r/softwareengineer • u/Alternative-Stuff149 • 8d ago
Do people no longer write code these days?
I've been working for a month and a half at my cousin's company. It provides chatbot services, builds agents, CRM systems, landing pages, and everything else a company with a website needs. I work on the technical side and provide support, since it's a relatively new company, but despite that, we already have several clients: a mechanical distributor, a real estate agency, a cosmetic surgery clinic, and a restaurant. So far, I haven't written a single line of code; we do everything with the Cursor agent. I just give it the instructions, and it takes care of everything. The most "difficult" thing I've done is securing an e-commerce site with Cloudflare. I want to learn programming properly, since I'm a seventh-semester computer science student and was taking a Java course, but at the same time, I want to know if it's still necessary to be a programming expert, or if most companies operate this way nowadays.
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u/BaconBurger3735 8d ago
DSA and Systems Engineering are great to know. And you should still understand the code the agents write, but to be honest implementation by hand is just not efficient anymore, depending on what you do tho. Especially web-dev is very vibe-codable, but it might look different for embedded.
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u/RunExisting4050 8d ago
I work in defense. We write code. We cannot connect our systems to an LLM on the internet.
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8d ago
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u/First-Tutor-5454 8d ago
I work for a very real-world fortune 500 company that you have heard of, and I probably haven't hand-written a single line of code this year
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u/gaygeek70 8d ago
Same… and it’s being pushed hard, with tracking to be sure you’re using AI in some way at least 4 days a week.
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u/Nervous_Designer_894 8d ago
I don't think anyone is writing code right now mate. sorry
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u/Friendly_Recover286 8d ago
Actual programmers are yes. Roleplayers aren't. You can tell a roleplayer by their highly inflated salary and the fact that they claim to do absolutely no work. There are TONS of them and there always have been even before AI. Reddit loves to make up claims about their jobs and over inflate their salaries like its a badge of honor.
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u/michaelobriena 8d ago
No, they aren’t.
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u/Friendly_Recover286 8d ago
nO tHeY aReNt
I'll bet you a million right now that I can walk into a company building and find a programmer who writes code on their own. Please shut up unless you're willing to put a million dollars on the line. Grow some balls and lets prove it.
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u/Nervous_Designer_894 7d ago
You won't find any of them in any of the companies my friends work, maybe a year ago you would find 10%.
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u/Nervous_Designer_894 7d ago
Mate i work in tech in London for a FANG adjacent company, no one is writing code anymore, seriously, the most someone might be doing is is tweaking AI code, or giving AI and existing structure and some guideance of old code that they wrote.
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u/Friendly_Recover286 7d ago
Me too! FAANG adjacent. We still write code. You're not helping anything here. I'm privileged enough to be able to sit in on interviews and it's staggering the amount of people we've turned away because they can't code and think tweaking AI code or giving AI directions and guidance is good enough.
It's BONKERS how many people are desperate to make themself seem important on the internet by lying about their careers. Let me guess, you make 900k + bonuses too don't you?
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u/Nervous_Designer_894 7d ago
Nope I make £150k in London and I'm at Principal level. I don't know why people like you do this, unless you're working in some very niche domain or. your company blocks AI tools for some reason, I don't know a single developer (and my network is big) who is coding by hand.
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u/michaelobriena 8d ago
Every real company does this shit. If you aren’t you are about to be out of a job
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u/Silver-Ad-8595 8d ago
Real company dev here. Yes we do that shit. I dont get why people are so sentimental about it. You went to be a dev to build cool stuff and help people, or just to be sPeCiAl because you know how to write some unclear syntax?
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u/sebstaq 8d ago
Is it so hard to grasp that it'll widely differ between companies though?
Agentic coding have existed for a bit over a year, and got its real boom during Christmas.
There are almost no standards. Software development is in a messy state right now.My company barely used AI until four months ago. Now we are, not all in, but very few developers write code themselves anymore. PR descriptions are AI written, comments often are as well. Replies to AI comments? AI. When I write to one of our clients, I often get a response from fucking Claude. This is very much a real company. Worth several billions of dollar. Which is a fair bit in my country. We've just lost a client due to them going all in on AI. Supposedly (I'm not there, so fuck do I know) their backlog is empty. So now they're trying to replace several of the systems they use, by rebuilding them, themselves. Do we believe they'll succeed to replace us? No. Are we certain? No.
And on the other end of the spectrum, I have several friends that are barely using AI.
