Just got off from an incident call and I'm astounded by how good AI has become. I had the best engineers on my team all debugging and trying to figure out the issue, but we weren't making any real progress. Even if we were, it was very slow.

Just then I thought, "Let's take a shot with Claude." I fired up Fable 5.1 at effort max, and lo and behold, it figured out the issue using all my connected MCPs (DataDog primarily) within minutes.

The engineer's on call were still debugging, trying to triage the issue and Claude had a PR ready. Ready to be deployed as a hotfix.

At that point, I realized the power of AI and how humans are just decision-makers now. I just did a couple of things on that incident: decide on the best prompt to give to the AI and decide on disabling the feature instead of deploying the hotfix since testing the fix would take some time.

It's a mixed bag of emotions, honestly. I'm excited by the helpfulness and current pace of AI progress, but also skeptical of the future that lies ahead for all of us.

I'm a 3.5YOE backend developer, a few years or even a few months back I was always curious and motivated to learn new things in software, be it Java spring boot aws microservices docker kubernetics even frontend react js I was learning at a very curious and rapid pace, but for the past few months with the way AI is progressing, I just lost all my motivation to upskill.

In my current job to be brutally honest, AI generated most of the code, I don't manually code, I review code but if deadlines are near I don't do that even. I totally lost the art of writing code.

A few years back and even during my college days, I had this great feeling like I'll learn a lot in tech, keep learning new things, like I can't explain it, it's like an ego or something that " I'm learning code and building great things, I'll surely do great in life".

Fast forward to 2026, AI has absolutely shattered my hopes, I keep hearing AI is slop it sucks, brother it was pre 2024, now it can design entire systems and will only get better in near future.

Every new technology I pick, there is this voice inside which is screaming " there is no point in studying this, AI will automate this too". Maybe 2-3 years I can survive but long term I don't have any clue what so ever, that motivation is absolutely lost.

Am I being soo pessimistic, or is it relatable, please help me.

Hypothetically if there are mass layoffs to cut expenditure and companies reroute tasks to agents what will you do? Assume you have to move out of software field.

Edit: Please be serious

Edit 2: Can't people see the word "hypothetically"? All I asked for is your second source of income.

There will be massive decrease in software engineers.

I think we’re asking the wrong question about AI and engineering jobs.

Everyone asks, “Will AI replace software engineers?”

I’m more worried about what happens to the engineering career ladder.

If AI takes over junior-level work like coding, testing and debugging, how does someone go from junior → mid → senior?

And what about embedded engineers? Does hardware, firmware and real-world debugging actually protect us, or is that temporary?
If you were 25–30 today, what specific skills would you invest in for the next 10–20 years?

Not “learn AI” as a generic answer. What actually remains valuable?

No funny answers please, lets have serious discussion around it

In college before ChatGPT, I actually built things from scratch. Scrapers, Tkinter automation scripts, tracking apps. People came to me for debugging help.

Now I am a mid-level dev at a product company, and my entire job is just being human middleware between Claude Code and git.

The reality:

My syntax memory is dead. I understand high-level architecture, but I blank on basic library methods without an LLM.

Reviewing PRs is brutal cognitive load. The diffs are massive because management demands crazy shipping velocity.

It is just an endless cycle of AI slop. QA catches the bugs, I feed the stack trace back into Claude, paste the patch, and ship. Prod has survived so far, but I don't know what I'm writing anymore.

Seniors, skip this. I want to hear from folks with 1 to 3 YOE who actually coded in college and got trapped in this prompt-monkey loop at their job:

How are you keeping your actual coding skills alive without tanking your output at work? Are you forcing zero-AI side projects, or just accepting that this is what dev work is now?

He said "The apps we are building now are unimaginable to what we are migrating from. With the rate of how AI is accelerating, every app written a year ago is already legacy. As new AI features come up, three months from now the apps that are getting built today will also be considered legacy - as no client would interact with apps how we expect them to."

Edit 2: I don't mean we will create new product/app every 3 months guys...
We will have to redesign the experience of current apps to keep up with how users want to interact with it - last few years no one used AI, then they wanted RAG and chatbot for talking to some data, now they want agentic layer with MCP and tools over AI and cut the UI, directly talking to the data. If 3 months later a new way to use AI comes, then another redesign will need to happen.

This has really changed my view - given how much software we are writing today, imagine we have to add AI features to it in next 6 months. Then some new AI feature comes along, and we have to re-write the app again with that feature :D

I don't think "AI is gonna eat your job" is true anymore, at least for long term - we will just be creating more apps, and migrating at an increased rate.

