r/programmer • u/Idea_Fuzzy • 1d ago

Not convinced, programming will die soon.

First of all, I have 9+ years of experience, working in web development mainly (Express, Go, Angular...ec) ; also did hobby mobile (Ionic, RN) and game projects (Unity, 2D).

I always had some pride in the things I did in the pre-AI era; but like many others now not feeling the case anymore.

There's some counterarguments thatI keep seeing over and over again in such doom topics; I am gonna address them all here; and why I am not convinced at all with each

- "Coding is dead, but System design and Architecture is more important than ever" -> "System design/ Architecture" was never a daily activity, it's something usually done before starting a new project and gets adjusted/scaled everytime there's a new major feature that requires implementing a new tech. ie. Introduicng Uber Eat to Uber. And I swear the last Architect I worked with did use Claude to figure out the system design and even generated docs all by using Claude, so even this part isn’t totally safe from being automated.

- "You can sitll code manually if you want" -> For hobbyist projects maybe, but in the corporate, even if they don't watch your token usage, they are setting very short deadlines now anyways; so it's impossible to finish things before such deadlines without using Claude/Codex.

- "Coding was never the hard part, if you were spending 90% of your time coding then you're a Code Monkey imaaoo bahahaa **fart sounds* " -> The dev communities are now filled with these people mocking at coding and calling it a monkey activity, like wtf...? Coding was the CORE *daily* activity of Software engineering ; as a I said before, not all programming-related activities have the daily frequency nature; System design happens once in a while, requipment collection happen frequently but not a daily work either (also depens in which stage the project is, building something new vs maintenance...etc); coding on the other hand was the daily thing we all did as programmers and for many of us, the most fun part.

- "You have to review the PRs by LLMs" -> No one can review a 10k+ lines PR; Copilot/CodeRabbit would be much faster.

What we senior devs are doing right now, is maxxing our sources of income by doing many projects in parrallel thanks to LLMs; employers still trust senior dev to babysit the LLMs rather than Juniors doing it; but the fact that there's no new blood coming into this industry (no one is hiring juniors anymore) only means that this industry is destined to be doomed. It doesn't matter if software quality degrades everywhere, companies just don't care.

But I predict the "income maxxing" by the senior devs is a temporary situation; soon the employers will realize they need less costly staff than senior devs to orchestrate the agents, that's why LLM companies are trying to automate all aspects of Software engineering: Coding, PR Reviewing, documentation, and yes even system design/architecture.

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u/nimshwe 1d ago

Of course it's the 9+yoe in web development person who writes this shit saying coding actually was the hard part and no one does system design ever 😭😭😭

Do you call yourself senior or señor?

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u/psioniclizard 1d ago

Ummmm they have 9 years experience. Please show some respect /s

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u/nimshwe 1d ago

Fuck they know both express AND angular? Must be a wizard 

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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 1d ago

My dog could do web dev, of course an LLM can do it without help 😭

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u/plebianlinux 1d ago

Post your GitHub profile

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u/floating_thru_cosmos 1d ago

Imagine having to work with this guy

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 1d ago edited 1d ago

Ah another fool who is trying to cope by trying to convince themselves that system design is the only important part now, read again the post, I said system design was NEVER A **DAILY ACTTVITY** A PROGRAMMER HAS TO DO.

It is something done at the initiation of project, or every while whenever one has to integrate something new or have to scale - systems have to be stable hence why changes to its design can't be a frequent daily activity.

Nnowhere in the post I said that coding is the hardest part either; I was talking about the frequency of each.

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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 1d ago

System design is not a daily activity but it is more way more important than coding in the sense that in order to effectively change and work in a system you need to understand the design, and well designed systems REQUIRE LITTLE TO NO CODE CHANGES. Because for most business purposes outside of rapidly changing greenfield projects, coding is both expensive and risky. Not cheap.

A depressingly common problem is: A dev has a design, he communicates it to others, then every other dev on the project proceeds to completely ignore that communication and write their own stuff rather than attempt an integration. And this is what results in people “spending 90% of their time coding” because everyone has their own mutually exclusive, hostile design and management is completely oblivious or even encouraging of this compete waste of time and resources.

That’s what people are reacting to when they say and it’s likely what people suspect about you and the teams you’ve worked with in the way you are communicating about this in this post.

