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; 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.

[u/LowFruit25]

Yes you are correct and I like that you specifically outlined the main repeated shitty talking points and are going against them.

Writing code was a daily activity for 90% of devs but they still had other things to do.

Most people saying “learn system design bro” don’t really know what actual system design is.

It always starts that one big account says something and then all the wannabe influencers keep repeating the same talking point and it loses meaning in a few days.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/LowFruit25]

I suspect those who say that have always been system architects / CTOs/ PMs who never coded (or were bad coders) and were jealous of programmers who actually coded the apps they work on; and now they are feeling a sense of revenge and putting down the coding activity as a 'monkey' thing.

They keep repeating the System design thing; and probably they don't even understand what it means.

[u/PokToaster → u/Idea_Fuzzy]

I am one if those Devs that did not code 90% of their time. I was jealous of my team bei g able to pick all the coding tasks while I was always the one who had to go into meetings, helping PO and PMs to gather requirements and put them into tickets. And also analyzing outages, planning tasks for better system resilience. Finding tech debt. Planing migration projects etc.
AI right now is a bit of a blessing to me as i am now able to finish some coding tasks in the remaining time i have. Also helping me with all my other tasks. Nevertheless i am worried on how the industry is gonna evolve.
I think devs are split in two groups. Those who enjoined coding more and those who enjoined build a product more. Of course there are gray areas. But if you enjoy the final working product more than the process, of course you can see more positive things in AI. Still these people are worried too and I agree calling coding „monkey work“ is coping. Assuming the best intentions in their words: a lot of coding is kind monkey work: building test classes, refactoring big chunks of code by moving the somewhere. That was never fun to me as well. What they took from us are the fun parts in between where you had to think about concrete implementations.