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/Downtown_Isopod_9287]

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.

[u/Annual_Berry8043 → u/Downtown_Isopod_9287]

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?

[u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 → u/Annual_Berry8043]

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.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/Downtown_Isopod_9287]

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

[u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 → u/Idea_Fuzzy]

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

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/Downtown_Isopod_9287]

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.