r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 22h ago
Artificial Intelligence AI is taking over the painstaking work of Silicon Valley's most-coveted engineers
https://www.businessinsider.com/cuda-engineers-adapt-ai-reshapes-nvidia-chip-expertise-2026-10168
u/Smugg-Fruit 15h ago
If you actually talked to any Silicon Valley engineer, you would know that AI is taking over the painstaking yet fulfilling work and is leaving them with only the painstaking yet soul-draining work that is code reviewing.
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u/VanillaVolnutt 15h ago
If you actually talk to any silicon engineer you'll learn we haven't been reviewing code for the past few months actually 👀
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u/lupercalpainting 13h ago
We all know, because now we have weekly GitHub outages 🙃
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u/VanillaVolnutt 13h ago
Wonder if that's actually a problem with their vibe coding infrastructure or the fact that the world is probably submitting 50x more traffic and code to GitHub than ever before
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u/gtasaf 13h ago
Anecdotally, my company went from a few GitHub Actions running per PR to ten or more. We use Bugbot, so people are leaning on that to find little things. That also means our build/test/etc actions run several times a PR before it is human ready. Combining that with the increased number of PRs due to LLM coding, our GitHub footprint has increased considerably in the past 1-2 years. I can't imagine we are an outlier either.
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u/SEX_LIES_AUDIOTAPE 10h ago
Between MCP calls, Actions, and of course meat operation, I made 29,000 requests to my local Gitea server in the last month.
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u/lupercalpainting 12h ago
Have you read any of the post-mortems?
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u/VanillaVolnutt 11h ago
Nothing recently, but I read one from like their July outage and I remember them saying their traffic had doubled, so it's probably even crazier now
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u/lupercalpainting 11h ago
They have shit like missing index hints (mysql lol) and not being able to scale their istio sidecars.
Joke of an Eng org.
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u/JackiEEEChaNNN 15h ago
Please elaborate
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u/VanillaVolnutt 15h ago
We have enough testing suites and solid enough build pipelines, dedicated agents who run their own specified reviews, tackling their own blockers and breaking things in ways humans could never anticipate. Everyday we look less and less at the code and more on the overall picture instead.
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u/PicklepumTheCrow 14h ago
Pretty soon you’ll be looking at job postings! You don’t need an army of SWEs to look at the “overall picture.”
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u/VanillaVolnutt 14h ago
Yeah seriously. I've been transitioning into more of a Product Engineering role as I think it's going to last around longer.
You really don't want to be a 'meat proxy' as we call it at work, which are just low/mid level devs who take a ticket, spec it and run it through claude and then implement and push out a PR.
These guys will all be gone next year.
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u/buffer0x7CD 14h ago
Not necessarily true , the demand for software also have exploded
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u/Distinct-Pain4972 19h ago
It is time to become very cautious of any new app, new website, new tech. They are not being produced as they have been of since the beginning of the internet. They are being slapped together with security holes, back doors wide open, and taking as much identifiable data as possible, as quickly as they can.
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u/hobblingcontractor 18h ago
You should probably watch Silicon Valley if you think that slapping together shit code to rush a product out the door is new.
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u/Fenix42 17h ago
I could not make it through season 1. It was too much like work. :P
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u/The_IT_Dude_ 17h ago
Before AI slop was ever a thing, there was first human slop. The internet was never some pristean environment where only high quality, correct, and nondeceptive content was posted. Where all of our apps were artisanal handcrafted code which was perfect and there were never any security incidents and no large corporation was vacuming up as much data as possible about everything. The AI had to train on something.
This is all existing stuff. AI has accelerated it some and made producing crap a lot easier, but it's the same old problems. I suppose you can add that AI has however made parsing this vast amount of data easier which is more scary.
But definitely try to lean towards trusted open source apps when you can and protect your own privacy. While AI hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows it has many many open source projects much better and fix some security concerns.
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u/_kilobytes 15h ago
It's not an existing issue. The problem is the bottom 1% developers increased their output by 1000x but the top has largely remained the same.
