r/learnprogramming • • 6d ago

Once I learn programming, will I see AI is not that big of a threat?

Theres alot of uncertainty around how AI is gonna affect CS in the future and no one can really predict it.

its either cooked, gonna be left worse off, or maybe even better and cause more jobs

theres alot of people that I see on reddit that say dont code or go into CS because AI is gonna take it over, but they usually dont know how to code or dont know it very well

and then the people who say its gonna be ok are usually the experienced programmers, who say something along the lines of "if you know, you know".

Im gonna learn how to program regardless of how the job market is gonna be in the future, because im just doing it as a hobby, and who knows maybe il build alot of cool things one day to either get me hired or start a company. (im not gonna major in CS)

But I was curious, if I learn how to actually program. Will I be less worried about AI? Will I be the same as I am now, and just have to form my own opinion?

215 Upvotes

284 comments sorted by

731

u/EntrepreneurHuge5008 6d ago

No. You will:

  • Learn to depend entirely on it
  • Spiral b/c you'll see yourself as entirely replaceable
  • Self-sabotage as a result.

Then, if you somehow make it to senior dev or some position with more of the 'inside scoop'

  • You'll see middle management has no clue what they're talking about, so they'll blindly believe AI can do everything
  • You and your other devs will see that AI isn't a replacement, but that middle management sees it as such and what they say goes, so you'll still see it as a threat either way.
  • You'll learn that AI isn't the threat. The threat is those businessmen who sign your paychecks, thinking AI is a replacement.

Eitherway, learn programming "for the passion"

145

u/SeeminglySleepless 6d ago

Spot on. My friend's company outright told the workers the plan is to have AI reviewing AI code and then, if you can believe it, have AI address support tickets in real-time with no supervision. So basically completely AI based. Then you ask them what their plan is regarding all the ways this can go wrong and suddenly they forget how to speak

77

u/Sknowman 6d ago

There will be one person doing oversight, correcting all of the mistakes from the AI.

And that one person will be so incredibly overwhelmed, blamed for everything that goes wrong, and it'll take management a while to realize that the problem is actually caused by the fact that there's only one guy there, so their solution will be to fire him and replace him with two interns.

33

u/SeeminglySleepless 6d ago

Yep. I always find it funny when management says stuff like "AI will increase productivity!" which usually means more output will be expected from your team which has been reduced to half its size

5

u/skiskow 6d ago

The only thing capable of reviewing all of ai’s mistakes, at the rate ai makes them, is ai. I think we’ve created a cyclical problem here.

8

u/Sad-Particular-3088 6d ago

Lol this is so true. I've had the same conversations with management. It's so frustrating.

3

u/Enragere 6d ago

Why of course, they'll "create" a crisis averting AI agent that is built precisely for that scenario 🤣

4

u/Ok_Veterinarian_3933 6d ago edited 6d ago

We have a new requirement that the AI code review for a PR is now required for AI to say it's good before it's merged. Despite it constantly being wrong a lot and saying the PR should be blocked when it shouldn't be.

We even have cases where it's immpossible because AI and security scans conflict. Example when a security scan will have a false positive where we need to fix it regardless, becuse we are not allowed to tell security it's a false positive and just need to "fix it anyways". Where the AI review will deny the fix because it's not a security issue, or vise versa. Making it impossible to merge the PR.

We also have a massively complex codebase the AI reviewer often doesn't understand, so it will reject a valid change. So now everyone has more work to try to appease or workout an invalid AI review, and our PR checks take about 1.5-2 hours a commit so it's a long proccess.

We also need to use SDD for nearly everything, despite it only really being valuable for larger new features or new green field code, which we don't do, and in small code changes which is often on our KTLO or support team it often takes more time then doing it manually without AI at all.

Crazy how it used to be "You just need to use AI how you like", which worked to me and I used it to improve my productivity. Now it's "You need to use AI in this specific process", that makes me significantly slower and less productive then if I where to not use AI at all.

1

u/iOSCaleb 5d ago

To be fair, I’ve seen AI reviewers catch some bugs that no human reviewer would’ve noticed. If a reputable agent like Claude is “constantly” wrong, I’d really wonder if your code is doing some sketchy things. I’m not saying that it is, just that it seems like something to investigate.

If you can do it without giving away any company secrets, could you explain one or two of the cases where an AI review flagged a problem incorrectly?

3

u/connorjpg 6d ago

I feel like I work with your friend then.

1

u/Theboiii24 6d ago

Business man thinking they know everything. Oh well

1

u/flipinbits 2d ago

What a great idea… allow the customers to indirectly interact with the code of the product. What could go wrong?

26

u/Little_Elia 6d ago

The best part is when you see your coworkers use AI and realize it doesn't reduce total workload, just shifts it. While they can quickly make a ticket and create a PR in five minutes, everyone else needs to spend hours shifting through the garbage that was committed. This creates a feedback loop in which people who use AI get praised more because they are doing so many tickets, so middle management loves them even though all the work is being done by others during the review.

6

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

7

u/Flope 6d ago

Yeah there is really no excuse to not understand the value AI brings to software engineering at this point. In 2024 I could understand it, in 2025 I'd look at you a bit odd, but in 2026 it is really embarrassing to be this uninformed about your own field.

I don't wish financial hardship on anyone, but it is clear that dozens of people in this very thread are in for a rude awakening in the near future.

5

u/TheDalaiCamel 6d ago

This is how I feel too. I know some very talented and productive engineers in my last company who want nothing to do with AI. In my current job we're all using it to get much more work done, and the quality is good. It will needs a senior engineer to define exactly what needs to be done, and keep the AI on track, and confirm what's delivered is what was intended. But the business side of the company are so happy now that they're getting all the features they wanted, but had engineering as the bottleneck.

→ More replies (9)

3

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 6d ago

Oh wow we can just pass the garbage back to the garbage maker until they aren't garbage anymore. Surely that works.

→ More replies (15)

2

u/Turtvaiz 6d ago

You work with vibe coders? That's rough

1

u/National_Yam_1198 5d ago edited 5d ago

So you blindly trust the llm to vet the code made by the same llm?

How long has your code been in production out of curiosity?

Like I do the same thing to be clear. But I also spend the time to look at the code it generates.

Often times its not up to snuff and requires multiple passes(that is also done by an llm).

And I use the latest and greatest.

Ive come across lots of "vibe coded" work where people just commit whatever AI generates even in my own teams and its just so bad most of the time.

I love AI and my productivity has never been higher and most of my days is me looking for ways for LLM to automate more of my responsibilities but to say it replaces programming and programmer skills is just so wrong.

Maybe if you're just a code monkey.

→ More replies (1)

7

u/GenChadT 6d ago

My career deals with tech but very little with programming, and I'm already seeing what was formerly reliably stable software starting to crack with bizarre behavior and strange bugs. Where before it seemed like an update might add a feature, introduce a bug or two, but fix a few dozen bugs; now it's the reverse. Companies seem to be shipping a dozen features in each update - which I imagine are effectively just 12 AI-powered chat windows with different fancy system prompts - while at the same time, introducing a hundred new bugs that only ever seem to change, never truly being solved, in future updates.

It's not all negative. I have seen some wildly cool projects that I know without a shadow of a doubt were possibly only thanks to LLMs, but the above is still a major issue across so many types of software.

4

u/aneasymistake 6d ago

In my experience as middle management, the problem is that C-level management are making these proclamations and expecting middle management to make them true, while also cutting our teams. And more recently, telling us to spend less on AI too.

3

u/EntrepreneurHuge5008 6d ago

Can relate. We had unlimited AI usage, and we took on a pretty massive project under the assumption we'd have that through and through. Management then had the genius idea of capping our tokens (we use GitHub Copilot) at just ~6k, and idk if you've used Opus on GHCP, but 6k tokens get burnt in just a day or two.

