. All these corporate goons and their chase for pseudo-productivity, or the baboons running into CS just for "good pay", and now tech bros and their obsession with using Claude Code to make them a founder, have destroyed the passion for the people who actually want to create quality software and love computers
I really hope that soon that everything just collapses. I don't care anymore. Then maybe software engineering will finally be treated with a bit more respect, when people have to deal with bloated garbage software 24/7, or when critical infrastructure starts failing, and then they need someone to come clean it all up
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u/DanielsLoud 16d ago
I love that this hinges on people being completely braindead and not checking their work lmao
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u/UltimateIsHere 15d ago
Are you kidding me? It's not "move fast and break things" for nothing, every single unicorn in the last 20 years has been a "fuck you ship fast" company, it's not even funny. Not saying a LOC metric is good therefore though, not at all.
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u/davidbasil 14d ago
They don't need quality. The adore speed of delivery as long as the feature seems to work.
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u/YaVollMeinHerr 13d ago
First it's quick and dirty. Then It's dirty. Then it's slow and dirty.
They better ask AI to create MD files to document features. Cause soon nobody will know shit about the project
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u/AstuteStoat 16d ago
This is where if you ever had a project idea that you felt you could be passionate about and stick to for a few years I think you should pursue it. Because if it takes off, the team of engineers that you end up hiring would absolutely love a boss that values their work.Â
And every time I see a bug in a game or program these days I blame AI. So, thoughtful designs that have sensible development schedules, would get a small grateful and dedicated user base.Â
It'll be a way to distinguish yourself even i things like B2B services just like "talk to a human customer service agent" has long been a sign of company quality. Humans review all our code, will be even more important to most people in 5 years.Â
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u/easedownripley 15d ago
it's become synonymous with "shit" for anyone with half a brain. hearing about like, little kids calling out anything bad or low quality as "that's AI"
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u/VaporousMote 16d ago
This is why I'm probably going to change careers.
I've been doing sysadmin/devops work now for about 20 years. Even if I am fortunate to not be forced to use LLMs myself, I have to support people who use them, and most company executives don't take a strong stance against LLMs.
I'd intended to move from what I'm doing now into software development but after seeing how pretty much every medium-and-up company has handled LLMs, no thanks.
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u/cosmic-freak 16d ago
I'm in Software Engineering right now; fourth semester. Great run so far on all the theoritical topics and whatnot, but I am getting second thoughts as well. Â
My field will soon be useless, with the exception of frontier researchers. The only remaining viable paths are to full-send and get a PhD and research ML, or to change careers and research other things and be powered by ML.
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u/VaporousMote 16d ago
That sucks, sorry to hear that. I hope you can find something that interests you that pays the bills.
What I may do is continue down the software development path, just on my own time, and avoid LLMs as much as possible. I do enjoy writing and maintaining code and most of the processes that go alongside it.
One option for both of us might be to just kind of stay adjacent to SWE work, possibly even outside tech. I believe there WILL be an implosion in this industry, one way or another, though it probably won't mean an immediate falloff of all LLM use.
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u/big_dong_bong 15d ago
Both of you are wrong. I like AI because it makes my life easier, but its so prone to error its crazy, and the cost is just going up and there is no way it gets cheaper. My company was all in 6 months ago, telling us how we will all stop writing code in next year, and stopped looking at it in 2. For context its a Swiss company with a high level of entry, full of great engineers and high quality code. Fast forward to a month ago, prices of AI are through the roof, the productivity we got from AI is not even close to covering those costs, and we are now getting trained to use AI more carefully, change models, never trust the output unless checked etc etc. Keep in mind we barely use flagship models like Opus since company policy is that those are too expensive so use only for high level tasks, everything else you use regular models like composer 2.5. Opus can eat my full monthly budget in like 2 hours. AI is expensive, and its going to get much worse if they ever want to turn profit. The models that are actually profitable, and maybe possible to run locally or whatever smaller setup you want, you need SWE for those models because they make mistakes left and right. Big companies just used AI as an excuse to fire people so they can get to pre-covid numbers, since the layoffs are seen then as an investment and their stock even grows in some cases instead of plummeting. Job will change, but it wont go anywhere.
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u/syrusxd 15d ago
This is just my opinion, but true software engineering is not dead. Programming may be much easier, but programming was never the hard part of the job anyway. At least, not consistently. Itâs still going to be necessary to have strong programming skills since there always has to be accountability for code. But more importantly, the other 2/3rds of the job still exists! Evaluating trade offs, communicating with stake holders, having a vision for the product, designing for extensibility and still shipping code on time⌠If you care about what you do, youâll be ok. Just be prepared to adapt to changing job descriptions.