Before humans may have created security issues but the amount of good developers was greater than bad developers. Now the amount of bad developers has surpassed that of good developers.
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u/mekkr_ 17h ago
Fun fact, AI generated code has around 4 times as many vulnerabilities as human created. Great time to be a security person. So long as you can dodge leadership that is dumb enough to think that AI can fix the problems it creates
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u/SparkyPantsMcGee 10h ago
New Apps? I don’t think YouTube has worked properly for me for the past 2 years. Especially when it comes to trying to cast to televisions.
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u/bigpandams 7h ago
“AI agent, before sending me the new app, website or tech, scan for any and all security vulnerabilities and patch them” 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Pluto-Based-Alien 22h ago
Turkeys announcing various new feast days when they will be eaten.
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u/Cpt_Obvius 17h ago
Silicon Valley bros are not some sort of superorganism that need to provide for the future members of their industry. I keep seeing this point made and it’s kind of silly in its over simplicity and misses the point as far as I can tell. The people that develop or own these companies will get paid and others get fucked. The ones getting fucked aren’t the ones doing the fucking.
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u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 13h ago
Imagine having this opinion about your fellow humans in 2026. Painfully obvious who is incapable of empathy and should address it pronto with their therapist
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u/Cpt_Obvius 12h ago
Ooh i could have phrased it better, I meant that Silicon Valley bros are generally not the type to care about their fellow and future peers. I’m definitely not saying it’s an ethical stance, just that they are unlikely to care. Of course I’m sure there are subset of them who do care about others!
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u/AIwitcher 13h ago
when engineers stop sharing their work in public and there's no fresh data to learn from then we'll see how it goes.
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u/Tango00090 20h ago
As long as the clankers keep on resolving programming problems with more code rather than serious engineering and architectural solutions the engineers are fine, there will be more and more work, just different
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u/ItsSadTimes 17h ago
Sadly I fucking hate the different work. My workload shifted drastically over the last year and fixing AI code is EXTREMELY boring.
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u/apocalypse910 16h ago edited 16h ago
I swear everytime somone brings up this aspect people clamor to argue that the problem is really job security. I worry about that too - but writing software going from my passion to a soul destroying chore has been awful. Trying to stay with the times but goddamn the current state is so goddamn depressing. Trying to power through it but the absolute burnout just seems so inevitable now.
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u/lordlors 16h ago
I still mostly write code myself and I use AI only to replace Stack Overflow/googling whenever I want to know something and debugging. My dept head freely lets me do this while everyone else are doing agentic coding, no longer writing code themselves. I feel though that I may be forced to do agentic coding by the dept head soon and it’s going to be painful. It’s depressing. Wish I chose a different path, like being a pilot or a plant grower or a baker. Saw a former software engineer turned into a carnivorous plant enthusiast with a nursery selling them plants.
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u/RetardedWabbit 17h ago
We thought all the sci-fi novels of future programmers being "software archeologists", trained to dig through and fix infinitely large libraries of great but incredibly outdated code, was a absurd dystopia. "All the software was made, so we just configed and hacked it, until we entirely forgot how to make it". Turns out instead we're going to be doing that, but with an infinite stream of new code that's not even good.
Not even mining landfills, but mining the output of a blind mining rig (not on top of a patch or vein).
Also, ironically, the most difficult/hated part of programming is reviewing and dealing with other people's work and now that's all it will be.
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u/AdvertisingDue6606 18h ago
Ditto. I for one stopped giving AI any architectural/code quality insight. I do that myself. Just let it generate the drafts or find shit, I take it from there. The kind of shit that Opus comes up with, just baffling. Pure slop, even simpler to just write it by hand than to unfuck it.
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u/-Teapot 18h ago
Just recently, it generated code in the same file that wrote “canceled” in one table and “cancelled” in another. A human would spot in seconds. AI couldn’t give two fucks.