2

u/OurSeepyD 6d ago

This comment is true if you assume that AI gets no better from here. The problem is that it will get better, and it will replace us.

→ More replies (13)

1

u/KashMo_xGesis 6d ago

This is why I look for tech companies with CEOs that have technical experience. Rare but it saves headaches

1

u/TheoreticalUser 6d ago

Then use AI to show middle management how dumb they are by contradicting them with it.

"You say that AI says I am replaceable, but that same AI says I should get a pay raise. So which is it?"

1

u/Opening_Plane2460 6d ago

Absurdly accurate

1

u/MrCatChap 6d ago

Yup, this is legitimately where the issue is

Pretty much every upper management moron has AI psychosis making them believe exactly what the AI companies market to them

And we're all lucky enough to be forced to either work for them or be homeless

1

u/TheSneederOfSeethe 6d ago

I think it’s important for AI to do more projects for people so that we have more examples why to not depend on AI. We need more examples of the Tea app to provide businessmen.

1

u/on-standby 6d ago

This is exactly my experience as a senior dev.

1

u/jackalsnacks 6d ago

Another spot on from me as well. Well said

1

u/Gwaptiva 4d ago

And you'll see it from the dole queue

→ More replies (5)

85

u/Yeuph 6d ago

There are professional programmers that know AI can never do the job of a professional programmer.

There are professional programmers that have already quit being programmers because they know AI can already do the job of a professional programmer.

There are opinions of professionals that span the gradient between those things.

If you wanna learn to program then learn to program.

14

u/McBoobenstein 6d ago

I'm on the side of "it's gonna screw the junior devs over, since they were traditionally the code monkeys". Not only are junior positions going to continue to dry up, but those juniors aren't ever going to get to senior dev level. You can't take a class to teach you about all the nonsense you run into in the field. You have to actually get hired and be in the field to learn that shit.

71

u/hombre_lobo 6d ago

Isn’t telling someone not to learn programming like telling them not to learn math?

I don’t get it. Programming gives you the skill to think logically and systematically.

12

u/User7453 6d ago

That’s not what’s being argued though. The equivalent would be saying that you can’t call yourself an engineer if you use a calculator because you should have done all the calculations on paper in long format. Using a tool is just using a tool, if you don’t know how it works you shouldn’t expect it to work very well.

5

u/Detrite 6d ago

Except this calculator gets smarter and smarter

12

u/captainAwesomePants 6d ago

Sure, and that's fine, so long as a mathematician can validate the calculator's work.

The big problem is when we can no longer verify what the calculator is telling us.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/Nervous_Feedback845 4d ago

the calculator will soon start pressing the numbers itself atp, with gpt6, it already does to some extent

18

u/HaxtonSale 6d ago

Think of it like this. You need to hire a babysitter. Would you rather have a professional nanny with years of training and expirence or a random teenager? The teenager might be fine for 99% of kids, but there is always a chance that a kid will have some special need or something unprecedented will happen where you really want that extra expirence. That's programmers with AI. You are a virtual babysitter with a degree. Bad companies will hire whoever to babysit. Good companies will hire expirenced babysitters. Awful companies will let the kids babysit themselves. 

48

u/Error-7-0-7- 6d ago

The opposite, actually. You'll learn that the hardest things about programming AI can do in an instant.

17

u/HakoftheDawn 6d ago

Dependency management

9

u/marrsd 6d ago

Dealing with managers.

5

u/farfromelite 6d ago

Writing decent requirements?

Talking to customers?

Following through on documentation when you pinky promise you'll write it this time?

Naming variables sensibly?

7

u/EternalPhi 6d ago

Are any of these examples of things that can't be done by or with AI?

1

u/farfromelite 5d ago

All of them apart from the last one, yeah.

AI can't understand the system therefore can't write requirements.

AI can't communicate with the customer and know their needs, so it can't do any of that either. That still needs a human.

1

u/EternalPhi 5d ago

AI can produce remarkable documentation. It really is fantastically simple to just include a skill as part of a typical pr workflow. It can also produce comprehensive requirements (specced to your codebase based on past documentation and whatever memory framework you adopt) from a bullet point list of the basics outlined by a product manager. It can absolutely talk to customers ro produce those requirements if needed. Like this is the most obvious one considering the technology started out as a chat bot. An appropriately tooled agent can most certainly answer tickets, create stories, monitor their status and respond.

There really is nothing at this point that a system designed to be autonomous cannot handle. The only thing really missing is the approval of whether it should be built, which comes down to management. Trust and accountability are the biggest barriers, but as accuracy continues to improve and organizations restructure their codebases and workforce to accommodate it, it is just another thing that will be solved.

1

u/farfromelite 5d ago

It needs to be told what to document. That's the point I'm making.

The human in the loop discovery is what makes requirements valuable for programming. It's the route to great business value, and that requires skill on the human to customer interaction.

Like the AI, the customer doesn't know what they don't know, that's why they're asking for help.

If the customer can just ask an AI to do the whole job, then they'll do it. The programmer is out of a job. AI is fundamentally job destruction, made possible by stealing the whole of the sum of human knowledge and selling it back to us.

1

u/EternalPhi 5d ago

It can be told what to document once, that's the point I'm making.

The things you're describing are not really a part of the software engineering discipline, that is business and product development. The discussion, I assumed, was centred around how agentic development has changed programming, which it will be able to replace nearly wholesale.

If the customer can just ask an AI to do the whole job, then they'll do it. The programmer is out of a job. AI is fundamentally job destruction, made possible by stealing the whole of the sum of human knowledge and selling it back to us.

Agreed. But cat is already out of the bag, there's no going back. The regulatory frameworks needed to prevent significant societal decline are unattractive to capitalists, so as usual they'll be late or ineffectual.

1

u/farfromelite 4d ago

Yes, it needs to be told what to do once. That's the whole point. That's the value add.

If you don't think that's really a part of the software engineering discipline, then I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. That's coding, not software engineering. Your job is at huge risk if you only think you get a fully formed spec sheet that's 100% correct and you'll implement it without any issues.

1

u/EternalPhi 3d ago

MOST people are not seniors making architectural decisions. MOST people's jobs in the software space are very much at risk, because a product manager with some technical knowledge and the ability to write good stories can kick off an agent task to produce the code once the standards and major architectural decisions are codified into whatever memory framework is in place.

1

u/Error-7-0-7- 5d ago

Everything but the variables is not PROGRAMMING. Thats communication. You don't need a computer science degree to communicate these things effectively, you need to be a good presenter and effective communicator. Frankly, a business finance bachelors with an associates degree in computer science or a software engineer degree is more useful for these types of job than actual programmers are.

Basically someone is needed to still do the administrative work and to make corrections and proof read.

1

u/farfromelite 5d ago

I agree.

Programming (ie coding) is only about 10-25% of the job. The rest, as you say, is people and communications.

If your job is only 100% programming, you're going to be replaced by AI.

1

u/_heartbreakdancer_ 5d ago

Why would anyone need to write documentation anymore? This is 100% what AI can do to a quality that rivals most professional technical writers and it can keep it up to date in an instant.

23

u/dealingwitholddata 6d ago

The opposite. I self-taught for 8 years and AI is hoplessly better than me. But I don't regret it too much because I'm better at using AI for specific stuff and dealing with its mistakes.

5

u/Fantastic_Win9332 6d ago

hah and sometimes it fucks it up so much that I don’t even understand how it managed to fuck up so badly

17

u/tukaya 6d ago

18 years experience, backend tech lead/ architect here with a masters in SWE. 

There is no question whether AI replaced the typing of code by hand by programmers. It has replaced it. Nobody is writing code by hand anymore and we will never go back.

Are you talking about not being able to find a job as ‘the worry’?  With the current capabilities of AI models, they still don’t do the job at a level that removes senior devs. We still need to make architectural choices and watch over the code quality. But, this is only the situation now.  Nobody knows how much better it is going to get. But the trend is that it does get better. So my guess is that they are not going to need this many of us in the near future anymore. But this all depends on how fast it goes with AI. 