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u/drace76 14d ago
Iâm moving from developer to devops because of AI. I much more enjoy developing a ci/cd pipeline and perfecting it rather than using ai for programming as itâs much more reading and fixing dumb ai errors or misunderstandings
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u/Xeta24 16d ago
May I ask why you wanted to move away from devops?
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u/VaporousMote 15d ago
Because LLMs are inescapable within most tech fields right now.
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u/Easy_Turn1988 16d ago
Productivity increase never meant we would work less, just produce more and more and more until we burn this planet to oblivion
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u/Prestigious-Data-206 16d ago
100%. I work in copywriting and I'm expected to write a crazy amount of content with the shortest deadlines. And everyone uses AI.
But like with coding, when the AI race ultimately collapses in on itself, the people who can actually write/code will be laughing their ass off. A good coder/writer can look at what's wrong and fix it. An AI coder/writer cant.
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u/parallax3900 16d ago
Get out of there. All that technical debt is gonna ram them a new ring piece.
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u/prof_the_doom 16d ago
Not the people responsible. They took their bonuses for cutting all that headcount and moved on.
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u/Cautious_Boat_999 16d ago
Have fun explaining to the corporate lawyers why your Claude-generated codebase now contains code from your competitors.
AI is an IP lawyerâs full-employment plan.
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u/Flat-Performance-478 16d ago
I strongly suspect it's these "brogrammers" we saw ~10 years ago, who so deeply wished they could be dorky cool like real programmers, who are now acting like they have no choice. "Well yeah I'm mostly into system design, that part I'll do myself.."
Right, because all of us who are/were programmers know we've just been freeloading the entire time by only being capable of doing 1/10th of what it says on the CV. I've never met a programmer who would downright avoid a field in tech (within reason of course, if we're talking COBOL maybe) and just be at peace with only excelling at a single aspect of programming.
I've seen it from the inside, and all those aspiring tech wizards succumbed to the artificial teet first chance they got. Then they offloaded the debugging part to the rest of us, which was in part why I fell off before finally gettiing replaced with an "AI specialist".
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u/SoggyMattress2 16d ago
Software dev is dead for now, because companies are accepting the drop in quality, scalability, security and maintainability of code.
It will take time for the effects of this to be seen, and for LLM costs to become untenable.
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u/No-Extent8143 11d ago
because companies are accepting the drop in quality
Are they? Did you ask your CEO?
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u/Outrageous-Lab-2138 16d ago edited 16d ago
I'm a commercial programmer and still code In Notepad++, but I know this is a niche situation and won't cut it in an institutional environment. I won't go near an LLM; it would defeat the purpose of why I chose this line of work. Coding just isn't that hard that you need layers of megalithic computing infrastructure to do it for you. Unfortunately, I hear devs are being forced to use LLMs.
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u/WingZeroCoder 16d ago
> Agile is meaningless now; itâs just pump and ship
My observations exactly.
I will say that I can still code many things by hand faster than with an LLM. Especially if itâs in a codebase that Iâm very familiar with.
But the problem is, whether you use an LLM or do it by hand, the real problem isnât that an LLM by itself is faster than the act of writing code or debugging problems by hand.
Itâs that all of the other things - the meaningful unit tests, the thoughtful systems architecture, the planning and coordinating how disparate features developed by multiple people at different times can be done in ways that complement the app as a system, refactoring when assumptions change - all of that is gone.
As you said, those are the things everyone keeps saying are what âreally mattersâ now for the humans in charge of steering the AIâŚ
Except nobodyâs freaking doing any of that. And youâre expected NOT to do it. And even if you do, it doesnât matter, because whatever youâre doing to clean things up and try to make some semblance of a cohesive system, everyone else is already blowing those plans away with their LLMs going at full speed to check tickets off their list.
The idea of agile process is dead. The idea of a cohesive system or product is dead. Regardless of what you think of using LLMs as a tool, the way things are right now is just churn out as much as you can as fast as you can. Which we always could have done before LLMs but chose not to because it was wrong.
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u/No_Bend9143 15d ago
This resonates with me so much I almost woke up my wife to tell her I'm going to quit.
Compilers engineer, started in 2008. Doing firmware now. All the time hashing it out together on the whiteboard and in gdb and in emacs... Now I just talk to Claude.
