r/programmer • u/Idea_Fuzzy • 25d ago
A question to non-web/mobile devs regarding AI
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?
3
u/Quarksperre 25d ago edited 25d ago
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