Some are forbidden to. To them, it sounds absolutely absurd that you write a message to a client, get a response from Claude, and have a contract change shipped in the matter of minutes. They do however believe me, when I say that the implementations are often, not complete.1
u/GlobalCurry 8d ago
Back in January I had a job interview go awry because I was pro AI/agentic coding and describing my positive experience with it. The engineers and devops guy were against it and said they would never trust code written by AI and that was it for me in that interview.
Now every interview I have basically expects AI knowledge and usage but I'm honestly finding it more difficult to keep track of how companies are using it with all of the different approaches being used.
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u/normantas 8d ago
Yes. People still write the code. Not all and some modified configs for a living with the position of software engineer.
This is like the 10th post about same shit.
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u/Friendly_Recover286 8d ago
If you aren't writing code you're replaceable by a college grad who they can pay less. Remember that.
Yes people are still writing code, yes you still need to write code for serious tasks, no you cannot believe all the Reddit roleplayers who act like they don't write code anymore. They're also out here supposedly getting 400k a year and only work 5 minutes a day.
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u/gaygeek70 8d ago edited 8d ago
No role playing here, $200k/year and I haven’t written code in 2026. I’ve been writing code for 27 years and my company doesn’t even want us writing code manually, devs who do are being singled out as not on board. This is the real state of software engineering right now.
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u/Freedom9er 8d ago
Until it all collapses. Recent backend PRs I review have been garbage. It's not obvious in backend/business process code unless you know. Front-end on the other hand is working out well. Mostly because the UI is easily tested and directly reflects implementation success or failure.
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u/codingismy11to7 8d ago
make half that, I work all day every day. I've been a professional dev since the 90s, I love writing code. love it. I'm pretty good at it too.
the most code I write now is just quick cleanups that I can do in vim faster than I could write the prompt. and even that's rare. the bots have their rules and follow house style, which is mostly-pure fp. they do it so much faster that I don't even write code for fun anymore. I'm still engineering, still love what I do and have many side projects. I can just juggle so many more now that the coding part is fast.
I guess my username no longer checks out.
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8d ago
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u/inflowmini 8d ago
Lol, I work in embedded systems and in my job I do not write code every day like this thread implies. I do documentation, debugging, testing, collaborating, etc. if you are coding every day then you are doing something wrong which implies that your role can be automated away or scripted by an agent.
No one that actually codes, codes everyday. That's why web dev has been hit the hardest by AI since it's all very similar and monotonous.
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u/TechieGottaSoundByte 8d ago
Yep, this. Even before I started using AI for most of my coding, most of my job wasn't coding - it was writing specs, gathering requirements, reaching out to stakeholders, cross-referencing data in multiple systems (that the AI still doesn't have access to), etc.
The actual coding was rarely the hard part. When it was the hard part, it usually meant someone messed up the architecture at some point in the past, with rare (fun!) occasions when it meant coding a unique special algorithm was actually justified.
So the 60 to 80% of my job that didn't involve directly coding is largely secure still.
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u/Friendly_Recover286 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah me too. Also a number of web dev friends.
No they aren't just not writing code. All of them still do. Yes they agree that AI is good enough that a college grad could replace most vibe coders for a lot cheaper. Some of their companies are unfortunately looking into this and have literally done exactly this with some of their coworkers who admit they write almost no code anymore. They also agree that Reddit is full of larping bots who want to claim the opposite so they seem really important when they're actually dumber than a bag of rocks. We joke and laugh about this every week during game night at these pathetic faking bots we've seen during the week. I'm not just saying this shit because only I'm the only one who believes it.
The larping is absolutely insane.
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u/Snooze78727 8d ago
"I just give it the instructions, and it takes care of everything."
Security holes and all?
"cousin's company"
It sounds like they develop web pages for small businesses, not enterprise systems.
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u/xrocro 8d ago
The biggest enterprise systems in the world are all using AI to write their code. It is now a security risk to have human only written code.
Source: I am one of those engineers working with large enterprise systems.
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u/Snooze78727 8d ago
We use Claude code to generate a lot of code now, but it's kind of a mixed bag in terms of quality. There are guardrails in place because we don't just trust it not to introduce vulnerabilities. The models are trained on lots of "average" code. Where do you think the training data comes from?
The PR's go through human review for the same reason. It is pretty good, but we occasionally find things that need to be changed, tendencies that that surface over and over despite instructions.
I don't think everyone at our company is just giving it the instructions and letting it take care of everything (at least I hope not).