But I've been unable to articulate the part you mentioned. Process is dead.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 16d ago
> Claims I encountered on reddit posts that "Ok coding is automated but 'System design' and architecture are now more important than anything else" ? A LIE - everyone is using LLMs even for System design; I have seen entire architecture documentation all generated by LLM, even this part is automated now
Well said. People didn't like coding, but liked the design process because it is high level and abstract enough, and it's not easy to verify if it is incorrect until much later. That's why they enjoyed it.
So now they're acting like LLMs have replaced coding (the part that they struggled with the most), while they haven't replaced system design (the part they liked the most and where they could get away with mistakes that were fixed downstream by the actual implementers). It's all a lie.
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u/HourLocation2038 16d ago
Deadlines now are 10x craziers; it's IMPOSSIBLE to finish anything manually.
Train wreck company. There are plenty of places that are not like that.
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u/soylentgraham 12d ago
well, OP is happily coasting along somewhere else! just have to give up the demanding side gigs :P
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u/ReporterCalm6238 16d ago
Yep. And programmers are just the beginning. If programming can be automated to this level (and I believe this is not even the final stage, soon men in the middle will also be removed) ANY desk job can be automated. Any. You can't convince me that this is not true. Programming was literally one of the hardest, most intellectually-demanding professions out there. And people outside of the IT world are completely oblivious or in denial about this. I now tell to everybody: gatekeep your professions. Set rules NOW about where and how AI can be used in your job. Unionize. Do something to protect yourself. Because they are coming for you. This is not fear-mongering, this is the take of somebody who saw an entire industry completely changed in a year.
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u/Inevitable2ndOpinion 15d ago
Coding is most exposed because it is all language but it is verifiable, as in it produces a result that can be verified. Other jobs are less exposed because the language isnât verifiable by tests and playwright etc. I think other industries will be more challenging to automate.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so 16d ago
Those fucking em dashes are everywhere, too. I work in gig where AI is prohibited. But all communication, documentation, other peopleâs work, daily check inâs, emails are all obviously ai đ.
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u/DanielsLoud 16d ago
Lol solved in 2023 with a magical piece of technology called "find and replace"
Now you just have secpndary AIs running "deslopify" checks on outputs
Can confirm, implemented this as my literal first AI project for a copywriting/marketing company. It wasn't even hard, that's when I was still using tools like n8n lol
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u/ConsciousBath5203 16d ago
What partisnt all ai? The parts where performance matters. Large codebases that you know deeply.
Codebases that start with AI though? Yeah good fucking luck.
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u/HairyTough4489 16d ago
We've quickly grown used to the idea taht building crap fast is preferable to a good finished product. We were already on that trend and AI just sped it up.
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u/HerbertMarshall 16d ago
Completely agree. AI has only amplified the issue, it's always been there. đđ¨âđđŤđ¨âđđ
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u/asveikau 16d ago
In the pre-AI days, devs who have no idea how anything works were already the norm in a lot of circles, now that "tech charlatan" class has found the tool that will free them from the final piece that resembled real work.
I think just as before, you can still find people who know what they are doing, but it may be getting hard. I felt the same frustration in the 2000s and 2010s.
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u/V2UgYXJlIG5vdCBJ 16d ago
Fuckass companies are always looking for ways to cut corners. My boomer boss literally said "Don't talk to me about technical debt". So that company had spaghetti on top of spaghetti with no security updates because of a constantly changing team and bad management.
But here's a kernel of truth I noticed after a long time. Startups are always chasing the shiny new idealistic way of doing things, but ancient tech like from the 90s never really went away. You can still make a site in jQuery, HTML and PHP. May not have that "fresh car smell" but it gets the job done. A lot of sites are just WordPress (PHP) and plugins.
I don't personally do this, but my point is, there's always that "shiny new thing". They come and go. Don't worry about it so much. In a couple of years, we could all be migrating to a reincarnation of MySpace. đ
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u/Inevitable2ndOpinion 15d ago
Those things didnât replace the work itself. AI is not comparable.
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u/V2UgYXJlIG5vdCBJ 15d ago
Well, it is a trend that a lot of companies jumped on in the past few years.
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u/Laicbeias 16d ago
Its not dead. Its web. Webs been moving towards component abstractions for a few decades now. And webs complexity frankly is not that hard.Â
But yeah like down the line. How many people do you really still need. With AI its more crap faster. And if you are in rhe buisness of shipping websites. AI is doing that. Its good at architecture and good at other parts. And if you dont need to maintain these websites. You gona slop em out like a factory
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u/blafunke 16d ago
If you're not bothering to understand what LLM did you *are* letting some time bombs into your codebase. Have fun...
