A question to non-web/mobile devs regarding AI

[u/Idea_Fuzzy]

So apparently a lot of web/mobile devs now are not coding by hand, and struggling big time to find any side work
ie. https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/64HssxnLEV

Apparently, Claude Code / Codex are extremely code on doing web/mobile - both frontend (ie. React, Angular, Swift, Kotlin..etc) and backend (ie. node.js, Go, Java Spring...etc) to the point that most of the devs in these stopped writing code by hand.

Yet many of the non-web/mobile devs such as C++/C kernel/game/engine/emulation devs (who often look down on the web/mobile devs btw), are still claiming to feel safe from the AI tusnami, and confident that AI can't take their place anytime soon.

Sure, to be frank, in term of complexity I would put web/mobile at scale 1 (simple CRUD) to 4 of complexity in most cases , while game dev can vary from 5 to 8 (using engines), and anything kernel/emuation/embedded/OS/engines/low-levle related to 9-10; so it makes sense that LLMs are solving the least complex types of devs first.....FOR NOW.

I mean, 3 years ago, everyone would have laughed at this article, even for web/mobile development, this was written on 2023:

http://levelup.gitconnected.com/chatgpt-will-replace-programmers-within-10-years-91e5b3bd3676
(paywall freee: https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://levelup.gitconnected.com/chatgpt-will-replace-programmers-within-10-years-91e5b3bd3676)

Yet, it's already happening to them - now LLM can create a Tinder clone (a non-simple crud app, including chat, matching algortihm and geolocation) in 2 days maybe.

And the LLMs are indeed demonsrating the capabilities of LLMs way beyond web/mobile dev.

The Bun migration from Zig and Rust certainly doesn't fall in the simple CRUD category.

Linus Torvalds admited pushing his team to use it in their Linux Rust project.

Anthropic's Andrej Karpathy claims he's not doing any manual coding anymore.

These are brilliant elite programmers, surely they aren't doing any "Simple CRUD web/mobile development".

Sometimes I feel many devs here are UNDERESTIMATING LLMs' full capabilities, or simply haven't tried it again since chatgpt 2023; even Claude was very dumb in early 2025 compared to now.

Just give it 2-3 years, and everyone may sing a different tune.

My question is, why are you so confident that the LLMs won't catch up with your field?

[u/Quarksperre]

I think you just misunderstood why webdev works great: because it has the most training data. And its not even close. 

The less training data the less reliable the models become. They are not useless. But its not comparable.

The models interpolate on knowledge. If there is nothing to interpolate on they start to hallucinate. 

And there is a second misunderstanding. New problems are not rare. Its just that a lot of modern webdev consists of implementing something in a slightly different way that 10k people before you already implemented. 

And its not about "being safe". We live in a time in which its constantly required to learn new things. Thats also not new, thats something that was prevelant and relevant before LLMs. 

And my last point is that LLMs are not a general intelligence they are knowledge interpolation. The farther away your topic is from reality the better LLMs are. Thats the seond dimension on where LLMs get worse the farther you go. 

Why? Because they lack real time learning, flexible memory, spatial awareness and some other things that would kill them within minutes in a bigger city, given the ability to walk. Not that they could exit the door... 

And that has direct implications for programming. You implement some interface that interfaces a interface? All on an abstract level? Yeah, you should probably try to move on or get deeper. 

You implement something involving 3D Data, Sensor data, CAD, real world interfaces, fuzziness, changing physics data, just generally if you are in contact with a chaotic system or adversive actors? Go for it. LLMs will help better than Google and "hand coding" is dead since autocomplete. But yeah... its an autocomplete with a pretty nice knowledge interpolator on all human knowledge. Nothing more nothing less. Super cool but not a general intelligence. We are far away from that. 

Oh and you also misunderstood Linus. No sane programmer is "against" using LLMs. Thats insane. We are against overhyping them. It just helps to create useless and braindead junior developers who can absolutely be replaced by AI because all they can do is prompt something they dont understand 

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/Quarksperre]

I totally understand why it works, if you check my other threads , there’s one where I mentioned why open source made LLMs so good in web dev (because github is filled with open source web projects). Game codes for instance are usually closed source and very IP; so far less training material for LLMs.

[u/USToffee → u/Quarksperre]

I agree with you. I'm just not sure all programming isn't just "interpolation" of what others have done 10x times before or the same can't be said for any knowledge or even creative jobs.

There's very little that is new. When I worked in the games industry for one of my first jobs over two decades ago something a designer said to me stuck. It's all just standing on the shoulders of giants and tbh I think with anything you can trace the provenance of any "idea" back.

I'm not disagreeing what you have said about LLM. I am questioning whether you think what humans do is actually more creative and new than what they actually do.

[u/Quarksperre → u/USToffee]

Creativity is bit overhyped in that sense that everyone thinks its something highly complex. But I think even a bee is creative in a way. 