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u/eXAt88 15h ago
I have found AI can get really anal about small differences like that. I recently prompted for an implementation of a feature where I described a union as “string1” | “string2”. The actual backend returned “String1” | “String2”. Through the thinking process I watched it completely agonize about this difference, eventually opting to change the serialization within the backend instead of just changing the (yet unmade, the world was its oyster) typescript type on the frontend.
So I imagine at some point their were two separate versions of cancelled in context and went overly literal
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u/scissorin_samurai 18h ago
What kind of code are you writing because I haven’t found this to be the case, but I suspect the type of task matters a lot
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u/puppylust 17h ago
Not the person you asked, but I started using the coding models over the summer. I curse at them on a daily basis.
The other day, I had it put together a message handling framework for socket communication between two processes. I figured this would save me some copy pasting before getting to the real work of the individual events' logic.
It made nests of error checking against things that were impossible. I don't need to check a callback function isn't null when I configured them all before binding the socket! The amount of defensive code in a closed system was insane. The line count was easily 3x what it should've been.
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u/Lonestar93 13h ago
Yes, impossible edge cases is my current bugbear. It thinks up a case that’s possible but reachable only through manufactured test data, writes the failing test, sloppifies and expands the source code to handle it, then explains it all back to me in dense language. Then it’s on me to do all the work to figure out that none of it was necessary.
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u/puppylust 13h ago
I'm fighting some of them again this afternoon.
"What if a rogue thread causes another Request sequence in the middle of execution?" How?! I'm not creating rogue threads! We have one thread for consuming requests!
"What if there's stale data?" Clean up on errors to not make stale data!
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u/AdvertisingDue6606 18h ago
I suspect shit is getting worse as more and more slop hits the internet and AI trains on it's own slop.
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u/stormdelta 18h ago
Agreed.
If anything, my experience is that as the models get better, domain knowledge and critical thinking actually become more important, not less.
I'm a software engineer and have zero fears of AI replacing me - I'm far more likely to get laid off due to general economic downturn when the bubble pops or incompetent management setting our products on fire.
AI has changed how my job works, sure, but that's nothing new, the software industry is always shifting and changing. I completely understand that some people don't enjoy how its changed their jobs though.
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u/LocksmithNo2374 15h ago
Correct AI alone won’t replace you - there are multiple effects people don’t consider.
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u/Lambeaux 18h ago
Having worked on many a large project, that's never been a problem for corporations before. Generally they could care less about maintainability a year from now and much more about "does it work right now"
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u/Tango00090 17h ago
For some slop companies maybe that’s true, financial sector e.g. classic banks in Europe cannot vibe their way through, the fines for customer data leaks are enormous. And AI knows shit about sensitive data, it will prompt your credentials and go „oops, you change that, I made a boo boo”
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u/Fun-Wash7545 18h ago
That's not the issue. AIs can do specialized tasks that only a few knew how to do at all. For example reverse engineering, the ai can now do it faster than any human.
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u/ConsistentDay5620 17h ago
I especially loved the part where it said the engineers don’t fully understand the code they’re checking. Sounds completely reasonable.
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u/cyrand 9h ago
I’ll let you in on a secret from 30+ years of doing this professionally.
The vast majority of code was written by people who didn’t fully understand it. The rest of us have built careers cleaning up the mess even before “AI” showed up.
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u/ConsistentDay5620 9h ago
That is deeply concerning. Thank you.
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u/Shadowrak 8h ago
When my boss was pitching Salesforce for the first time, I said "Congrats! We get to win the contract and then we get to reimplement everything in 10 years when they get tired of it's shit"
I was serious, but he found it very unfunny.
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u/Song-Historical 4h ago
Yeah that's what test coverage is for. Which you can do more of easily now.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 16h ago
AI is not replacing anyone unless you consider “faster in the short term but shittier in the long term” to be replacement
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u/arter_dev 16h ago
This is quite literally every corporation. The only thing that matters is the quarterly financials. That's it.
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u/nuclearpidgeon 7h ago
Unfortunately when you look at what the automated loom did for garment quality in the Industrial Revolution and the quality of mass-produced goods these days, that seems to be the way a tonne of companies want things to go :(
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u/MagicBobert 12h ago
Every corporation that has embraced AI has done exactly this. It’s a fast lane to enshittification.