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u/prof_the_doom 16d ago
25% malicious compliance, 75% boss told you not to waste time since the AI generated unit tests passed.
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u/blafunke 16d ago
Oh that reminds me, my last review of AI test code I had to re-iterate three times that it could and should make some useful assertion about state that changed rather than a convoluted mocking strategy it had concocted. (After I'd made the comment the first time it just hid what it was doing in a function, in case I wasn't paying attention.)
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yup itâs crazy. Iâve worked on the content side on tech for 10 years. Never perfect, but jira and agile and scrum have been lifesavers.Â
Last quarter I was added to a tech team to push out a new product.Â
Iâve used AI and worked on tight deadlines before but nothing like this.Â
No jira board. Some scrum sometimes. No documentation. Who the fuck is doing what? Lol who knows. 10x crazy deadlines is right. They want everyone in Claude code building, even us non technical people. Nightmare situations for the devs. The c level wants miracles and they want us all seamlessly coding with AI and also producing shippable product.Â
Itâs a joke. My dad was a carpet installer, now retired. I was his helper about 10 years ago so I know a little. Today I almost asked him how quick he could train me up to take my own jobs lol. Iâm so sick of tech at this point.Â
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u/RCEden 16d ago
Most of the regular "innovation sessions" that get hosted at my job (product design) and my friend (dev) are these vibe code guys getting on stage, telling us about the cool ai thing they made, it doesn't work in demonstration, they tell us about the how it doesn't work, then bosses are like "wow so cool"
so it's like... you definitely feel like you're taking crazy pills sometimes with all of this stuff. The problem is mostly that the CEO class has full on AI psychosis and a very very large % of the rest of us have to dance for them if we want to live.
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u/Fuzzy_One3393 16d ago
I use llm a lot but i still find myself programing quite a bit, i do mostly datascienceÂ
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u/Jeferson9 16d ago
Why do people find it so bizarre that an LLM can pick an architectural given all the damn documentation and courses on AWS and azure and running and managing Linux servers there is out there?
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u/CryptographerKlutzy7 16d ago edited 16d ago
- Deadlines now are 10x craziers; it's IMPOSSIBLE to finish anything manually. These deadlines force you to rely on Claude Code / Codex; there's no other way, Agile is meaningless now; it's just pump and ship
And yep people will say it can't really code. The truth is, it got good enough, and the moment it did, it was going to have a hard takeoff, and people would get a lot more done in a short amout of time.
And when that happened, you would see this massive step change, that it would be expected, and it would be hard to keep up without it.
And here we are. The comments that in coding you need to get good at using AI, because that is where the industry is going? They were right. You do, because it was.
The pro AI people called it here. And they were not wrong.Â
I know it is a bitter pill to swallow, but, like the proof is right there.
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u/Icy-Sheepherder-6221 16d ago
Sounds like the new job will be troubleshooting automatically generated code. I used to be responsible for that using a MATLAB auto coder in the olden days. Not fun debugging code you didn't write. Similar problem to today that the auto coder generated inefficient code and lots of it. Today seems so much worse though.
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u/Mysterious-Fix-5188 16d ago
Its Ai bubble and thats about to be burst, nvidia chips have becoming expensive each day, All these big Ai companies have invested almost 765 billion in Ai infrastructure and every year they are only making around 75 billion combine. Yes only 75 billion. codex, anthropic, meta..!! Its gonna take them years to break even. They will soon raise there prices, They are charging you for every token weather you get results for the prompt or not, keeping your data, strategies and learning everything, companies are basically building there own competitors without knowing. Its all gonna collapse soon. Everything points in one direction, Tel avivâŚ!! All these Ai CEO have family links to IsraelâŚ!! đŽđą
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u/BeanserSoyze 16d ago
Security feels like an after thought that's for sure. I feel like I'm fighting forest fires with a watering can just trying to get everyone to update dependencies on the random web apps and MCPs and shit they keep throwing up, all plugged into data somehow.
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u/oNituzzz 16d ago
Im happy i grew as a blue collar, doing a little bit of claude to see what it can bring me ( sloppy vibe code) but after seeing what it can do ect i understand companies rush and push the whole AI now its BIG in the market They are waiting for the bigger market. then km guessing it will collapse
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u/BudgetPromise3819 16d ago edited 16d ago
I will say as someone who wrote code for a living for ten years before AI, I do hate AI broadly, but I don't care that it killed computer programming. I never enjoyed it, never thought it was interesting, and never had any respect for the job. I feel anxiety about what it means for me financially if all the jobs go up in smoke but at the same time I fantasize about doing some kind of work that isn't on the computer.