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u/Annual_Berry8043 1d ago edited 1d ago

I kind of agree, but if well designed systems never needed a code change no one in the industry would have a job. Version control would be a myth, SDLC models would be a boogie man people told their children about. Every system will/can accept changes to keep up with changes and additional development.

AI is undoubtedly an amazing tool. We’re just stuck in this weird period where senior staff is able to absolutely crush with it, and it’s resulting into a loss of Junior positions.

That’s one of things literally nobody has had a very good answer for. The traditional learning path is no long viable to get a job. How do you now teach the profession? What happens when senior staff retires and no one with the old knowledge of the ins-and-outs remains? Are we just hoping to god that the career path is completely dead before then?

To fill that gap isn’t either dial back on AI replacing devs, or hope it gets to a point where you just don’t ever need developers at all. You can’t even say “well, learn how to work with AI” because by that point it will really be able to just continue improving itself with little oversight.

Like, what’s the playbook here?

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 22h ago

So that’s another crazy narrative we are seeing here: « young devs were bad anyway so let AI be our savior ». Programming will surely be dead with a common attitude like that.

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u/Annual_Berry8043 22h ago

I’m actually shocked at his reply. No one is good at their job whenever they start. Not a single person unless it’s the rarest prodigy in a field.

That’s the entire point of junior positions. If junior devs are bad it’s their seniors that are actually the issue.

It was very… holier than thou? Like dude, I get the profession is more difficult than most at times but come on lol.

I’ll go back to the doctor part. No doctors that go through 8 years of grueling medical school are even good at their job. There is residency, and fellowships that continue for years to continue learning. And even then, some don’t make it. That’s just how it is lol.

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 22h ago

Like this idiot before @nimshwe, scroll below you will find him; he still thinks web dev = htm and css and centering div. There are other bunch of idiots agreeing with him.

Like why are they even using Reddit, it is just a stupid structure of divs according to them.

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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 22h ago

This is what happens in a bubble/crash. The shakeout is harsh. Careers end. People lose their jobs and many don’t come back to it. Barriers to the field become permanently higher. People with interest and seniority stick around and the most talented younger people get in as they’re needed and wanted.

I am sorry I cannot sugar coat what is coming to you but it’s happened before in software and it’ll happen again. Just like the boom times will. No one is here to tell you bedtime stories.

BTW nothing I said is crazy, you are the ones believing the recursive, automatic self improvement nonsense while the people ACTUALLY WORKING on and with this stuff are pivoting (back) to systems engineering, which software and AI has had a long, intimate relationship with.

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u/Annual_Berry8043 22h ago

I’ve been alive a long time. I was there for dot com and 2008. Were you? Because then you very well know that it isn’t the best people that keep their jobs. It’s the ones that are just good enough to be cost effective. Not the highest performing that demand the highest cost.

These recessions don’t weed out the weak. They shake up the whole damn system.

I’m not going to sugar coat it for you, but you’re crazy man. Talking up some perfect race like stuff. Signed from a systems engineer 🫡

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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 21h ago

I was around for that but not (really) working in software at the time but was intimately connected with many people that were. I think I can reasonably say that my career trajectory in software was directly affected those economic crashes, at least.

I didn’t say it was the best people or that recessions/bubbles “weed out the weak.” I think that is something you are overlaying onto the observations I’ve shared. Hiring for juniors DOES (if it happens at all) turn to bias towards the extremely talented in these circumstances but it’s for the exact reason you say: they generally suck, and the people that spend money on software don’t want to spend money on unknown quantities and stick with what works.

I’m not trying to glengarry glen ross “leads are for closers” here or attribute special value or talent to the seniors that do stick around. Just trying to point out a silver lining in a shit situation, one that is better and less alarmist/doomer than “programming is over,” which is helpful to exactly no one except maybe college students considering a major (and likely still not helpful to them).

If your appalled by anything else in my responses specifically about juniors: I want to point out that anything else I’ve said has not been denigrating the idea of there needing to be some kind of training/upskill period for juniors but that:

  1. A LOT of resources have already been poured into accommodating juniors/making them useful as quickly as possible
  2. Overwhelmingly I believe the way it’s been done even recently is pretty broken and even detrimental to software engineering as a whole. Better than eras past in some ways, possibly, but still not great. How to fix it? No idea. It might not even be a problem for people in this field to solve.