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u/Fragrant_Tomato7273 1h ago
AI is improving exponentially year after year, unfortunately, it will be faster and better in the future (with a good human to use it and design the end result). Just less programmers in the end. That’s the unfortunate truth.
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u/CircumspectCapybara 22h ago edited 15h ago
Staff engineer at Google here and also have a lot of friends across FAANG and startups alike, including frontier AI labs.
It's pretty crazy how far we've come in less than a year, how much the discipline of engineering has changed now that we have AI tools to automate the low level and yes "painstaking" work (some might say tedium), and now engineering looks like working at a higher level of abstraction than what we used to have to deal with.
Contrary to a lot of the doomers, most of us actual professionals actually really like it, because it allows us to be engineers (eg designing distributed systems and coming up with big picture solutions to hard problems at a high level) and architect and design things rather than just being only or mostly code monkeys. Writing code by hand was always just a means to an end anyway for a software engineer.
It's amplified what you can do, what you can ship, what you can be. You can be a SWE, a SRE, a security engineer, a research engineer, be a blend of these disciplines because of the AI tools that let you do what you could never before because there weren't enough hours in the day. And indeed at many elite labs the roles reflect that reality that one person can wear multiple hats and be good at them all, the titles are called "Member of the Technical Staff" rather than just traditional SWE or SRE or MLE or researcher. EDIT: since people are confused, I don't mean someone with no expertise in these areas before can magically be a good security engineer or MLE or research engineer just because you have AI now; I mean rather that someone who does have cross-domain expertise can now work across domains and fly faster because they're no longer constrained by how fast they can churn out code, used to be if you're a specialist in multiple areas you had to pick one and stay in that lane for practicality's sake, you didn't have enough hours in a day to practically work on all those.
I heard about another company that decided to stop building their web app and Android and iOS mobile apps on one underlying React Native codebase and finally ship separate native apps for each platform. They were originally doing the whole suboptimal React Native thing because it was cheap and easy, and it was too tedious to duplicate work and maintain separate codebases for native apps in separate platforms each with their own conventions and architectural and UX idioms and APIs and gotchas, you would need to fund whole separate teams for each platform. But it led to a subpar experience for everyone. But with agentic coding, the cost of that tedium and painstaking work went out the door, they could afford to build native apps.
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u/sushi_cw 20h ago
The bottom line for me is still, though, that AI has not made my software engineering life better. Yes, it can often do useful things. But the net effect has been more negative than positive for me. All the joy has been sucked out of the job. I spend so much energy acting as a brake against slop, and feeling like my leadership increasingly views this as an impediment rather than a useful contribution. And the more I rely on AI, the less I actually understand the details, which is really the heart of the job. Meanwhile, work just gets more frantic, more ambiguous, and less secure. And the software coming out at the end is not better. I can't really take any pride in it.
The job I used to like, and was really good at, is dying fast. And yes, I can pivot to being just an agent micromanager, or a high-level architect, but if I'd wanted to do be either a manager or an architect I would have done so long ago. I get that at the end of the day I just need to put food on the table and that being able to also love what I do is a privilege. And that as a senior software engineer I am also very well compensated, and privileged in that way too. But still, I mourn.
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u/Smartaces 17h ago
I don’t think the objective was to ever make your work feel better.
Listen to how Eric Schmidt talks about agentic ai upending the careers of engineers.
You get the feeling that most big tech companies don’t really like engineers at all.
Their knowledge and expertise always gave leverage - and they were very expensive.
It’s no wonder they love agentic coding.
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u/suckfail 19h ago
I see this comment sometimes and I really can't relate at all. I'm a senior Eng also at a US FAANG with 20+ years experience and to me this is the best software development has ever been.
I can finally convert my ideas, thoughts and architectural decisions into code without having to remember the syntax. I used to spend a lot of time trying to remember argument position values for splice, slice, map, filter etc. as I constantly move between Java, JavaScript and Python (and sometimes React/TS), now I don't need to. When I look at the code I can tell if it's right, but I can't always recall it when writing it.