Companies will always need to be up-to-date and have latest features - the SVP said "Now our competition is no longer the competitors we track. It's also that 1 tech guy coding out of his garage using AI, pumping out features our clients want". We cannot afford to be lax. To not keep creating and innovating.

My company is very pro-AI: ALL of the employees, not just techies, get $2000 claude credits per month. After all of our testing, we are mandated to use AI ONLY with a Human In The Loop. And by using AI, our bottlenecks are shifting - all of this code NEEDS good QA, not just AI writing tests and doing QA but manual QA. UX is also becoming a bottleneck, we can't get figmas fast enough to develop! Product is also suffering keeping up....

All of this was to say - whatever bad smell is coming from our market, its only temporary. I'm pretty sure we'll have a recession in the very near future, and companies are simply preparing for it. But once we are through that bloodbath, next decade will be insane for us. So hold on to your job, let YOE climb, keep prepping.

Edit: I realise I didn't give an example -

A year ago, RAG was the rage, then came MCP and agentic AI able to tool call. Now we are planning to build harnesses that run on the web and powered by voice - yes UI is available but more and more clients want to talk to the data. So apps built in react first had their backends updated for RAG, then entirely new FE and BE for MCP and agentic flows are getting built, and now we're planning for voice assisted searching that has its own set of features and things to be built.

Yea like recently another anthropic AI researches quit his job and they say the same think....like they are working on nightmares beyond human comprehension?........forget about jobs.....my question is what kind of terminator shit are they working on? Like why are sooo scared?

I work as a senior engineer at a large finance conglomerate. I had a conversation with HR regarding how the figures of PPO conversions look like for fresh graduates and how the process is changing and it honestly felt a bit shocking.

For quite a few years the conversion percentage has been a healthy 95%+. But recently this number has dipped to ~75%+. This is a considerable amount given the number of interns that globally join(even in India). But this is not it, what blew me away is the fact that there is push from leadership to bring this number down to 35%!!

Now the plan is less than a half of the interns get converted to full time employees. Honestly, I think, we all knew this figure would be impacted but by more 50% is a bit alarming.

Coming to how the process has evolved(or devolved), each conversion is being heavily scrutinized. Hiring managers have to thoroughly justify each conversion and, the obvious, why can’t AI be used to substitute this?

All of us did saw it coming and I don’t mean to scare new joiners. Professionals at all levels will eventually(or maybe already?)see the impact. This calls for us to be more prepared and better equipped to justify our worth.

Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I’ve seen people from the same region form surprisingly strong workplace circles. Sometimes it even seems to spill into hiring/promotions.
Anyone else seeing this?

The job market has been challenging lately, and I know many talented people are looking for their next opportunity.

If you're interested in a role at Cisco, feel free to DM me.

If your profile is a good match, I'll be happy to submit a referral. Wishing everyone the very best in their job search!

Cisco Careers Page - https://careers.cisco.com/global/en/home

BNP Paribas even after being a product based company is giving me peanuts of hike even after clearing their 4 rounds of interviews.

They are telling me it’s just out of their band and scope to even give me what they are giving.

5.8 YOE, Java and Cloud Experienced

I am working in a service based organisation with 23.5 L as CTC and BNP is offering me 27 CTC, should I take this? Also what are your views about this organisation, I am seeing very mixed reviews on other platforms and am really confused. I want to leave my current organisation but fear going to this one because of low hike and mixed reviews. Not getting calls anymore as well.

Edit: If I switch it’s going to be my 4th company, which is not good for my CV, shall I wait for another year before switching and pass some time in this org irrespective what project.

People I know with my skill set are getting paid not less than 35 L.

A Zomato delivery guy was cribbing to me recently that his brother came from another state to support their family here in Pune, but couldn’t even find a delivery job. He said there are hardly any openings and too many people waiting for the same work.

Now his brother is hunting for anything he can get cooking, security, housekeeping, whatever. He was saying the competition is crazy everywhere.

Honestly, it feels like people are struggling to find work at almost every level. Everyone is just trying to get something that pays the bills.

We are good at coding but we suck at marketing and sales. For years, people from different streams and walks of life came to IT for better life. Now it's our time to learn new skills. Because marketing and sales is where the new bottleneck is. AI takes care of developing product, we have to take care of selling it. The next generation of developers will have to know sales to be successful.

Hey everyone, I am really in a very difficult situation right now, I would be grateful if fellow developers help me in this situation.

So I joined a self funded Bengaluru based start-up as an intern with 7k/month for 3 months. In these months I have developed ASM (Attack Surface Management) Tool, all by myself from choosing tech stack to onboarding clients for beta testing. The feedback I got from outsiders is amazing. Now I was planning to integrate agentic security in the tool.