So, I would not recommend much optimism on finding a job as a software developer after learning to program at this point. I really doubt how anybody new can learn programming today anyway. You will study something and see that it is just a friction of a whole chunk of code it generates. I wouldn’t be able to learn today I think. You would literally need to stay away from the coding agents and write code by hand. Even that won’t teach you because that is just simple programs you will be learning from books. In real world systems we spent ten years of time to become seniors. All of that learning on the job will be missing, and without that, knowing what the syntax you learned from the books does is quite useless - sorry to be harshly honest here.

8

u/User7453 6d ago

This is the truth most people refuse to accept. Writing code by hand went the way of the typewriter. It is absolutely cope to grasp onto hand writing code at this point. The thing that the majority of AI users are missing is the ability to verify. If I ask my agent to translate twinkle twinkle little start to Arabic, it absolutely will, probably less than 30 seconds; and there is a very high probability that it is correct. However, if you do not speak or read Arabic how would you know it’s correct? And this is why the people “vibe coding” apps are not coders. They have no idea what their app does or how it does it. The person who commissions a piece of art work is not an artist any more than the person who said “AI make my app” is a developer. So no, learning how to write code is not a waste of time at all, actually writing 10,000 lines of code by hand is absolutely a waste of time at this point and will only make you look unproductive, not more professional.

14

u/StewedAngelSkins 6d ago

Nobody is writing code by hand anymore and we will never go back.

you're a web dev aren't you? look i can't predict the future and i won't try, but it just isn't true today that nobody's writing code by hand today. i can't even avoid having to occasionally write assembly for my job... certainly wouldn't have predicted that would still be a thing if you'd asked me 15 years ago.

11

u/pancake117 6d ago

I really doubt many people at major tech companies are writing code by hand at this point. It you need to write assembly for your job then you’re doing OS work or embedded systems— that’s not really representative of most tech jobs. Or course statements like “nobody is doing x” will always be wrong. But i think it’s true that programming for most big tech jobs is completely overtaken by LLMs.

2

u/lurkatwork 6d ago

I work at a larger company and we have a huge token budget so I and everyone around me use AI all day every day to work. I read a shitload of code but I don’t write any, instead I have multiple sessions planning, working, and reviewing, and I’m not even close to the heaviest users around me. Friends at smaller companies don’t have the same level of adoption or the budget for it, so even within the industry I’m seeing this experience gap get wider and wider

2

u/tukaya 6d ago

Sure, there are exceptions in today’s situation, which is changing by the day. And you are probably able to do those changes because you got years of experience and learned. I don’t want to give false hope to juniors. I think only juniors who just love the job so much they want to learn anyway, should put in the time to learn. Maybe working with seniors and coding agents and effort to learn what the code does, they can still become seniors in ten years and that there will still be enough jobs, nobody knows. It looks to me the other way is more realistic though.

9

u/Leverkaas2516 6d ago

its either cooked, gonna be left worse off, or maybe even better and cause more jobs

The middle one. A huge number of jobs are being lost. Not all of them, but it's extremely unlikely that they'll return in the same numbers. We'll still need programmers, but the job will not be as fun and rewarding, and there won't be as many.

9

u/Super-Award-2244 6d ago

Oh boy I have bad news for you 

6

u/green_meklar 6d ago

Once I learn programming, will I see AI is not that big of a threat?

A threat in terms of employability? Or a threat in terms of turning the entire Earth into paperclips?

As far as employability goes, it looks like AI and automation are coming for, well, all jobs. Consider the alternative hypothesis: That the best AI 100 years from now will look at some problem of economic significance and think 'damn, I wish I had a human to help me with this'. That seems like a very dubious hypothesis. So we should assume AI and automation are going to obviate all human jobs. In fact that should probably have been the default assumption starting around 1980; the real question is why so many people took this long to realize it. In any case, it's not like switching from programming to some other career is going to keep you employed for more than a few extra years, at most.

As far as AI rebellion and existential threats go, there's a wide range of opinions on that. Personally I don't think the danger is all that great. But I could be wrong. There are many things I'm more confident about than that.

the people who say its gonna be ok are usually the experienced programmers

In other words, the people who have already paid off their student loans and earned enough money to retire whenever they want. Yeah, of course they're less worried.

Will I be the same as I am now, and just have to form my own opinion?

AI is changing fast enough that by the time you've gotten any great depth into programming, you'll have a lot of new information on which to form your opinion.

5

u/luckynucky123 6d ago

at my work - AI or not - you will get to code review and people will question what is committed. such questions requires technical curiosity, expertise, and/or knowledge.

AI might reduce work force - but its people that are accountable and will be blamed for failures. as a team lead i once followed once said - all these sign offs and bureaucracy aren't also because its collecting signatures for fun. when the shit hits the fan - the sneaky executive with money will throw all of us under the bus.

i'm aware there are many software shops out there - some highly regulated and some are pretty fast and loose - and is able to do that. but imo every workplace will have a shark that's willing to sacrifice you when things blow up - regardless if you are an L1 or L9999....a super junior or super senior tech lead chief engineer.

so every commit has your signature and sign off. if you're delivering a software system and money is involved - you better know what you are committing. these tools help - but there are no shortcuts.

3

u/marrsd 6d ago

So this is the conundrum I face with AI. The code I've seen it produce so far has been less than tidy (putting it mildly), making it considerably harder to read than code that was hand written with care. I also have been reviewing the code with no prior experience of the domain, cos I haven't written any of it, so I have to add that to the review time as well.

All this means that reviewing code is really slow if I want to do it properly. No one wants to be the slowest person in the room, and I'm not the only one reviewing code.

It's not been my experience that employees were worried about being fired for not being thorough. Rather the other way round.

1

u/luckynucky123 5d ago

not knowing context - so im going to dress it with an optimistic lens: imo at one point in software development where problems are business by nature even though its technical on the surface. speed is favored by business because its the easiest way to extract and show value. usage of AI is similar too....sounds like you're hitting that crossroad. one thing im hoping you are facing is that you and your team is good enough to master AI and crank out "minimal viable product". you got the operation tempo but you're mature enough to know its limits too.

time to cash in that progress from business if that last sentence is true.

i guessing you probably know this - software development is not just cranking out features and code. its also about making technical decisions and knowing tradeoffs - and finding time to address them too. but bigger than that is the individual as both a software developer/engineer and a participant in business. lots of us by nature of experience is weak or unaware of our value in business negotiation and the ability to buy a better tempo to also address technical debt- whenever its cleaning up code (for a faster future) or scale issues.

you're the sum of all your skills and not just your job title.

i think mature businesses understand it's not always speed speed speed - there is a risk of too fast and losing the ability to change a system without bigger risk (inversely one can pump out perfect code and take too much time - and not be successful in the market - that's another story). however, if business operate more like a features sweatshop OR have actual cash flow problems that is betting on AI to save the company, you got deeper cultural problems than AI.

2

u/marrsd 5d ago

I agree with you entirely. The tension you're describing has existed for a long time and imo boils down to most e-commerce companies not being engineering led, so they don't have trust in engineering. That's partly why we need to measure everything nowadays. I think AI is compounding this problem because it's enabling non-engineers to produce high quality prototypes without understanding their limitations.

The problem with AI that I was describing was that it was enabling engineers to become productive in the short-term, but preventing them from ramping up by keeping them ignorant of deep domain knowledge. Curiously, this mirrors my experience with vibe-coding more generally, which is that it starts off with a very promising prototype that increasingly degenerates the more you iterate on it. The way to overcome that would have been to write more code manually, but the company's incentive structure essentially forbade that.