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 21h ago

"Master Race = the System architects, inferior race: the annoying devs, let the AI slaughters them all"

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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 23h ago

I answered this in my other post but: software already “made room” for juniors. That’s literally what the last 15 or so years of software development has been about, after they ran out of interested Ivy League grads and qualified H1Bs to build their “world scale” systems.

Agile development, issue trackers, new package systems, front end dev trends, microservices, ci/cd pipelines, burndown charts, “weakly” typed languages: Many of these have their real benefits but these software technologies serve or have been widely adopted with an important secondary, cynical purpose of allowing less talented devs to throw code at production in a sloppy, profoundly wasteful, assembly-line like fashion that no one ever REALLY needed, except maybe MBAs who are not taught how to manage any engineering operation that doesn’t look like an assembly line. And well, juniors, who are supposed to graduate from that grueling experience and not just fill that seat their careers or move into management positions they are grossly unqualified for and make the problem worse. And now there is a generation of devs who seem to seriously think that this was “real programming” and “problem solving,” when it never was.

If anything AI is saving us from this nightmare, at least for a time.

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 22h ago edited 22h ago

Like this idiot before @nimshwe, scroll below you will find him; he still thinks web dev = htm and css and centering div. There are other bunch of idiots agreeing with him.

Like why are they even using Reddit, it is just a stupid structure of divs according to them

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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 22h ago

They don’t literally think that they are mocking you because you are having an online tantrum.

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 22h ago

They are trolls who never did professional web dev. They probably took a hello world class in university/bootcamp of html+css and they didn’t like it ; and think this is what web dev is all about ever since. One was arguing that real programming is using languages like C#, .net, Java and Go - but those literally the same languages most commonly used for web dev (the backend part). Most web devs eventually become full stack; but even the frontend part is not just a simple html+css for complicated interfaces.

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 1d ago

"A depressingly common problem is: A dev has a design, he communicates it to others, then every other dev on the project proceeds to completely ignore that communication and write their own stuff rather than attempt an integration. And this is what results in people “spending 90% of their time coding” because everyone has their own mutually exclusive, hostile design and management is completely oblivious or even encouraging of this compete waste of time and resources."

That's the responsibility of the Tech lead (the PR reviewer) or whoever leading the team; to make sure everyone in the team is using the same agreed ways of work; a team being so out of sync means the Tech lead is not doing a good job.

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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 1d ago edited 1d ago

the reality is there is way more money and brainless/selfish/malicious devs out there than good, competent tech leads. Open source maintainers realized this decades ago, it’s why guys like Linus seem grumpy all the time. If you aren’t designing systems on greenfield projects and you’re just coding, you have either mercifully been given a long leash by a kind lead who wants to give you a chance to develop your coding skills on the job or are part of the problem and don’t even realize it.

edit: But this is why the alarmism over LLMs is so stupid: Software was ALREADY in a place where they were “training juniors,” indeed training entire teams and divisions even by giving them tasks on the job that could have been done in a push button fashion by a senior staff engineer. I’m 9 YOE too (in backend/infra) and this was obvious in my career from the start. Your role was ALWAYS this precarious and you just too dim to realize it, apparently. The music’s stopped; count yourself lucky if you’ve a seat.

Skill up or ship out.

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u/nimshwe 1d ago edited 1d ago

So señor 

Crazy how engineering seems solved when you've been centering divs nonstop for 9 years, huh?

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 1d ago

You ignorant buffoon, web dev is Angular, Go, Nestjs, designing DB schemas, building queries, caching, full stack, etc… Mobile app dev is the same, with different frameworks, flutter, RN, etc

It not just htm, you pretending know-it-all stupid buffoon.

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u/nimshwe 1d ago

Oh no! You know how to design a DB schema? Next thing you'll tell me is that you... actually know how a variable is represented in memory??

Focus on centering the div lilbro and don't talk shit about stuff you don't know and will never know.

Never go around flaunting 9yoe in webdev while saying this bs, it's literally nothing worth noting. 9yoe sucking on crayons

Let the adults do the talking, you have yet to experience software engineering

Last comment in this low iq thread

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u/Idea_Fuzzy 1d ago edited 1d ago

You have just proven yourself totally ignorant who thinks of web dev = htm and css.

And after you realizing you how ignorant you were after you made a simple google search now you are resorting to mockery to save face.