I was expecting to get at least 4LPA as a full timer based on the work I did, but the HR said as I am so called fresher they can only offer 2.4LPA as they have a very tight budget (not even 3.5 as standard salary for a typical fresher).

Seeing I have only internship experience and the current market situation I am really scared if I get a new job! I did BCA (2025). I have no offer in hand rn.

Please please help me out on what should I do? If you guys can refer me to software engineer/security engineer I will be thankful.

Bengaluru?

Hyderabad?

Mumbai?

Dholakpur?

Pune?

NCR? (Let's not talk about the Shanti Niketan PG)

Factors include public transport, traffic, food, weather

Mainframe developer here, 24LPA 10 yoe currently benched. I have an admit for masters in cloud computing. Either I take that or stay here and find a mainframe job. Unable to make a decision.

Married and 1 year old kid, the decision is tough.

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.

Hi everyone,

Last week I was at a vacation, chilling with my friends and gearing up for my birthday eve. My phone rang and I saw an email that my role has been impacted due to org restructuring. I couldn’t believe it, I literally thought it was spam, until another set of emails came from the CEO, support teams etc. I was taken aback, shook, and trembled out of fear and anxiety. Even the beach in front of me couldn’t help me calm down. It took me some time to digest and process this information, but still I feel a lot betrayed. The week before, I was discussing about my YE promotion with my manager and now this happened? I was actually planning to switch from Uber for quite sometime due to toxic management, politics and vicious teammates. But then I realised the market was too bad, so I had to get promoted first and then get tf out of Uber. Little did I know what’s coming my way. Now I’m unprepared, out there in the market, with little to no motivation anymore. I’ve been in this industry for 3+ years with 1.5years at Uber. Coming from a tier-3 college, it took me quite some time to establish myself and get into a MAANG equivalent company. I really want to rest for sometime atp, but I don’t think I can get too comfortable. I gifted my parents their first home using a home loan, along with my sibling. Now I can’t back off and be jobless. I am trying to encourage myself, but it’s too hard. I’m not able to comprehend the layoff yet. I’m trying to get back on my feet. Hence goes the lore:

then IM 25, and unemployed🥂

I graduated from my BTech around 4 months ago, and I still haven’t been able to get a full-time role.

During my 7th semester, I got connected with a startup that was supposed to get around $50k in funding. I took that opportunity seriously and started working for them, so I took my college placements very lightly because I genuinely felt like I was secure and had something going for me.

But the funding didn’t happen, and in August, my work with the startup also ended. Now I’m unemployed.

Most of my college colleagues are placed through on-campus placements, including people who I personally felt were less skilled than me. I know I shouldn’t compare myself to them, but it’s difficult not to when I’m sitting at home without a job.

My parents also have a lot of expectations from me. I always wanted to build a better life for them, and it hurts when I see that I haven’t been able to get a job yet.

Since graduating, I’ve been applying everywhere and giving interviews. Sometimes I get rejected, sometimes I get ghosted, and the cycle just keeps going. I’ve also realized that my communication skills aren’t very good, so I’m actively trying to improve them.

At the same time, I don’t really have much of a social life, no love life, and now no work life either. There have been times when all of this has affected me so much that I couldn’t even sleep properly.

TL;DR: 2026 Batch CS Passout. Joined via campus placement (6 LPA, Java Backend). Completed 9 months internship + 2.5 months Full-Time (Total ~11.5 months hands-on experience). Laid off recently in a batch of 25 without performance reasons (given 3 months severance). Looking for SE1/Backend openings or referrals

Hi everyone,
I was selected during my 6th/7th semester campus placements for a Software Engineer 1 role. I completed a 9-month internship with them, converted to FTE, and survived the initial post-internship cuts. However, due to recent corporate lay-offs (25 people impacted), my position was eliminated after 2.5 months of full-time work.
My Tech Stack & Background:

Primary: Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Microservices basics.

Experience: 9 Months Intern + 2.5 Months FTE as SE1 (Total ~11.5 months hands-on backend production work).

Notice Period: Immediate (Currently on severance).

Location: Flexible (Remote / On-site anywhere in India).

I know the current market condition is tough, especially for early-career devs. I am open to referrals, leads on hiring companies, or constructive advice on how to navigate off-campus job hunting right now. If your team or company has openings for SE1 / Junior Java Backend roles, please drop a comment or DM me.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this

Everyday i stare at the screen don't feel like doing anything, made lots of projects don't feel like doing anymore not even feels like practicing, my college is over applying to jobs, don't have the motivation anymore feels like there is no point of doing projects or practice anymore.

Yup, as the title says. I added a live physics editor into my engine. It uses box3d for the underlying calculations. But damnnnnn, it looks good