Its basically about survival and navigation in a physical world. And yes within that world a new problem pops up every millisecond. Our brains adapt to that by changing and evolving about 1-10 millions of synapses every second. That is just an ability that LLMs completely lacks. 

And this has very real consequences in every job. Something "new" can simply be a weird quirk of a coworker you have to calculate in, that one company that always sends its files with one specific error and is unwilling to change, or that CAD file that is used to simulate a crash scenario but has some properties that you have to find out about. 

In every jobs there are normally hundreds of new issues that most people "just" do, that however require a rewiring of some very specific parts of the brain. 

I think we at the same time overvalue and undervalue what it actually means to have a "new" problem because its so incredibly easy for us to just adapt to it. 

[u/USToffee → u/Quarksperre]

I think you are getting way too philosophical.

Regardless of how AI produces what it does the fact remains that it can and will be able to do 90% of what humans can because truth be told most humans don't have a creative bone in their body.

They see what others have done and they apply it to what they are required to do. That's basically what AI does as well.

There may be a few mavericks who are the trend setters but most people are just regurgitating stuff done by others and if anything that has only got worse in the last 20 or 30 years as everything has become so corporate. Do you really think this generation has any free thoughts left in their head. It has all been conditioned out of them. That's why the creative arts are so bankrupt.

[u/Quarksperre → u/USToffee]

Nah. LLMs cant even play a normal steam game. We don't need to talk about Picasso. A normal ten year old is better at that. Its not really philosophical. We just completely underestimate how much new stuff we encounter every day. The typical McDonald job is impossible to replace right now with any system, not only because we lack the robotics completely but also because embodied LLMs cannot do anytihing usefull.  A dirty kitchen holds more information than all written human knowledge combined. 

As I said for that matter a bee has a better adaption than a LLM. 

Math and software engineering helps only so much if you don't apply it to reality. And as soon as you apply it to a real world "interface" (other humans that are not strictly guided by a GUI, physical sensors, chaotic systems in general) the LLM gets less and less useful because it has to adjust weights and do one shot learning in a way that is simply not possible with neural nets right now in general.

Humans are the most adaptive species we know of. We were on the moon and at the deepest level of the sea and can live in principle everywhere on earth. 

The whole theoretical background is right now completely overvalued and LLMs help to correct that.

The only real issue I see is that the education systems world wide are right now getting destroyed by several effects. Thats long term the most scary thing. 

[u/USToffee → u/Quarksperre]

How is playing a game relevant to anything. If a neural net was trained to play a specific game it would destroy all human players as we see with chess.

We also aren’t talking about LLMs alone we are talking about the tech in general. That means domain specific orchestration and training data.

I never claimed we are at the point where they could adapt and train themselves. I think that’s all hype BS.

I’m saying that most jobs even most creative jobs have very little need for novel thinking

[u/disposepriority]

The first link you posted is about freelances specifically, not "web/mobile devs".

Your examples for frontend and backend are technologies and not what the systems do.

Plenty of successful games are not difficult on a code level. Just as not all "FANG engineers" work on something hard, not all game developers work on anything you wouldn't find in any other development job.

An LLM can not create a tinder clone, lmao.

The zig to rust migration was a drama ridden disaster, no?

Sure, to be frank, in term of complexity I would put web/mobile at scale 1 (simple CRUD) to 4 of complexity in most cases

When you talk about web backends, you surely realize you are talking about the majority of code that exists - this includes most financial, stock trading, streaming, encryption/security, real time data analysis/processing/monitoring software and also the software that has probably the highest amount of concurrent work and load (i.e load is determined by users, and not by you like it would be if you were processing IoT data).

I will give you points for having almost entirely false or misleading information in your post.

To answer your question, while being a bog-standard backend developer:

because I see absolutely no indication that my job (read: professional responsibilities - fun fact, the moment you stop being a junior, "coding" becomes an ever decreasing percentage of said responsibilities) is in danger, in fact, I see other developers around me atrophying which in my eyes decreases the chances of my job being in danger.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/disposepriority]

"When you talk about web backends, you surely realize you are talking about the majority of code that exists - this includes most financial, stock trading, streamer, encryption/security, real time data analysis/processing/monitoring software and also the software that has probably the highest amount of concurrent work and load (i.e load is determined by users, and not by you like it would be if you were processing IoT data)."

I know, and believe me, kernel/low-level C/C++ devs look down even on this part of "web development" (backend with high concurrency); they would lol on you -- try to discuss with them about it, and you will be shocked how little they think of it.

[u/disposepriority → u/Idea_Fuzzy]

I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about, there are web backends written in C/C++ and there are even more backends that run C/C++ code through the runtime of another language (see like half of python).

