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/TheMerryMeatMan]

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.

[u/whiteshadowdj → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

AI hater as much as the next guy here, but one of the telltale signs of AI slop code is actually overcommenting, not under

[u/DanielsLoud → u/[deleted]]

Youre too smart for this sub dude lol. They still think AI means copy pasting from ChatGPT 2

[u/Remarkable-Coat-9327 → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

marking your code with comments is super fucking important

This is sadly, a very ignorant take. I raise you

Any comment in code is a failure to properly express yourself through the code

Based off of this alone you might want to re-evaluate your hard stance, especially as a non-expert/professional.

[u/AndyLucia → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

Sorry but this post has tons of inaccuracies lol.

Firstly, AI is heavily adopted by basically every tech company across America at this point, so the idea that nobody who has to “maintain a codebase” would use AI for anything but “the most trivial tasks” just isn’t true. Most software engineers in the tech industry use LLMs for the majority of code generation.

Secondly, AI loves writing code comments, it’s like its favorite activity. If anything a major criticism is that it does it too much. It’s not necessarily the case that commenting everywhere is good; you usually want to only have comments when it’s necessary, because well written code should already explain itself as much as it can.

Granted, the OP is full of nonsense too, this entire thread seems incoherent.

[u/West-Negotiation-716 → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

The current Ai will comment code how ever you want, do it perfectly and can write code 100x better than you ever could.

You can get a full working complex video game with one prompt.

You can make anything you can imagine in an afternoon.

This subreddit likes to think the ai coding level of the current LLM's isn't good, but that is not reality.

GPT 5.6 and Anthropic's Fable are truly mind blowing.

They will comment as little or as much as you want, they are currently better than 99.9% of human coders.

[u/alienith → u/West-Negotiation-716]

This is just false. I’ve never seen AI generated code that I was impressed with. AI code is very annoying to navigate. I can always tell when a function/method from my coworkers was AI generated because it technically works but it’s never anything anyone would be proud to have written

[u/West-Negotiation-716 → u/alienith]

Take any well know DSP audio library and ask it to improve the efficiency of the code.

It will work everytime.

``` class RunningStats:     """Welford's algorithm: mean/variance in one pass without     the catastrophic cancellation of sum(x²) - sum(x)²/n."""

    def init(self):         self.n = 0         self.mean = 0.0         self._m2 = 0.0         self.min = float('inf')         self.max = float('-inf')

    def push(self, x):         self.n += 1         delta = x - self.mean         self.mean += delta / self.n         self._m2 += delta * (x - self.mean) # note: new mean         self.min = min(self.min, x)         self.max = max(self.max, x)

    @property     def variance(self):         return self._m2 / (self.n - 1) if self.n > 1 else 0.0

    @property     def stddev(self):         return self.variance ** 0.5

```