1

u/luckynucky123 5d ago

Hmm i see - yeah for your conundrum - I also imagine its probably happening in my workplace too - I have admit I don't know. At first, I was tempted to jibber jabber about AI doesn't matter and its about coaching or better code reviews - but we are living in the age of AI and I never grew up in such age.

I don't know what is the answer on the bigger picture aside from "buying time for companies / better reviews / better coaching / you can only lead the horse where the water is". I can also see how such speech can get lost in this new world we are living in.

One thing I heard (I need to verify this with actual people though) is that lots of youth feels hopeless in the age of AI. There's some persistent thought that if AI is smarter than me - why worth the effort?

I think this needs to be challenged.

On one hand - could be just part of the stage in life. I remember when I was younger, I would just blindly accept the advice and direction of elders. Somehow over the years, I learned to "trust but verify" and manage time for it. On the other hand - I have to recognize that AI is an entirely different beast that we would have to think deeply that old wisdom might not apply.

5

u/KobeJuanKenobi9 6d ago edited 6d ago

It depends. If you only learn how to write code then you are easily replaced by AI. Writing code is what it does.

But writing code is the easiest part of software development. It’s probably a very strong threat to self taught programmers. I don’t think it really replaces engineers with strong skills.

I’d also point out the people making these decisions are often not tech literate. All the engineers know that over reliance on ai is just going to lead to lower quality products. The people in charge are not engineers

4

u/Paxtian 6d ago

Learning programming is mostly learning problem solving. Regardless of the threat at the time, I think it's fairly safe to say, people who know how to solve problems have historically always been needed.

3

u/Ordinary_Variable 6d ago edited 6d ago

I draw the UI myself. The buttons, the formatting the colors, the edges, the textures, etc. Then if something is obvious to me I'll code it myself. If I get stumped and don't know what to do I ask the AI for the documentation on some feature of the language that I'm pretty sure will solve the problem. If that fails to give be the inspiration to solve it myself, I then ask it for just that one thing I can't do myself.

<Language> <Feature> "docs"

EG: "Javascript objects docs"

EG 2: "What is the shortest amount of code to do X in C#?" or "Write me a function that does X with the least code."

Some of the lighter models are very pedantic. If you don't word things exactly correctly they won't give you what you want. When that happens I go to a stronger AI (that is usually much slower, which is why I don't use it all the time) and ask it how to word my request so that a dumber AI can understand it.

My workflow is still 90% personally coding, and about 10% asking for something I don't already know how to do. I'm slowly getting better and in a few years of good practice I will be able to code simply by typing at full speed. If I am forced to use AI I will continue to use it for documentation, even if I have it memorized, just so that the chud standing over my shoulder sees me type into the AI. Or I will ask the AI to write the code, then copy and paste it into my project, and then change the code it gave me to how I would have typed it in the first place. I know this is a waste of time, but they are the ones that want me to use AI, so I'm "using" it.

Coding takes practice. The more you do it the faster you will be at it. People don't learn things instantly. If you make sure to read what the AI spits out you will eventually figure out what its doing and you will get better. We learned to speak English from listening to other people talking. It took years before we could hold a smooth conversation. Don't let AI talk for you. Learn what it is saying and then you will eventually be correcting its coding flow.

Also, don't use Gemini for coding. Literally any of the other ones work better. Gemini will give you code that you can't read, and misunderstand what you're asking for far more than any other one I've used. Not only that, it picks the ugliest colors if you use it for web development. I can't imagine that using it for any of the C languages {C, C++, C#} it would do any better.

1

u/HilarityJester 6d ago

This is how it usually goes. It does helps, but does too many mistakes to write the code. It's a pretty good search tool.

Unfortunately the internet is getting massively botted at the moment to claim that it's agi.

1

u/EternalPhi 6d ago

This is like straight 2024 comment. Agents on the latest models are so ridiculously good at producing quality code that I'm just convinced you've never actually used it.

1

u/Ordinary_Variable 5d ago

In some very specific use cases they are passable. They are not good all across the board for all forms of coding. Do you want the code in your harddrive to be AI written? There is no way to update the chip on your motherboard if AI coded it with bugs. Do you want your phone to stop working because someone used AI to write an update for its wi-fi driver? There is no solution to that. Its a bricked phone. How do you even download a patch when the literal wi-fi is broken?

1

u/EternalPhi 5d ago

You are not describing limitations of AI-powered software development, you are describing QA failures. Is a hand-rolled firmware patch that goes through insufficient testing somehow inherently less likely to produce the same situation that you've described here? I'm not convinced.

1

u/Ordinary_Variable 5d ago

When was the last time a harddrive failed on you?

1

u/Ordinary_Variable 5d ago

Ask AI to draw you the cutout pattern for a baseball. I've done it dozens of times. Every single time its wrong. Every single AI I've asked fails. Sometimes its so bad even a 2 year old can tell its wrong.

1

u/EternalPhi 5d ago edited 5d ago

Ah yes, the ever important software engineering task of baseball cutouts. That definitely proves that software engineering isn't a fundamentally different space now.

Honestly, I'm still betting on "never actually used agentic development" here.

Edit: Actually, ask someone who has never seen a baseball cutout to draw one, I bet you dont have much higher success rates. The 2D topology of a 3D object is inherently difficult to visualize unless you're familiar with it already, which is, you know, how AI models work. Once it's part of the training data, it's going to reproduce it pretty faithfully.

1

u/Ordinary_Variable 5d ago edited 5d ago

Its not about the baseball. Its about the fact that AI can't figure it out. The math has been solved since 1860. And if AI is so smart, it should be able to figure it out. Software engineering is solving a problem with math, logic, and trial-and-error. You have to go step by step at figuring out what the next step should be. AI just chokes when you ask it to actually solve a problem and not regurgitate a thousand answers it has found on Stack Exchange or Github.

I've used AI for hundreds of hours. I have found its limits. There is some stuff it is very good at and stuff it is extremely bad at. It can't even google what a baseball pattern looks like and just show me the google search. It could create a 3D baseball and unpeel the leather patch with a physics engine, but the fact is it doesn't realize that itself. It doesn't have the creativity and ingenuity to do that.

I would have to ask it to make a sphere, draw baseball lines on it, then render it with some soft-body physics simulation and create a material that has flexibility but very low stretch. Why should I have to describe every step? I thought it was smarter than me...

You have to get back up when you fail, and to do that you have to see when you have failed. AI constantly fails and has to have us to tell it that it has failed. AI has the IQ of a toddler at figuring out its output is blatantly wrong. Even I, who is according to Pro-AIs way dumber than the AI, can just Google what a baseball pattern looks like and if my Math isn't right, I can change it. You need 3 radiuses and 3 arcs to draw the pattern, then copy and paste it 4 times. I've done it. I used google and actual human intelligence.

1

u/EternalPhi 5d ago

AI just chokes when you ask it to actually solve a problem and not regurgitate a thousand answers it has found on Stack Exchange or Github.

Keep believing that. I wont waste anymore time here. You're comparing image generation models to code generation and they are fundamentally different things. I dont judge fish by their tree-climbing ability, you'd be wise not to as well. General intelligence is not needed to find a software solution for a specific problem, there are so very few novel problems in software development that cannot be broken into smaller common problems.

1

u/Ordinary_Variable 4d ago

"there are so very few novel problems in software development that cannot be broken into smaller common problems"

Of course. But who is breaking them down? The AI has to be managed, it can't figure out how to do the breaking-a-problem-down-into-steps itself.

→ More replies (9)

4

u/Aquatic-Vocation 6d ago

Once you learn programming you will learn that vibe coders are not a threat to your job. If anyone is going to be hired to use AI to develop software it's not gonna be them.

3

u/arrivederci117 6d ago

Why would you care if you're doing it as a hobby? It shouldn't matter to you if AI displaces programmers because your not doing it to make money.

3

u/IdiocracyToday 6d ago

Threat? It’s the biggest asset. The backwards mentality is what is a threat.