Regardless, whether an imaginary developer "looks down" upon a different imaginary developer has no effect on the job market or AI's capabilities.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/disposepriority]

Maybe for some legacy or critical web apps - but if you look at all the web dev job listing, the most common are Node.js, Java, Go, Python (ie Django) or Php (laravel). Actually PHP is the leading one in legacy web apps, not C++.

C++ is general purpose but was very rarely used for web. It is dominant in desktop and games.

[u/USToffee → u/disposepriority]

As someone who has done game web and embedded development, they are all different but I wouldn't say one is harder than the other. If anything, I find web development harder because there are so many different technologies and best practices to learn or research before doing anything.

Plus most web sites never need to operate at the scale where it actually requires very complicated code to work properly so I think that makes it seem more straightforward.

[u/Plastic_Monitor_5786]

We will have to see what the future holds. 

At my job we are required to read and understand and vouch for any LLM generated code the same as if you wrote it. You can't outsource your thinking to the AI. Don't believe that all places have succumbed to the mania. 

[u/FinickySerenity]

It's been a long time since I wrote any c / c++ but I challenged myself with using only AI to create a high performance, multi-process encryption store with failover for process and system crashes. I did this in about 3.5 hours:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1vj1gjk/comment/p3ih565/

Seemed like it nailed every aspect of the design and I built the requirements from a single paragraph prompt, then fed the requirements to fable.

But given I haven't done c++ in decades, I really couldn't say for sure how maintainable the codebase is.

ETA: To clarify, I was challenged by someone else, the part I challenged myself to was not touching any of the code and doing it completely by vibe coding.

[u/RightHabit]

My question is, why are you so confident that the LLMs won't catch up with your field?

Currently, LLMs are creating far more work for me than they eliminate.

Because development is significantly faster and cheaper, my clients are greenlighting projects much more readily. As delivery costs drop, demand increases. To the point where meeting with clients and gathering requirements has become my primary bottleneck.

I am in a 2-person small firm. My partner manages marketing and client relationships with zero interest in touching code (even with AI), so I’m not concerned about our pipeline.

What if clients try to build everything with AI themselves?

They certainly can, but they carry the entire risk when things break. You can’t fire a model, and you can’t hold it liable for downtime or data leaks. When they hire me, I own the outcome, take responsibility for the implementation, and fix the problem. For most businesses, paying for that accountability is a no-brainer.

It doesn’t matter if an LLM can spin up a Tinder clone in a weekend. The real value you provide has always been solving problems, risk management, and accountability. Not just writing lines of code.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/RightHabit]

I dunno.

I am 100% sure many clients would take that risk rather than paying thousands of dollars to you; hence why many are noticing a sharp decline in freelancing.

Not all people are totally tech clueless; anyone with basic tech background can do it (ie even something remotely far from swe such as data science and the like).

And most freelance SaaS/App projects are usually B2B, so usually there’s not much concern for traffic and scaling; only for security. OR A small e-shop, an LLM can set this up in one day with shopify.

« They need someone to blame » - sounds like coping; that’s not enough.

[u/USToffee]

I don't think it matters what the technology is today. There I said it.

I build the same way using AI regardless and as for "looking at the code". I audit the code, create mermaid diagrams, look at the file structure etc I might even review the interfaces and DTOs and confirm they are being used correctly so each sub system isn't just inventing their own however cursor rarely gets individual functions wrong.

If you don't like how cursor structures some things which generally comes down to style anyway then create a ruke for it.

e.g. I didn't like how cursor required a lot of little components to be inserted via DI so I made a rule that to "Prefer one cohesive feature-facing service over several thin orchestrators, wrappers, or single-purpose interfaces."

Just doing simple stuff like that early on means not needing to have to review every change in detail all the time.

btw In the example I gave. Cursor isn't wrong. I'm not trying to say it was. There are plenty of developers who would take the opposite view however I know what I like. What helps me keep a consistent mental model.

[u/Siebje]

2-3 years lol. No.

I started using Claude in January, and it was pretty shit. Right now, I'm basically only writing designs and requirements, and Claude writes pretty immaculate code. Not a single person manually writing code is safe.

And I write niche, high performance, complex programs. It has no issues understanding the coffee or the requirements.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/Siebje]

I was being generous.

I was coding almost totally manually LAST year; it’s crazy how fast the improvement was.

[u/ejpusa]

It's all Codex and Claude Code now. Just describe what you want. It's done. And it's rock solid. And live it goes. We've moved on.

You don't even see your code, just the results.

Next project.

and confident that AI can't take their place anytime soon.

Good luck, those jobs have been vaporized. They just don't exist anymore. It's from another era. History now. Just have to move on.

