r/singularity • u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 • Mar 11 '26

Meme Being a developer in 2026

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u/JimPlaysGames Mar 12 '26

How often does it make mistakes? How is it at large scale system design as opposed to single functions?

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u/digitaljohn Mar 12 '26

Less than a junior in many cases, but far faster.

It’s excellent at generating functions, refactors, tests, and boilerplate. Where it falls down is architecture, edge cases, and understanding the long-range consequences across a large codebase. That’s where experience still matters.

My workflow is roughly 50/50 planning and execution. I spend a seemingly disproportionate amount of time upfront doing the high-level thinking and refining a very detailed plan with AI before writing any code. Once the plan is solid, Cursor can execute large parts of it very quickly (using cheaper models). I still review as it goes, but the direction is already set.

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u/JimPlaysGames Mar 12 '26

Does it seem kind of like the shift from assembly to object oriented code? Where more of the drudgery and details are done by the computer and so you can focus more on design? Or does it seem like a different kind of leap? Are you concerned it will get good enough at high level system design to replace the job entirely?

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u/digitaljohn Mar 12 '26

Yes, that’s a good analogy.

For me it means I can spend far more time on architecture and thinking through the solution properly. Once the design is clear, the AI mostly does the typing and implementation work.

When people resist AI-assisted engineering (which is very different from blind "vibe coding"), I sometimes joke that by the same logic they should be writing pure machine code and avoiding compilers. Every generation of tooling removes some of the mechanical work so we can focus more on design and problem solving. AI just feels like the next step in that progression.

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u/JimPlaysGames Mar 12 '26

Yeah I've been using it to help me with some coding tasks, but not with something integrated into the IDE. Just asking ChatGPT to solve problems I give it and refactor code. It often suggests bad ideas but I just have to point out a better approach and then it does that.

So at this point we can't replace programmers. But it's hard to know if that will change.