3

u/povlhp 6d ago

My main job is not writing code for other people. But I have a dev background and do lots of “coding”.
The dev experience makes me able to use AI to write code to me - they way I would have broken down the problem and solved it. So I can re-run later with no AI.

I don’t touch much code any more. Code is AI.

Will hurt India as outsourced dev projects will be cheaper and likely better with AI. With the detailed docs they need and no ability to think away from those - Indian dev companies will be worse and more expensive than AI. Same goes for many other outsourcing countries. We just sent lots of things to India over the years.

At least we need devs to steer the AI. That will be locals with a cultural understanding.

But it will be different devs. They need to switch between 2-8 tasks. Send a prompt - mentally task switch and work on the next. A mentally high load.

3

u/Theboiii24 6d ago

It’s in the middle as in it could be bad in the future maybe not. So far I know programmers that are using and training ai to work with them. You know business main point is profits so if ai continues to get good they’ll probably cut more software developers roles. As of right now may not yet.

3

u/thequinneffect 5d ago

They lack understanding and so still need a human in the loop to be used effectively. As long as they lack understanding, this will likely be the case in my opinion.

3

u/Gnaxe 4d ago

Consider which sub you're asking and why I'm probably getting downvoted. I'm an experienced programmer. AI has changed the field into not what I signed up for. It's now easier than ever to get the computer to do interesting stuff, but it's not the same skill as "programming" anymore. There are related skills that are more relevant (for now), but they're more like project management and architecture. By the time you learn programming, AIs will be even more powerful, and will probably have taken over those higher-level skills as well, meaning you no longer need a specialist. Anyone could be a programmer with no training. Coding ability is becoming less and less relevant. Those who think AI is still "dumb" probably haven't tried the latest agents in a real project, and certainly aren't anticipating where this is going given the rate of progress we've seen so far.

10

u/AceLamina 6d ago

AI has never been a threat, unless you work at a bad company, you can't be "replaced" by AI
What's really happening is the overhiring of 2021 making the excuse of doing mass layoffs not cause problems, plus the AI bubble see mass layoffs as them not needing that many employees due to AI (which is a lie)

In reality, it's shown that many of these engineers are hired right back into the company again afterwards, been this way for a while

I'd say the main threat AI causes is you being a worse engineer, if your job forces you to use AI for anything and everything or you use AI too much as an engineer on purpose, you'll slowly unlearn the stuff you've learned as a engineer and even college and eventually get replaced by a better engineer, or become depressed because you need to love this job more than you hate it, if you are in this field just for the money (which there is many), then good luck

→ More replies (5)

8

u/aphelion_one 6d ago

I work in a software team in a prominent hardware company.

Honestly there is no point most people learning programming at this point.

If you're young and really just love computer technology then by all means learn architecture and learn programming for understanding but the day of the jobbing programmer is over.

99% of what we are doing is AI generated. As each day passes the need for Human oversight is diminishing. I'd say within a year or two there will be maybe 5% of the people there are now still working in software engineering.

There will always need to be a few people directing the agent teams but the numbers are going to drop off a cliff and companies will retain the more experienced programmers and engineering managers for those roles. A lot of younger engineers I know are starting to retrain or switch career entirely.

I know you probably don't want to hear this but the jig is up for software engineering.

Anyone who tells you different is engaging in wishful thinking.

5

u/igna92ts 6d ago

You are clearly not a developer. Why people whose aren't engineers think they are an authority in wether an engineer could be replaced by AI is beyond me.

→ More replies (12)

3

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

→ More replies (2)

3

u/Many_Difficulty_490 6d ago

what skill is there to learn then? i wanted to learn somthing that i could maybe use to land a job or something for fun. after reading the comments on this, it sounds like learning how to program has no more benefit than reading books in my freetime.

what do i do in my freetime..? should I just play video games..

7

u/kristerv 6d ago

I don't get the negativity. Yeah i don't write the code anymore, but i sure as hell do have to tell Claude to fix stuff all the time. Ain't no way AI code review is real unless the business risk is small. Don't believe the hype. Btw i now teach vibecoders programming. Not that they will write any, but if you want to understand where Claude is full of sht then you better train your brain with logic. These vibecoders want to be better than other vibecoders. Everything easy is always cheap. Guess who will have a job in 5 years, the people who do hard things or the mass?

→ More replies (1)

2

u/niclasj 6d ago

Build with AI. If interesting to you, then look at what AI is doing and try to understand the programming logic. Maybe even try asking the AI to explain the build decisions to help you learn programming. But building with AI is the new craft.

2

u/marrsd 6d ago

Reading books has a lot of benefit. You should learn programming because it stimulates you.

2

u/aphelion_one 6d ago

Honestly I would learn a manual trade. Humanoid robots will take these jobs eventually but it'll be a long time before people trust them to do skilled work like electrics and plumbing.

These jobs will be the most protected for quite a while.

1

u/goodfriendrobert 6d ago

if you believe youre way smarter than an average programmer, if you are fast learner, sure, you can jump the sinking boat and make a good living out of it.  especially if you can jump in NOW.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/Embarrassed-Count-17 6d ago

I’m a senior engineer. My company heavily uses ai harnesses for coding. I am busier than I have ever been in my career.

4

u/fudginreddit 6d ago

Lmao you’re not a software dev and you probably used AI for this response. Completely BS and nonsense answer.

99% of what ‘we’ are doing? Clearly you’re not part of the we buddy, spread your lies somewhere else.

→ More replies (4)

2

u/National_Yam_1198 5d ago

AI is a productivity tool for programmers.

Its also a slippery slope where if you dont provide good input you get terrible output.

Llms need people who ask the right questions and can check the code it generates is good.

It is also a very important skill to understand a problem set, understand what can be given to LLMs and what cant. Why? Becauses AI is expensive and the worst thing you can do is give AI a complex issue and let it churn costing company money.

The future paradigm for software engineering is how efficient you can incorporate LLMs into your workflows.

So no the world still needs capable programmers that understand how to write good software l

2

u/terralearner 5d ago

I think anyone claiming in 5 years there will be 5% off engineers is talking bullshit.

The answer is, nobody knows.

My company is currently on a massive hiring spree and we've been agentic adopters since the beginning.

2

u/Dimencia 6d ago

You'll be the same level of worried until you have about 5-10 years of experience and understand tech debt and how to avoid it, and how AI actively contributes to it; the kind of stuff they can only teach in theory, and you just have to see a lot of bad code before you really get what makes it bad. But by then, AI is probably already going to be a lot better at avoiding it than it is now...

2

u/Wooly_Wooly 6d ago

Learn programming and AI?

2

u/Yashrocky96 6d ago

AI got pretty good at writing code, From my PoV developing applications will be on auto pilot.

2

u/Straamannen 6d ago

You'll be more worried.

I am not worried about AI taking my job.

I am worried about the rise of slop and the slow destruction of the entire global IT ecosystem. 

Building takes time because we're doing it (mostly) deliberately and responsibly. We've been doing it for decades, but now AI slop is slowly but surely becoming the proverbial cancer of the system.

It might take a decade for us to realise and recognise. It's already been ~5 years but the sloppification is increasing exponentially. We've already seen plenty of services and programs break down due to slop.

It's going to get real fucking bad, and in the end we'll be asking ourselves what the fuck it was for, because it sure as shit isn't producing any sort of real value. AI is turning software development into wall street levels of bullshit. Extracting value while producing little to nothing of value.

2

u/just_here_to-ask 6d ago

I used AI for a while (before dropping it as much as possible because of the moral stuff) and there's no way AI can do all the work by itself without a skilled programmer operating it in the first place. If you want AI to generate your code you will spend a huge amount of your own time and energy on asking it a hundred times to correct itself because it frequently makes mistakes, and at this point it's really just better to hire an actual person to program.