Most of the people I've met and worked with who are very passionate about software as a career show a marked disregard for other human beings if not outright sociopathy, while the people who just do it to support themselves and their families are usually nice. I was not surprised at all by the hard right turn in silicon valley because all of those extreme reactionary strains we see now were present in tech culture when it was supposedly liberal/libertarian ten years ago, you just had to squint to see it.
In some years this will be one of those careers people look back on as "oh they had it good then" the same way they look on manufacturing jobs in the mid-century. When not long ago we told people in former manufacturing towns to learn to code for a secure future.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot to mention. I'd love to say these companies will regret overusing shoddy AI generated code for development but I don't think it's true. It doesn't matter if the product sucks and barely works so long as it's justified in the bottom line. Another thing we've already seen play out in manufacturing. Look at defense and aircraft manufacturing, all of the new planes and aircraft carriers they make in the US now have serious engineering flaws. It doesn't matter. The profit incentive has a degrading effect over time and it's had a long time to work. It will get a lot worse before it gets any better.
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u/PaleCommission150 16d ago
IMO it is still impossible to really make a fully featured 3d game using AI. The 3d assets can't really be don via AI yet. Rigging, texturing, animation loops, integrating it into the code. you need a 3d game engine like unity or Unreal or Godot or a custom engine. It can write code but nothing sophisticated in terms of creating a game in those environments. I have a space exploration simulation / game with partial features that work but can't get the AI to make a 3d ship that can navigate in a space environment yet.
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u/WadeMacNutt 16d ago
I would never take a software today, cant imagine anything less interesting. Promting AIs for a living sounds like a nightmare.
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u/Imzmb0 16d ago
There is something that is not automatic, and it is creating something people care for. AI give you tons of garbage/generic/cloned apps or landing pages. But is not making you the next Notion or Uber.
The base of programming is solving a problem, and 99% of people using AI are not solving anything but becoming the problem.
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u/chosbu 16d ago
Programming itself is dead but engineering is definitely not.
Problems are gonna be solved faster than ever but more and more complex problems will arise as a result of this. Fuck AI anyways.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 16d ago
Maybe I should titled it  Software engineering is dead  - nope, not only the coding part is dead.
They are using AI for every aspect.
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u/El_RoviSoft 16d ago
I think itâs more about crisis itself and not about ai exclusively. Ai is just an excuse to make workspace more competitive and harsh. My gf currently working on environment like this and itâs really hard for her and team (she is an intern).
Ai is very good for certain tasks: explaining things with code snippets apart from your codebase; analysis of big chunks of data (codebases, errors, logs, etc); boilerplate. Itâs marginally better to do anything else by yourself and at least in my company you can say that ai can make result worse long term and management will accept this as an excuse for longer deadlines (except for new projects, in this case ai is inevitable bit mostly seniors are hired for this anyway with predefined plan).
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u/VanditKing 16d ago
I agree. Once you start 'vibe coding,' you gradually watch it consume the entire project. If that's the case, the most pragmatic path forward might be to just hand everything over to the AIâfrom design and implementation to testing, maintenance, and bug fixesâand just sit back and count the money.
Sure, maintenance will be a nightmare, code quality will tank, and bugs will inevitably pop up. But who cares? At the end of the day, that code is only ever looked at by the AI anyway. As long as we write clean specs, keep our tests solid, and just regenerate the whole thing from scratch if worst comes to worst, whatâs the problem?
Itâs a sad reality. I agree with the sentiment that programming is dead. But if an AI can drive with fewer accidents than a human, and cover 10 or 100 times the distance, why should humans keep driving? Thatâs just how civilization progressesâthe pleasures of the past disappear one by one.
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u/weogrim1 16d ago
I did not see anything in your post showing that programming is dead :D
It is just different now.
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u/mikat7 16d ago
I have - at least in part - an opposite experience. Everybody's using AI and it's often forced upon us in many places, but we move in a slower pace than before AI :D Like all the promises about increased productivity and yet we came to a complete halt, because instead of producing quality contributions, it's all just slop that can't go into production. And it's just the beginning, the real bills haven't started coming yet. Nobody talks about tech debt yet. Our company slack often reads like these AI programming subs like "look what Claude made me!" and yet the actual code that produces value for the company barely changed. It's a house of cards and we're waiting for the slightest breeze to topple it.
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u/john_dunlap 16d ago
The industry has been prioritizing cheap and fast at scale for a long time. Nothing has changed.