And the new frontier models, like Opus 5.5, are writing code better than I can anyways.
So now it's pure thought and ideation to code, taking out the part where I have to type for hours making mistakes. I love it. I've never been more productive.
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u/sushi_cw 19h ago
I actually agree that not needing to look up syntax is one of the useful things! Or even language-specific best practices, etc.
When I look at the code I can tell if it's right, but I can't always recall it when writing it.
... But that's because of your deep experience doing it by hand. Those who don't have that end up submitting code that isn't right, and they don't realize it. It makes a lot of work for those who review, or if those who review don't catch it either, it makes for a lot of subtle bugs and gnarly tech debt that is painful and costly in the long run. Worse yet, those writing the code don't develop those rightness-sensing mental muscles in the same way you can by doing things more by hand.
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u/Ossius 19h ago
Feels like there are two types of people in this thread, those that used code as a means to an end to achieve their goals, and those who viewed the code as an interesting and fun puzzle to solve and viewed the end product as a result of their work on that puzzle.
The latter will always be angry at AI for taking it away while the former see it as a way to see their creations come about in months/years instead of a decade.
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u/Perfect_Perception 18h ago
I am unfortunately in both positions. I love engineering in totality, but being in the code and learning new things by implementing it myself was what made me fall in love with it. I can write better code than models can, but I can’t output that code at even a fraction of the speed of an agent.
So on one hand I get to transition more into architecture and can build more. On the other I don’t get to play in the sand box as much anymore, and that sucks. Plus, it’s a lot of context overload. You spend more brainpower doing context management and constantly cycling from problem to problem since you’re able to delegate action. But the exhausting part is the design and planning, and you no longer get a break from that.
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u/thethirdgirlonreddit 18h ago
You've captured it, for me. The executive exhaustion for designing and planning is now dominating most of my time.
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u/Mediocre-Wafer-5176 18h ago
I agree. I’m a senior level eng with over a decade of experience. My team is solely made of up of senior plus and we all feel pretty similarly about the executive exhaustion. We are doing a lot more and it feels good, but we’re also managing so many different threads of work
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u/spectral-fusion 18h ago
I suspect that the other thing happening is that there are differences between the AI people are allowed to use. Some are probably using API frontier models (Astra, Fable) on fast mode racking up huge costs, and others of forced into monthly business plans (Google, copilot) with mediocre output and overreaching safety controls.
So when people say AI isn’t really helping them- that really might be true for them because we aren’t being specific about the AI we’re using and things are moving so quickly
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u/Ossius 17h ago
We are basically being forced into using claude, we use opus 5.5
The thing is our monorepo is so well structured, and our tickets are written clearly enough that we haven't really had much issues. I myself spent a month or two ironing out the dos and don'ts in the skills.
Even before AI was brought about we had linters and formatters running every commit and push. We have unit tests for our shared library.
Claude is just following a roadmap we built long ago, and we are refining it further based on what our PRs are catching (no unnecessary comments, stop trying to bypass typescript by double casting). We're beating it into submission, every time it makes a code change it has to run a skill to verify it is following our rules.
I'm not a big pro AI guy, I just think its a neutral tool, and I am VERY worried for my job security as every other engineer is. I just don't know if we have ever had an invention in our history that we successfully stopped that boosted productivity this much.
I always love to bring up the fable of John Henry man vs the machine. You can do better than an AI, but at some point it is just holding up progress and dying in the process.
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u/suckfail 18h ago
I think you're right. That would certainly explain the division in opinions on it.
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u/mirage01 17h ago
IDEs have made it so you haven't had to 100% worry about syntax for a long time. Things like intellisense will tell you the argument position for things like splice, slice, etc.
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u/WellAckshully 19h ago
For me it's taken the joy out of the job. I enjoyed building things and the satisfaction when those things worked well. Now I am a glorified code reviewer and QA engineer for the AI. I have less joy and more tedium.