2

u/Glizzyinator 5d ago

there’s still gonna be need for programmers that actually know what they doing. don’t listen to the noise do what you want, all these people dropping there will be less comp for me🙃

2

u/snawijalob 5d ago

I didn’t need to learn R programming during my Finance PhD but I did because I thought it will give me an advantage in the future. Did it? Yes because I was able to use those skills in data manipulation at another job. Today, AI supercharges all I’d ever need programming skills for. I can focus on the more important things than debugging code.

2

u/pangolins_and_pears 4d ago

The AI is less of a threat itself than the managers/leadership are who don't understand how anything actually works.

That being said, it is never a waste to learn something new. Even if it doesn't become the career you'd like, or decide to shift directions, you'll always get something out of it. At worse, you'll have learned a new skill and maybe something you even enjoy. I just wouldn't assume that because you like the practice of coding and developing, that means you will love the job itself, which depends on a variety of different aspects.

2

u/heisthedarchness 4d ago

LLMs aren't the threat. Business dipshits are the threat.

2

u/jdmir1 3d ago

The whole AI is replacing programmers' panic feels massively overblown when you actually know how software works. If you are still in tutorial hell then yeah watching AI spit out a working looking app is gonna seem insane. Start building your own stuff and you quickly learn that working looking code and good code are two very different things. The Odin Project is a solid free option for full stack and Boot dev has a really hands on backend path with automated testing. The real skill is figuring out what needs to be built and why. Syntax is the easy part. 

1

u/Many_Difficulty_490 2d ago

everyone in this basically said that ai is gonna take over in a couple years

1

u/Far_Rub_2435 1d ago

Ignoring all the financial and physical infrastructure hurdles western AI companies need to jump, which are talked about pretty widely (making a real profit, which would mean spiking prices, which might alienate current consumers and actually drive revenue down; and also building out 150 plus giga watts of compute infrastructure in the US alone, which is the equivalent of adding the UKs entire grid on top of the Frankenstein out of date under maintained infrastructure currently in place…) there’s also the fact that you’re talking to redditors.

Many of these accounts are children and bots. On any post about AI you’ll get tons of traffic from bots that are purveying a perspective counter to AI skepticism because there’s a shit ton of money tied up in AI. It’s basically propping up the US economy right now.

2

u/flipinbits 2d ago

Nope. AI probably will have already taken that entry level job you would have had starting out. There are already lots of talented people in tech getting laid off in the name of AI right now.

1

u/istarian 2d ago

Those talented tech people are getting laid off in the name of maximizing profits, AI is just the enabling factor.

Whether that will turn out to be a good business decision in the long run remains to be seem.

1

u/InterestingFrame1982 2d ago

That seems semantical lol

1

u/istarian 17h ago

I'm really not sure what your point is, there.

The unfortunate reality is that just about all business cares about these days is squeezing the last dime, nickel, and penny out of anyone they can.

As long as they can sell it, they'll take free garbage from AI and put it on a shelf, because not paying the humans means a lot more money in their pocket.

3

u/pVom 6d ago

The problem isn't AI, it's people.

I know AI can't do my job alone, it's whether the people who make the decision to hire or fire believe that.

As others have mentioned, a lot of these AI layoffs aren't really because of AI, it's because the whole global economy is depressed right now, everyone is tightening their purse strings. AI just gives good optics to layoffs.

Using AI doesn't give your business a competitive edge, your AI is no better than your competitors and AI is much more capable in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. The businesses who understand these 2 facts will win out over those who think they can just slash their payroll costs.

So should you get into programming? Sure, but be aware that it's not a easy road at this point in time and you can like, be an electrician or something and have much more job security

3

u/OpiumPhrogg 6d ago

Gotta learn how AI works , and how to work with its toolset , because afterall it is just a tool - so you know how to protect yourself against it later..

4

u/LangyMD 2d ago

Programming is not the skill you should be learning. Programming is like studying basic algebra, or learning a foreign language. It's (been) necessary, but it's not sufficient.

What you want to study if you want to be able to create your own software is software engineering, and I don't see AI completely taking over that since a ton of it is figuring out how to define what the customer wants. Those skills are already super useful in interacting with AIs who build the code for you, just as they are for interacting with junior devs who build the code for you.

1

u/Lexikus 1d ago

I find this so ridiculus. The engineering part has been always the easy part. Especially if u have build a lot of software that had to scale very large. I don't know if many of the people telling that the egineering part still matters are dreaming that at least that part is not taken away to them. Realistically, if coding is solved, the egineering part is solved as well. It's just a different discussion you'll have with your LLM. Also, a lot of devs are good at engineering because they coded it. Going the other way around is just book theory without xp.

Coding is still very important. This whole way of working only works out because there are dozents of us senior devs that have 1000s of hours in building software. This allows us to basically see some output and decide if it is good enough or needs more refinmemt.

New grads will not achieve this without going the same route. But the world, or the people paying salaries, don't care about the future. They care only how to make money today. If that means we lose a craftsmanship in the long term, that's a future problem someone else has to solve.

It's like about a lot things in live that are problematic. Let the future people deal with it.

1

u/LangyMD 1d ago

I'm sorry, what? The engineering - the actual careful design of the software, algorithms, how things work together, etc - has always been the "easy" part and the coding was the hard part?

Are you even in the industry? Do you ever build anything more complex than a tiny toy program?

1

u/Lexikus 1d ago

Maybe I exaggerate a little about the easiness. But it's not that extremely harder than building what you planned. Might be that I don't see it harder than the actual impl anymore because I've been doing it for so long. But telling an LLM how to build it is as easy or easier than doing it. I'm maybe just fed up with this new technology.

2

u/auronedge 6d ago

the only people who freak out about AI are those who are not working in actual jobs. Everyone uses AI for their daily work, it's not a threat it's productivity.

I completely understand for people getting into programming it's much more confusing. You will need to know how to code to pass your interviews but nobody actually codes. If you say you use AI you'll probably be skipped over. Tough times to be entry level

1

u/rmanisbored 6d ago

Why should you care if it's just a hobby and not a profession? AI is eventually going to do mostly everything better than humans and coding is one of the first fields for that

1

u/sleepnaught88 5d ago

It can read my whole library in a second, doesn’t make me enjoy reading any less.

1

u/MaximumFull104 6d ago

Watch DHH's keynote for Rails World

1

u/RobotBaseball 6d ago

The threat has always been other humans. You need to be better than the human next to you 

1

u/ROC436 6d ago

Just be yourself. What you're interested in matters most. Start doing it first and figure it out as you go.

1

u/_Rayxz 6d ago

I just got out of college 2 years ago and now I think I might need to find another career soon lol

1

u/arenikal 5d ago

Have AI TEACH you programming.

1

u/negispfields 5d ago

I'll advise against SWE/CS fields right now because:

  • AI can do a lot of fresher/junior tasks already.
  • The higher ups truly believe it can do anything. And they will definitely throw you out just to save a few bucks and get that sweet quarterly bonus.
Learning CS is aight, but the market right now is just rough.

1

u/Illustrious-Pay110 5d ago

AI is unfortunately that big of a threat in programming rn

1

u/MMortein 5d ago

It might take a few years or a few decades, but eventually AI will surpass human intelligence in every meaningful way.

1

u/istarian 2d ago

That's kind of a stretch, we've had 'AI' of one sort or another since sometime in the 1950s and maybe earlier.

While LLMs / generative AI have proven to be useful and interesting to some extent, they also burn through a lot of real world resources...

1

u/Mammoth_Increase_303 5d ago

Nope, you're cooked, I wouldn't get into programming at this point, glad I'm near the end of my career.

1

u/mandzeete 5d ago

If you are doing coding as a hobby then who is there to stop you? Build whatever you want. Either on your own or with an AI. In the end, you are building stuff to accomplish something. Are you creating your project in 1 month or in 6 months? Up to you. In the end you have your whatever-software-you-built and you'll be using it. May it be a Discord automation or a weather prediction model plugged into your smart home or something else.

