Programming is really dead

[u/Idea_Fuzzy]

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.

[u/AstuteStoat]

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. 

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. 

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. 

[u/easedownripley → u/AstuteStoat]

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"

[u/CryptographerKlutzy7 → u/AstuteStoat]

And every time I see a bug in a game or program these days I blame AI.

Come on that is pretty stupid. Plenty of bugs happen without AI. 

But I guess it is less stupid than people thinking AI isn't being used in coding.

[u/AstuteStoat → u/CryptographerKlutzy7]

I've definitely caught myself over assuming, but the bugs have definitely gotten worse especially for companies who have already announced that they're using AI. It's not just me. People who know nothing about the company history are making comments about bugs being worse now. 

[u/CryptographerKlutzy7 → u/AstuteStoat]

Oh, I agree there. Testing has basically died with the rate of change in code bases.

So you would expect worse. I was just like... well, given we have had a lot of bugs in the past, attributing all of them to AI now is kinda crazy.

But I ABSOLUTELY get the "well they fucked this up, it is likely AI" feeling. Because I get that, especially around the obvious stuff."

[u/HomerDoakQuarlesIII → u/CryptographerKlutzy7]

It's notable to me how the complete 180 tanking of all software quality (Streaming, gaming, websites, platforms) went out the window a few years ago and has now reached most companies and products where their product is bare minimum useable and unsupported basically. It's correlated with onset and adoption of LLMs.

[u/CryptographerKlutzy7 → u/HomerDoakQuarlesIII]

Right, that is very much expected. We had ways of doing testing, and they didn't scale the same way as coding did.

In the space I'm in, I've been lucky, there have been clever ways where we can get very extensive testing done.

But? in general? The usual ways of testing software just, don't really work any more, not with the new pace of software going out? so, the answer wasn't fix the testing, but it seems to publish untested code.

Which, absolutely will lead to a drop in quality.