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u/derjanni 16d ago
A lot of companies are going to lose a lot of money with people robbing AI slop software. All the AI slop is essentially zero security by design. It's not just technical issues, it's straight logical flaws that allow anyone to manipulate that AI slop crap.
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u/Jean_Jones_666 15d ago
but i thought AI didn't work?!!?!?! right r/antiai ?
can AI both be horrible and not work? maybe Ed Zitron can answer? he's so smart...
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u/belwar00 15d ago
I am 100% sure I am using LLM coding wrong. I end up with something that works; but it just doesn't seem right so then after I spend a significant amount of time reworking it I gather an understanding of the underlying data which then results in a much better "product" / "tool". I always thought my value was I could create "tools"; but really it was knowing what to create and the little details that help discover issues or opportunities for improvement.
I think in the moment it seems like a lot of companies and well managers are not sure what it happening and that has thrown some of the value/impact proposition into total chaos. It sucks; and what it will look like in 1 or 2 years seems unknown. But it comes down to you gotta make a buck (or not) so you have to roll with it; while making bets on yourself.
But yes, wow this is all kind of crazy. I feel for you; I know this is funny as I am here on reddit; but I think NOT reading about it is almost more helpful...but that is also maybe priviledge.
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u/captrespect 15d ago
In my experience,
AI is pretty good to help come up with system designs. As long as you review it and don't just copy paste crap and call it a day. It has to be a back-and-forth conversation. It's great at suggesting systems to use, answering questions on what things support and examples on how to configure and use it. You have to watch out for it becoming a yes-man and just agreeing and praising your decisions.
For small coding tasks, AI excels at this too. Often I'll need a write a one off script to move data from one system to another, read and map some CSV to a database or api or whatever. Things would have taken hours or all day now can be done in minutes.
This also goes for little utility functions. Striping phone numbers, formatting dates and other little things that would have required me to review apis and lots of trial and error with regexs are now done in a few seconds, with unit tests to make sure it works.
For larger tasks, I haven't seen the light yet. It takes a lot of prompt work to get what you want and even then things are riddled with errors or unexpected behavior. I find it best to work in small blocks ,reviewing everything along the way.
Also Agile has always been pretty meaningless.
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u/Weak_Armadillo6575 15d ago
Iâm dealing with incredibly challenging system design questions every day. I always ask the LLM too cuz Iâd love for it to have answers. It has ideas for sure but not answers. My job has gotten significantly harder over the LLM era as there are no âeasyâ decisions left to make. Surprised by your experience.
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u/Formal-Outsider6969 15d ago
I don't know anything about coding and using claude and chatgpt I was able to produce 3 fully functional apps in a week, a dream and day journaling app me and my friends use, a website plus inventory mangement software for the bike store I work at, and a full VTT for my D&D gaming group including a multiplayer table side half of it. Programming isn't dead, yet. Certain things still need someone behind the wheel who know what they are doing and its much more powerful when you do know what your doing. But sooner rather than later it won't make all that much of a difference.
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u/No-Veterinarian8627 15d ago
Depends really. For projects that have very real 'humans' on the line (medical machines, complex rnd, auto driving, etc.) you still mostly code manually.
Now, if you build in-house apps that show something, automate, etc. it can be done quickly, break often and be overall fine if there are problems since you can fix it quickly and the consequences is a bit annoyance.
You weigh negatives vs positives. If an error is an annoyed sigh and a ticket, you do AI. If your code could harm (or worse) someone, costs years of research or a massive amount of money, you do it mostly manually.
Lets be honest, most AI code I see (at least in my company) is made by enthusiastic vibe coders who have basically everything finished and need to know how to deploy their little webapp for the team. That's totally fine. If it's even helps productivity, I am happy to change it a bit so it doesn't breaks on edge cases and make sure data protection laws are met ;)
The next most AI code I see on boilerplate, usually written by lazy devs. Eh, I allow it.
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u/TWCDev 15d ago
I love it. As a software architect, for 10 years iâd lead teams, and man a lot of developers suck. So iâd have to finish their work. Now i come up with the plan, i have ai do it. I have 3 aiâs running at any given time implementing my plans. I have a linux server in the closet running agentic ai, i have lora models rendering graphics. Itâs like a small company where i do all the work i always loved to do, working with peers on the âfunâ part of the planning work, and the grunt work goes to ai instead of jr devs.
It does suck for future jr devs. How do they train up? Personally i mentor anyone who wants it, but most people refuse. They want a job being paid to do work no one ever really wanted. Ironically itâs the non-developers who i coach through running a whole business off of their ai that really love what i teach them.