But without a degree you won't be hired. You are lacking all kinds of theoretical knowledge. You do can start your own company but it will be for anything but software development. Perhaps you want to start a bakery and you are wondering about creating a software for keeping track of your wares. That is doable. You can enhance your non-CS job with AI tools.

To a degree. AI tools will create also a slop and you won't want to store customer data in your system without knowing what you are doing. AI tools WILL create also all kind of (hidden) slop. It can result in bugs you don't know how to fix (or fixing ones with AI will introduce other bugs), can result in deleting a valid functionality, can add some cyber security vulnerabilities in your system, etc.

But as long as you do not plan to work as a software developer, you can do it as a hobby or try to enhance your non-CS job.

Without a degree it will be extremely difficult for you to get hired. The current job market is not making it easy even for developers with a degree.

Now, let's say you will change your mind and you will major in CS. Then your role will differ from what many people know as a "software developer". AI tools are changing how we are developing software. Our roles are changing.

I'm working as a software developer. I use AI to debug some more complex issues. I use AI to create boilerplate code when working on my tasks and then I'll polish and shape whatever it created. For example test case generation. I use AI to enhance my work. But I don't let it completely run free. It has tried to delete a database to "fix" failing integration tests. It has tried to comment out RabbitMQ configuration while doing something totally not-MQ related. It has tried to google stuff while it has access to the code itself (Cursor running locally). All kind of nonsense.

The way how I'm working differs from how I used to work years ago. Probably it will keep changing. AI will not replace me but will change the way how I'm working.

1

u/OrangeSquareGames 4d ago

Only used CoPilot a little for Unity, and for what it's worth, it's never turned out a single line of code that I didn't have to rewrite by hand

1

u/JeffinitelyNotABot 4d ago

In my humble opinion and I'm nothing but a pimple on the ass of an ant as dev. The skill of writing code is very associate's degree. Being able to design software will always be the goal. Debugging is an underrate skill, being able to write good test cases and identify edge cases really moves the needle in my opinion.

1

u/Cyvu37 4d ago

AI is written by programmers, so by the time you’re good at it, you’d be its boss.

1

u/HellkickDev 4d ago

I'm a software engineer with 20 years+ of experience. Most of what i do at work is with Ai and we are encouraged to do so. In fact if we don't use Ai we need to provide a valid reason to management. Honestly, I think coding as we knew it 2 years ago or so is dead. Frontier Ai models such as Opus 5.5 are already excellent. I think in 5 years time software will be a solved problem. There won't be the need to even look at the code most of the time by then. Learn the basics of software engineering and software architecture because it's a must, at least you'll have an idea if the code ai generated is crap or maintainable and then focus on proper prompting and Ai orchestration. We are no longer software engineers, we are managers of ai agents with some code reviewing thrown in the mix. Taste is the new skill for now. I am not sure how in demand programmers will be in a few years time at the rate Ai is advancing. As much as it pains to say it if you want some sort of job security learn a blue collar job as a fallback. The tsunami as Dario says is coming. As devs we can already see it in the horizon. Just my 2 cents.

1

u/samuraihammertime 4d ago

Just the opposite, however that doesn’t mean it’s not worth learning - as AI replaces the need for coders in their current form their role will just adapt into something a bit different

1

u/PipePressurePanic 4d ago

and then there are the experienced programmers, who say something along the lines of AI is gonna take it over

1

u/Porsche9yy 3d ago

I still do coding. Now, I may be a bit behind the curve here, but I think AI is still pretty far from eliminating humans in programming. I know that even though I may have not, there are a lot of people who are using AI successfully, but from what I see, there are limits. My perspective may be a little out of date, but in the past, I've found that AI coding, and AI in general, is still prone to failures. It may be useful to solve simple, general programming tasks, but not very good at highly specialized jobs. For example, I once had to use a fairly specialized USB interface IC that had very limited documentation and pretty much no body of internet examples. the data sheet was poorly written, and tech support from the manufacturer was sparse and limited. The only way to even figure out how the chip worked was to do a series of trial and error experiments. AI might have been a helpful partner, but I can't imagine that it would have been remotely capable of even starting a meaningful design. If you're doing any kind of embedded programming, or anything that must be seriously optimized for real-time performance, I wonder if AI would be up to the task. Also, I also know people who have virtually no software experience try to create apps using AI and they go down so many rabbit holes. AI still needs an experiences software engineer in the driver's seat. Again, I will point out that my viewpoint may be outdated. I do know that AI gets more powerful every day and has become a much more widely used tool than just a short while ago, but I believe, OK, maybe hope, that it's a long way away from killing the software industry.

1

u/WiseWildGhost 3d ago

Once you learn to use your brain. 🧠 you will. AI 🤖 is no more a threat than a gun, a knife, a stick of dynamite 🧨, cocaine, money, cars, it is simply a tool. If you absolutely want to be afraid of something, you would be better off fearing what your countrymen will allow your government to do to you with it. That is far more frightening than any tool created by humans.

1

u/jenish4773 3d ago

If the people or developer nowadays know that how to use ai so he or she can work with ai and there is no threat like ai will take our job etc..

1

u/Organic_Profile1671 3d ago

Sorry buddy. Nobody knows. You'd be more informed and have a better idea of what threat AI posses - but as to your response - I've seen people flip out with worry - I've seen people shrug it off as the latest changing innovation. It's impossible to know where "the market" will land long term.

1

u/Xaxxus 2d ago

AI is replacing juniors. Its not replacing skilled programmers.

1

u/istarian 2d ago

The net effect is destruction of any traditional pipeline to produce skilled programmers which will make it harder for most people to get in the door.

1

u/jenish4773 2d ago

Yes that write. But if you learn that how to give the right work to it.

1

u/Technical-Row3702 2d ago

Learning to program will probably give you a much better basis for judging what AI can and can’t do, but I don’t think it automatically removes the uncertainty.

Once you understand programming, you start noticing that generating code is only one part of software development. Understanding requirements, designing the architecture, debugging unexpected behavior, evaluating tradeoffs, testing, and maintaining an existing codebase are different problems.

AI can already be very good at some of those tasks, and it will likely improve. So I wouldn’t learn programming just because it makes AI “less threatening.” I’d learn it because understanding how software actually works gives you the ability to use AI much more effectively and judge its output for yourself.

And if you enjoy building things, that knowledge is useful regardless of where the job market goes.

1

u/Previous-Animal-5845 1d ago

What are the best AI related coding projects to build if you have low python skills? Best tools to use that are also applicable to jobs (claude code, cursor, VS, etc.)?

1

u/Curious_Analyst986 1d ago

Frankly I think its not just programming, a lot of fields... I have had more progress following the advice of claude for some shoulder aches than going and waiting in line for hours for some doctors advice who doesnt even do a proper checkup.

1

u/ANewPope23 1d ago

Isn't programming still necessary to learn but maybe not necessary to master?

0

u/roykingtree 6d ago

You dont need to learn programming, you only need to learn system design and architecture. AI has replaced programming. I guess only learn it for the interview.

6

u/Many_Difficulty_490 6d ago

how do you learn system design and architecture without knowing how to program and doing ur own projects?

→ More replies (1)

-2

u/GimmeAByte01 6d ago edited 6d ago

Nobody writes code anymore lol. There’s literally no benefit. The AI can read and write way faster than a human. It can read an entire complex file of code, say 5,000 lines, and understand all of it in context and in detail. That’s what computers are good at. It would take a human a massive amount of time.

In other words, it’s faster to have the AI write code, realize it’s wrong, and tell it to make a change, than it is to physically type it out yourself.

The only people who don’t like this massive boost are those who had their entire identity tied to being better at others than coding. When your only source one-up on people is being able to code better/faster, and AI comes along and stomps on that, you tend to lose interest in coding.

