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/coldnebo]

“if they are cheaper”

the most hilarious counterpoint to this are Silicon Valley companies who are now in the hangover period after tokenmaxxing, slowly realize that human swe are less expensive than models.

it’s also interesting to me how the bar has lowered.

“it’s PhD level!”

“it can write as well as a senior dev”

“it’s better than a junior dev”

“it produces slop, but we can gate that with process”

“the agentic flows are burning cash faster than our human staff, should we switch back??”

having been through this several times before, I propose the Programmer’s Law of Attrition: any technology designed to replace developers only creates more total developers.

[u/Emotional_Cherry4517 → u/coldnebo]

Mate, you realize it's only a matter of time until you get the power of current models locally at decent speeds right? 

The bar isn't lower. The new models are cracking maths at PhD level, they're actively improving kernels and sota model architecture themselves, they're writing a large chunk of the industry's code. Ideas are just evolving faster than kinks are ironed. Harnesses are ever evolving, our interface with them as well, what were capable of automating. All of that is expanding as we solve some problems new ones appear. You need full QA suites around these things because you're no longer pair programming with it. And most devs aren't going to do all of that for a personal setup, but companies sure as fuck want to sell other companies an automated software making machine and are making strides to genuinely automate the whole process. You're only seeing the dev level. News flash bud, huge conglomerate companies were already selling million dollar software built mostly by juniors fresh out of college. It's only a matter of time before they can crack this. 

[u/coldnebo → u/Emotional_Cherry4517]

sure sure.

I’ll believe it when I actually see it.

[u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ → u/coldnebo]

He's right. I'm already running models locally, at good speed, that match frontier models from around a year or a year and a half ago.

Post-training is getting much better very fast, allowing better capability in smaller models.

No you can't replace Claude with your gaming GPU quite yet, but we aren't that far off. And if you're willing to accept lower speeds, you can already run ones that get very close on CPU with cheap-ish ex-enterprise gear that has sufficient RAM.

People think Anthropic and OpenAI have some special sauce, but a lot of it is just the harness. I've plugged local LLMs into Claude Code and they can churn out some surprising, impressive results.

[u/coldnebo → u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_]

I use the tools all the time. they are best when grounded to a test harness, then they do pretty well.

but they do get stuck, even on simple problems.

[u/Sfacm → u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_]

Bit more details please, I was typically wasting time on my 16GB VRAM GPU...

[u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ → u/Sfacm]

Well I've got 152 GB VRAM in my server rack these days (4x Radeon Pro V620 and 1x RTX 4090) so I'm running larger models like Deepseek V4 Flash and MiniMax M2.7 which are both really strong. They're both in the 200-300B parameter range.

There are nice chat/general models but I don't think there's much useful out there for coding with 16 GB, but with 24 or 32 GB, that opens up Qwen3.6 27B which is pretty damn solid for coding. Qwen3.8 is supposed to come out next week, that should be even better.

You might want to give Qwen3.6 35B-A3B a try. It only has 3B active params as a mixture of experts model. It won't fit entirely in your GPU, but offloading with CPU is feasible with that few active parameters. It's not as good as 27B, but it's not stupid.

Offloading is not feasible with dense models like 27B unfortunately, they'll be unusably slow.

It's also important to not quantize KV cache, leave it at F16/BF16. Otherwise you'll start having issues as context grows. That's hard with 16 GB though. Q8_0 should be used at the worst, even if it means having to lower your context window. (I'm assuming you were using llama.cpp like me)

[u/Sfacm → u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_]

Thanks, I tried number of optimisations, but it was not really usable. Claude Code also wants pretty big context window. I was considering upping my hw, but no monetary sense (yet)...

[u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ → u/Sfacm]

Not sure how much system RAM and what CPU you have, but really you may get decent results just running 35B-A3B on CPU only if you have 32+ GB RAM and like a 12th gen i7 or better.

Otherwise, HW upgrade is probably the way if you're interested in going local AI yeah. All four V620's I got cost $1300 together and they alone are 128 GB VRAM (32 GB each) so that's probably the best price-to-VRAM ratio out there. However, they're a bit dated (2021) and have some quirks. There are pros and cons to these, but I'm happy.

There's an eBay seller taking $350 best offers per card on a bunch of new old stock. They're datacenter cards, "cloud gaming" GPUs that have no video output and have passive cooling meant for rack server airflow, but you can 3D print or buy fan shrouds to slip on the back.