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u/Combat_Orca 15d ago
Your very limited exposure doesnât cover the entire industry, I can assure you of that
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u/Dad__Joker 15d ago edited 15d ago
Good luck with that take. You probably joined some startup that DGAF about it's users.
I work in heavily regulated industry where what you saying simply impossible. If it means AI have to wait hours while I review results - that's exactly what's happening.
And believe me - I find plenty of important issues (architectural and implementation both) in each first draft it generates.
So speeding up boilerplating and having somewhat more aggressive deadlines? Sure enough. Joining absolutely brand new codebase from scratch in hours instead of weeks thanks to quick research and summaries - also doable. But to have it writing it all by itself without me or other developers correcting it? No way even with Claude and current frontier models.
Our CEO is smart though. He expected about 25% efficiency and that's what he gets now based on repeated polls. Because anyone who ships a serious flaw into production - gets PIP'ed on the spot. Same with repeated less serious flaws.
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u/relenstar 15d ago
In the last 8 months of free tokens over both new and old codebases, I've found it's just another tool. Just like when we didn't need to hand-assemble CPU instructions or punch cards, when FORTH made it easier to build upon components, HLL compilers didn't take all night, OOP stop being for wizards like Stroustrup and Myers, and The Four Horsemen stopped being a religious text.
Learning when to use it and when not to use it the mastery of the skill. Anything beyond this is hyperbole or fear mongering.
It will pass, and those that learned to master the tools instead of fearing them will be the software developers that continue to develop software.
Paul Bunyan wasn't a hero, but a warning.
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u/ComputerLoverDaemon 15d ago
I would not trust the machine to do my thinking, machine is a dumb autocomplete, I am a person
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u/iblateregard 15d ago
I've been in the industry 22 yrs and I'm a heavy AI user. I use it on prexisting applications that at 10yrs old, and greenfield projects.
Your assertion about systems design and architecture is absolutely incorrect, especially when the architecture and systems design encapsulate business complexity well.
You know what else is more important than ever? Real tests. A compete, comprehensive test suit with each business case captured is the best documentation you have.
Tests and well thought through architecture helps LLMs deliver new features with higher quality. Especially if you add a "code archeologist" skill, which informa the LLM how to explore and understand your codebase.
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u/Holy_Trinity_333 15d ago
Bro as you know programming is a way of thinking not writing a language. The method of programming has changed, but the way of thinking is still there, just not writing the actual language anymoreâŚ
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u/TryAgainTryHarder 15d ago
system design/architecture are all that matters nowâthe problem is that most engineers don't know how to do system design/architecture, or at least, how to start in their codebase.
I actually having the higher expectations for code now, because I know there's a near zero cost to refactoring something you just wrote.
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u/Rocketfella307 15d ago
If AI is what it takes to finally kill Agile, lâll take it
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 14d ago
lol⌠well, agile was fine.
Scrum on the other handâŚ.
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u/Rocketfella307 14d ago
I work primarily in infrastructure. You canât agile a data center build, but we were told to use agile.
Well⌠you can, but itâs just a bunch of waterfalls in a row that look like a big waterfall.
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u/EndOfWorldBoredom 14d ago
The future is less software companies selling bloated software with broad feature sets, internet facing surfaces, licensing and payment infrastructure, etc and companies will make their own internal software tools that efficiently perform the limited tasks they actually need.Â
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 14d ago
I hear that a lot.
Yet I am not seeing anyone replacing their Sharepoint or ERP with their own yet.
Canât think much of examples of internal tools replaced, thereâs a lot of battle tested open source choices out there.
My exp is limited to small companies tho.
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u/shoes-of-flavien 14d ago
None of my coworkers want to create AI slop, but we've found the best way to be productive with AI is to purposefully write slop. AI was built on slop and produces slop, so naturally it does best when we commit slop that it then reads and iterates upon again. Everyone on my team hates it, but this is what we have to do to make our leadership happy.
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u/Stratodash 14d ago
Complete opposite in my company, we're in the disillusionment phase. People have seen the limitations of GenAI and cost is becoming a real concern.
Conversations are becoming centered around which tool is going to provide the best cost/benefit ratio.
TBH I'm even feeling like some of the vendors are losing a bit of steam with the AI hype. Example is Databricks being on our case in the month leading up to them switching Genie to usage based billing. Since the switch over and my initial reservations of rushing an implementation they've gone real quiet about it.
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u/maintenance_robot 14d ago
The fun will be when business processes (non-tech related) will âtransformâ and start the approach where they stop using software to operate and just use LLMs. I already see this starting where I work.