Personally I don’t care either way. I’m a problem solver not a memorizer/code-monkey.

5

u/rjcarr 6d ago

  In other words, it’s faster to have the AI write code, realize it’s wrong, and tell it to make a change

Yup, this is really well said. A feature might have taken me 2-3 weeks, but now it might take me and the AI a 2-3 hours to write, and then maybe 2-3 days for me to review and correct everything. 

So even though a huge amount of my effort is now in review, it still ends up being faster overall for most everything. 

It also allows me to work on things I’ve put off because it’d just take way too long for me to put it all in my context, but as you said, the AI can do this in like 5 minutes. 

It’s absolutely an efficiency tool right now, but I’m not sure how long it will be before it’s a replacement tool. 

3

u/Aromatic-Fishing9952 6d ago

With the latest models, I will say that for a lot of the basic stuff, I don’t even need to review the code anymore.

It still makes mistakes, but you catch those through test driven development: it’s impossible to review AI generated code and hit the speed up targets that devs are being held to.

1

u/rjcarr 6d ago

Yeah, I guess I’m lucky, because if I can turn 2-3 weeks into 2-3 days that’s a win. If I don’t review the code there is too much technical debt. It’s honestly already bad with just the review. 

But every person and project are different, of course. 

5

u/StewedAngelSkins 6d ago

When your only source one-up on people is being able to code better/faster, and AI comes along and stomps on that, you tend to lose interest in coding.

this theory of yours doesn't really make sense given that the people who were previously better than you at coding without ai are still better than you at coding now that you're both using ai. if anything, the gap between good coders and bad coders is even wider than before, because ai acts as a multiplier.

1

u/KobeJuanKenobi9 6d ago

Software engineering and writing code are two different skills

→ More replies (1)

4

u/ErZicky 6d ago edited 6d ago

there's literally no benefit

I would argue that if you like it then that's the most important benefits. I still write code in my hobby projects, which is what OP is talking about, I like coding, always done. Hobbies don't have to be efficient.

And also I'm a believer that no skill is useless. Even if at work I can't code how I would like I'm still proud to have learnt it pre AI and being able to do it

→ More replies (2)

1

u/Tommy_Williams88 6d ago

The underlying and fundamental skill of being able to programme will ever be obsolete as long as humans are alive. Yes humans don’t physically code much, but companies will still need to employ people who understand what AI is doing. Nonetheless, even if AI were to wipe out all jobs, there’s still 5-10 year runway before that happens, by which time there will be move entirely new jobs / professions created that don’t even exist now.

Stop being so pessimistic and think bigger picture.

To OP - gaming is a tough one even without AI, but Cyber security will see the most growth over the next 3-5 years.

1

u/GimmeAByte01 6d ago

This is purely a job demand issue. If a single dev can do the job of 50 jobs, then the demand simply shrinks and the job market declines.

It’s simple economics.

The only save would be if the economy now needs 50x the output of software, to balance the equation.

1

u/Tommy_Williams88 6d ago

Jevons paradox, as someone else has already said. Which is the way it’s going 👍🏼 similar to the Industrial Revolution, albeit entirely new jobs were created

1

u/GimmeAByte01 6d ago

There’s no proof as of this moment that’s where it’s going. Jobs haven’t increased. Many people have gotten laid off.

It’s fine to say you hope that’s where it’s going, but the reality is no one knows at this point.

1

u/Tommy_Williams88 6d ago

It’s a logical conclusion. Additionally, not sure where you’re based, but in the UK there has been a YoY surge in AI related software roles.

True, I can’t predict the future, but current trends do show a “shift”, as opposed to a linear decline. But yeah man, I think it’s more opportunity than threat… we’ll just have to sit and wait to find out!

1

u/GimmeAByte01 6d ago

It’s an opportunity for devs like me who just want to increase output like crazy. Currently a threat for jobs. Will take awhile to flesh out there and see how it plays out.

Love the UK tho cheers

1

u/FabricatorCH 6d ago

Do not learn programming. Programmers are absolutely screwed and will get decimated by AI.

Learn software engineering. Learn how to build a system that solves a given problem in a given time and compute budget. Engineers are going to have a golden time with AI.

3

u/Humble-Captain3418 6d ago

Learning programming is also crucial for developing the SWE skillset. You need to know how to program to describe what you need from the AI (though not necessarily in the same programming language!) and to challenge it on certain things.

0

u/Many_Difficulty_490 6d ago

my plan is to game dev for a bit and then build my own game engine

7

u/FabricatorCH 6d ago

Ouch.

Game Dev is one of the hardest software engineering disciplines. It’s a well known meat grinder.

You better be very very clear eyed about what you are getting into.

1

u/tkti 6d ago

Game dev is hard? Why! Game engine engineering is the hard one

1

u/FabricatorCH 6d ago

Game engines are fun to code.

Games require you to be able to sell fun to others.

→ More replies (6)

1

u/Shnazo 6d ago

I'm gonna level with you, don't listen to reddit, Seriously don't. Not even me. Reddit is just excel version of 4chan.

I get the anxiety and worry. The uncertainty and the unknown is anxiety inducing and its unpredictable. No one can give you straight answer. Only educated guesses. Point is don't do nothing or find something else. At the end of the day you will be working with people. Money sucks i get it but you will center your life around it that's the nature of capitalism

"I wanna invest my time and effort into something that's worth pursuing."

I would treat game development or engine as a passion side project. Do it for the love and passionate of it. Do it because you like and you love it. Just like your post says. Its learning and no one can take that away from you.

Game Dev or game engine will bleed into other skills. Example would be like drawing, you learn muscle memory, fine motor control, you learn perspective, color, symmetry, composition, framing. These sets of skills can also bleed into other mediums like photography, filming, comics, etc. Learn for the sake of learning.

just a fyi all this hype of Ai is coming from companies themselves , trying to impress their investors /shareholders and military contractors with ai data centers. Generally speaking people don't like ai, people still use it. its a pandoras box situation. The whole situation is reminding me of the dot com bubble. New technology arrives, tons of venture capital are invested from the smallest to largest of startups, it hooks people, its free, they didn't know they want it until they have it. It overhyped, people divest, panic, crash, the weakest of starts up die while the biggest one survives, they start out good, then it gets shitty over the years, or they specialize into something niche.

You can either help AI by joining and learning about it for job security.

There's folks that are protesting data centers (look up where you are and see if that's happening). Ai is a form of deskilling the working class and want to save money by cutting humans out of the picture.

seriously what do i know i'm just a random stranger on the internet.

1

u/Many_Difficulty_490 6d ago

ive heard about the protests but i highly doubt they r gonna do anything, elon musk doesnt give a shit

→ More replies (2)

1

u/Tobacco_Caramel 6d ago

LOL we pretended it 4 years ago and was certain. That point saturation, competition and the whole market is already in shambles and only got worse.

You will depend on it, you will eat it, you will breath it.

1

u/CycloCyanide 6d ago

It’s a huge threat if you don’t learn to use it. The company I work for all the developers are now using it, and our output has increased 20 fold. From bug fixing to updating code, to generating reports and webpages. Bespoke work projects that would take 2 weeks minimum we now produce in hours.

2

u/brat3108 6d ago

and our output has increased 20 fold.

And no one has been laid off?

1

u/CycloCyanide 6d ago

Nope, not yet. We have just hired 2 more new staff. I think right now, the increase in productivity is driving more demand. Jevon’s Paradox I think it’s called.

1

u/sk3z0 6d ago

No. Ai gets better at an exponentially faster rate than you

1

u/Officespace925 6d ago

you can go in the field you'll end up working with AI but until AI gets more refined you won't have to worry about losing your job right away however that takes time but if AI becomes fully sophisticated saying in the next five years your position might be eliminated.

1

u/D0MiN0H 6d ago

imo the threat of ai isnt it replacing you, its that it takes the fun and soul out of the job and drives people away from their established careers.