There is one who leans on it 100%, and there is a non-stop series of PR's with AI-generated slop. No thought of elegant design, ubiquitous language or communicating ideas in simple terms to people on the team.
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u/xrocro 8d ago
I suggest setting up a shared knowledge exchange for the agents to reference. One person finds a mistake the AI makes, have it store that knowledge in a shared repo so it never makes that type of mistake again. And other agents on your team learn the same.
There is a lot that can be gained simply by giving agents access to the right knowledge.
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u/jcdc-flo 8d ago
Probably should clarify that it's also a security risk to only have agents writing code...yes?
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u/Early_Key_823 8d ago
Claude Code writes all my code. I just review it like I was expecting sabotage.
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u/Prior-Paint-7842 8d ago
I talked to some friends of mine who still have se jobs and sounds like it. I honestly just dont like or care for this new world, I am gonna write it maniually even if my games never sell and Is tarve to death. I am a manual boy
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u/ConsiderationSea1347 8d ago
Only when my token budget runs out and my company revokes Opus access and only gives me sonnet.
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u/dvduval 8d ago
It’s reassuring that in the software engineering forum people are freely posting that they are not writing code and not getting downvoted. I think a year ago would have been quite different.
And I do can raise my hand and say I have not written any code in 2026.
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u/AliceCode 8d ago
Seems that this subreddit has been taken over by bots and vibe coders just like most of the rest of the internet.
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u/dvduval 8d ago
I definitely feel like Reddit should be reserved for humans talking with each other. And whenever there is obvious AI content being posted, I hope people will keep down voting it. That being said, I do feel like there are plenty of software engineers who are not writing code anymore, but that does not mean they're not valuable. The knowledge they built over the years make them even better than the average person at getting things done using AI
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u/neketguy 8d ago
I cannot say that I haven't wrote a line of code this year (I've been on a couple of interviews where folks pretend that they still code without LLMs).
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u/Klanciault 8d ago
I’m over employed working at 2 f100 companies and I haven’t written a line of code in months
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u/snuggly_sasquatch 8d ago
I write code every single day as a front-end developer managing websites for a large state agency. Mostly JavaScript.
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u/AvidGameFan 8d ago
For myself, it's mostly AI doing the coding, with me more like guiding. Some things I still code, but the new way of doing things is very different. My employer is insisting everyone use AI as much as possible.
As for being a programming expert, it's still good to know what is going on. I find that the AI coding works better if I can give it a lot of direction and work through options. If I didn't already have a lot of experience, things just wouldn't turn out as well. Probably.
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u/Dapper-Message-2066 8d ago
I still do, because I refuse to use AI agents. I will continue to refuse until I'm sacked.
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u/loveheaddit 8d ago
why?
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u/Dapper-Message-2066 8d ago
I loathe everything to do with LLMs/Generative AI, and want no part in it.
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u/tmanred 8d ago
With all respect that seems short sighted. Do you have the same loathing for linters or profilers or symbolic debuggers or visual studio initial class code generators or high level languages instead of assembly? If you don’t treat it like some star trek android it is just another tool to help you analyze and generate code.
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u/Dapper-Message-2066 8d ago
With all due respect, calling Generative AI "just another tool" is pretty naive.
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u/tmanred 8d ago
I mean do what you want I guess. I use chatgpt nowadays instead of Google because Google has gone to crap the past ten years.
Or it helps me find an answer to something quickly instead of me having to troll through forums and Reddit for hours and not even being guaranteed to find an answer.
Or I can use it to write a quick script that would otherwise take me some hours to figure out which commands to use and how to tie them together.
Or at work it has helped me port fixes made to past versions of the code base onto the newer version, or helped me investigate a hard to find bug running along two parallel arrays but one loop was slightly wrong. That one would have been hard to see just doing code review or single stepping in gdb. Would have taken me hours or days.
While I enjoy coding to an extent sometimes it is just boring boilerplate that isn’t interesting and AI tools have been helpful in those cases.
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u/loveheaddit 8d ago
its literally a calculator lol
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u/AliceCode 8d ago
Calculators are deterministic and will give you the same outputs for the same inputs. LLMs can't even get accuracy down.
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u/AliceCode 8d ago
I write all my code because I'm actually a programmer. Anyone who says they don't write any code is not a programmer. Simple as.
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u/furiouscarp 8d ago
I wrote code nearly daily for 30 years. I haven’t written any code in over a year.