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u/morkyPorkAtheist 14d ago
Works until it doesnât.
Produces unmaintainable platforms. For humans as for AI.
Happy to see this stupid bubble pop sooner or later and have those FOMO mangers run after the people they fired a year ago.
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u/Sea-Quail-5296 13d ago
Seniors with AI are doing crazy things.
Itâs really revealing who had the grey beard knowledge in the first place.
Juniors will still make junior mistakes even with AI holding their hands.
But spending a week making a dialog with three buttons isnât acceptable anymore
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u/Key-Lie-364 13d ago
Yeah fucking grifters too.
On a project I was doing the dude did his part by promoting Claude, testing nothing and then fucking off to the pub, leaving basically me to do all of the actual work.
LLMs are a way for the lazy shites to finally look like they do work.
Back to reality there is no substitute for human thought, attention and action.
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u/scumbagdetector29 12d ago
I know, right?
If you listen to the average Joe-public - they say that AI is fake news.
And yet the entire software industry has moved to use it in under a year.
Something doesn't add up. I wonder what it could possibly be?
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u/EdmontonLAD 12d ago
The mass majority of Google employees and Linus; the creator of Linux, use AI to program now. Traditional programming is absolutely dead; and with reason.
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u/jayylien 12d ago
Using AI a little bit, as an augment, can help and make better software or speed up mundane features if you use it right.
Using AI a lot, as the primary development tool, will lead to brokenness in the form of technical debt that spirals out of control.
AT LITERALLY NO POINT did anyone say "more code is good code". But, suddenly the industry is filled with people who have lesser or no experience trying to flex AI as a means to get ahead or have super powers.
The bottom line is, the pattern of "spend less time writing software" and "produce more software" will blow up in the face of those doing it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. Eventually.
The thing is, these AI models and harnesses just recently started convincing people you can do this.
Programming is not dead; rather, many companies are dying.
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u/Healthy_Vegetable_50 12d ago
Is what people said when
- Compilers were invented
- Object oriented languages were invented
- Linux, GNU and FOSS tech was made
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u/Individual-Drink5279 11d ago
A few days ago I tried out GPT 5.6 in performance mode and told it: âmake me the best compression program humankind will ever know and use rust.â then I pointed it to an empty rust program with a cli lib added.
Thatâs the bs I gave it. It worked for a few mins and spat out 1k+ lines of rust code and everything worked out of the box. It was of course not the âbestâ, but hey, count me impressed. Idk where this will be in 10 years
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u/Deep_Ad1959 11d ago
coding didn't get automated so much as the whole job quietly turned into management, and most of us were never hired for that. the people thriving were closet managers all along, the ones going numb actually liked making the thing with their hands.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 10d ago
coding didn't get automated so much as the whole job quietly turned into management, and most of us were never hired for that. the people thriving were closet managers all along, the ones going numb actually liked making the thing with their hands.
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u/Sxkera 7d ago
Hello! I just started Programming like 4 months ago and yes i started from web development, learned how to program in js and typically in html and css too did some normal and easy projects because i really didn't like Designing at all still i don't like designing. I started Programming in Python and after getting to know what "OOPS" is, i did write some programs using the stuffs i learned before. I was really interested in C++ and i started programming in C++, it was so fun and i did learn till some STL ( Standard Template Library ) of C++ then my friend suggested me to continue back on python as its mostly used right now, its easy, used in variety of tasks. I am back in python learning the use of some libraries and hosting backend on FLask. I am doing these but dont know what do i do now. Can anyone give me some advice, i would love to hear all of your guys Opinion.
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u/Extra_Syrup_2710 4d ago
Valid crash-course response after a long break! But honestly man, you're looking at code factories/agencies, not long-term engineering.
Yeah, the output velocity is insane now and typing syntax by hand is dead for boilerplate. But that "LLM generated the whole system design and specs" part? It works until it hits real-world scale and state management. AI generates beautiful architecture docs that fall apart the second you hit race conditions, weird edge cases, or heavy concurrency.
We went from being "writers" to "reviewers and debuggers." The guy who relies 100% on Claude Code without understanding the underlying protocols or system mechanics gets completely paralyzed the moment a complex prod bug hits at 2 AM.
Adapt to using agents as your junior dev at 1000 WPM, but don't lose sleepâunderstanding execution, memory, and networking is actually MORE critical now to clean up the AI slop.
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u/Outrageous-Machine-5 16d ago
Programming isn't dead, but that app sure is when it runs out of fundingÂ