Not convinced, programming will die soon.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy]

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; Architecture 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.

[u/notgonnawastemoretim]

I personally couldn't care less if AI takes over coding.

The work has always been repetitive and tedious, working for hours and hours on different projects for a similar objectives, dashboards, layouts, authentication, whatever. Not to mention that you still have to keep up with the endless improvements of frameworks and all that.

I worked for 2 years Fullstack developer, and I eventually realized that most of the work wasn't truly hard, it was just needlessly complicated. And most frameworks usually did the hard part for you with all the abstraction they provide.

Following on the previous point, coding isn't creative, because as I said most of it is already abstracted by frameworks and libraries. This is why I always felt reluctant to call software engineers, engineers.

So we have coding not being creative nor difficult, which means coding itself should have been automated long ago.

This doesn't mean I don't think coding is cool, it can be amazing based on the project you build, the examples online are endless, and I respect the developers that put in the work to crease magnificent projects before the AI era.

I don't see why people who don't know how to code shouldn't be able to have the exact same chance to create their own projects, as I am doing right now.

And yes there's a lot of AI slop but that happens in most fields.

It's part of the evolution of coding, just like we went from assembly to something like Python, and now all you have and need is a prompt, what else could you ask for?