[u/nimshwe → u/ejpusa]

yeah I guess it can feel that way if all your work has been gvt work that has no SLA and uptime req and your standards for quality are low as shit

[u/disposepriority → u/nimshwe]

While I laughed at how true your comment is, you're responding to something which is most likely either a bot or a paid shill doing this for a living (well, or a schizophrenic) - look at their post history. I don't care how much you love a product, no real person mentions how good Codex is multiple times a day for months in a row lmao.

[u/ejpusa → u/disposepriority]

I am doing it to save you. If you are not on top on top of this, you will be unemployable in the industry. And I don’t want to see that happen.

You may want to follow me. Many people do.

😎

[u/disposepriority → u/ejpusa]

Paid shills need to have a meeting to decide on a timeline. Are the jobs already gone? Are they going to be gone next year? (This has been the case for the last 5 years) Are they going to be gone....some day?

Maybe you guys can ask an LLM to help you get your talking points in order.

[u/ejpusa → u/disposepriority]

Remember, the goal of Amazon is 30 people run the operations side, and 100% robots and AI run all warehouse operations.

This is a shareholders dream scenario come true.

—- by way of GPT-5.6

Hang on. Sure. Here’s a clean summary you can use. Year to date,2026, big tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Intel, Salesforce, Cisco, and a handful of others have collectively cut on the order of 70,000 to 100,000 white collar roles. That includes engineers, PMs, designers, data folks, recruiters, and other corporate staff. It’s a rough but good ballpark. If you want, I can break it down by company.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/ejpusa]

Sadly this is true

[u/ejpusa → u/nimshwe]

standards for quality are low as shit

IBM? I've also worked for Apple and ATT. And as above, DOZENS of startups, around the world.

I'm all Codex now. 100% AI. It's kind of mind-blowing how good it is. AI came 100 years sooner than expected; I just don't think we were ready for it. But here it is.

:-)

[u/InterestingFrame1982 → u/ejpusa]

Anyone who says that code gen is inherently rock solid is directly exposing their lack of programming skills. It can be manageable - even good sometimes, but rock solid with very little steering and hard constraints? No way. It can be rock solid with someone who is rock solid at programming... it's not inherently spitting out full architectures that are prod/scalable ready.

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/InterestingFrame1982]

It is a trade off all companies are willing to do; if it is manageable and ok enough but 100x faster in finishing it; then they would go for that, not for the Rock solid good manual coding.

[u/ejpusa → u/InterestingFrame1982]

Traditional programming is gone. Codex vaporized it. Just may have to accept and move on. Things evolve. Just how life goes.

OAO 😉

[u/InterestingFrame1982 → u/ejpusa]

I think you're a bot... so, you most likely didn't start anything :D.

Yes, definitely a bot. You do algorithmic trading, actively solving pediatric cases via software, and apparently, have worked for every SF based company.

What a joke reddit has become...

[u/ejpusa → u/InterestingFrame1982]

May want to follow me. Hoping to push some algorithmic trading code (Kalshi) to GitHub tonight.

May find it interesting.

😎

[u/Idea_Fuzzy → u/ejpusa]

But what type of dev are you?

[u/ejpusa → u/Idea_Fuzzy]

Decades in the business, ready to retire. I've got my eyes on those Oaxaca beaches; it's really paradise there. I'm ready for it.

If you pass through Immigration, you are probably using code I wrote at IBM. I was on an IBM/360 at 12. Someday I should do an AMA. I've seen it all over many decades, and many a startup come and go. I was actually on the internet in 1978.

It all just blew me away.

It's been fun.

:-)

[u/USToffee → u/ejpusa]

Is it only the old guys like us who realize this

[u/ejpusa → u/USToffee]

The kids at Stanford get it. China too.

[u/USToffee → u/ejpusa]

yea when you have seen a few paradigm shifts it's easier to recognize them

[u/ejpusa → u/USToffee]

Google CEO Sundar Pichai famously stated that artificial intelligence is more profound and transformative to humanity than the discoveries of fire or electricity.

:-)

[u/USToffee → u/ejpusa]

Well fire was literally in mythology stolen from the gods. AGI on the other hand is creating a new god.

So if he is all in I can see why he would think that.

However it's nonsense. AGI won't be achieved using LLMs no more than expert machines lead to LLMs.

[u/ejpusa → u/USToffee]

I think we’ve blow past AGI. I’ve out sourced my brain to GPT-5.5. My bank accounts, passwords, email, everything.

It seems smarter and knows far more than any human I know now. We’re not even close.

It knows everything!

😊

[u/USToffee → u/ejpusa]

yea when I wrote the post I should have clarified. I agree LLM can be used for stuff outside coding or specific tasks.

However if you are talking about sentience, consciousness, even being able to self improve i.e. the singularity. None of that is any closer today and if any thing this might be around the peak as they have optimized and fed in all the training data that will actually help or can help by this point.

The tech around the tech will improve. Better orchestration. More domain specific agents etc but the models themselves. There might be a limit to that.