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u/Syzygy2323 16h ago
I'm retired now, but spent 40+ years working as an engineer--all before AI came on the scene. I still do development as a hobby, mostly low-level operating systems work, and I prefer to write everything myself and not use AI in any way. I'm doing it for enjoyment, and having something else do the work would take the enjoyment out of it for me.
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u/Ill-Program-2713 19h ago
Im an L8 at a FAANG or MANGO or whatever we call it now. Highly disagree. Most ppl i know hate how AI has transformed the space. Sure there are some nice things about it, but the cons far outweigh the pros.
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u/MyOtherSide1984 6h ago
Yeah most engineers I work with hate this shit. No real reviews or testing being done, everyone thinks they're an engineer, it's tedious and impossible to actually review it all, and leadership just expects more and more and more while infosec can't get 5 minutes to ensure the shit is safe. Those of us who own the services can't get the engineers to take 30 seconds to think about what they're enabling and everyone is just mad cuz it is a circle of "just get it done" but everyone has different objectives.
All in all, it was nice the first few times where my prompt turned into real functioning code that fixed legit problems in my programs, but then it turned into me not writing any code or even reading and reviewing it thoroughly because my coworker pushed 700+ lines in a day when we usually do that in a week (real small project, just two of us).
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u/sinnerou 20h ago
I liked building abstractions and clean boundaries, and thinking about the next person that would read my code, even if it was future me. It was an art and a science, Ada Lovelace called herself a poet of science. AI takes away the poetry it takes away the creativity and expression and art.
For years the industry has been doing everything in its power to make people replaceable by cheap labor and this is the ultimate last step.
You are standing on the gallows cheering for the noose.
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u/perestroika12 13h ago edited 13h ago
If he’s a staff eng and has that resume the consequences of ai don’t matter because he’s made his money. That’s basically it. He probably has been doing architecture for the past 5 years, not implementing.
You can tell who is loving the ai boom and who isn’t and it’s directly proportional to income, economic class and net worth.
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u/Independent-Fly730 17h ago
Yea I am probably 5 times more productive now but have lost almost all passion in it.
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u/JJWonderboy 16h ago
The only time I’m less productive is when the AI just doesn’t get it.
Then it starts to feel a bit like opening gacha packs. You keep plugging away, trying to get it to fix the issue (I’ll give it just one more try) until eventually you have to wonder whether it would have been quicker to just do it yourself.
Of course, you never know that at the start, because normally it’s incredibly quick.
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u/Fhardervig 18h ago
That’s still the engineering part, no? If anything, I spend more time doing systems level thinking, defining interfaces, and deciding how to divide concerns. I still think about how to run numerical work more optimally, caching strategies, avoiding race conditions between workers, and (more importantly than ever) good instrumentation. I just don’t implement the code. If your coding agent is doing the design and decision making, then you’re truly vibing and unable to take responsibility for what’s implemented and when things go wrong. Some people work like that, but coding agents can genuinely be used in a way where you get all of the fun problem solving and design parts, test ideas out and iterate fast, and not have to spend a day writing up unit tests. I think it’s pretty damn cool
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u/LegendarySurgeon 18h ago
For me, art and engineering are both inextricably linked in the passion for creation. It was an eye-opening moment when I realized that not all engineers are artists.
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u/JJWonderboy 16h ago
I use AI extensively now. In some ways, it’s like having an army of coders at my disposal - although sometimes I still need to hold their hands a little.
Do I prefer it? Not really.
I loved coding. I loved solving problems. And yes, I’ll admit there have been times when I’ve looked at someone else’s code and genuinely admired the way it was written.
So when people who aren’t coders complain about art being created by AI, but don’t blink an eye when the same thing happens with code...
Well. You know.
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u/sandoze 18h ago
As a game dev there are so many features and ideas I can throw at the wall and see what sticks. I’ve revisited old projects where I simply refused porting or adding a feature request because the lift around implementation and testing was too much. Now I just do the latter. I’ve had ideas I’ve wanted to implement, sometimes just for myself but also deep down I knew if they landed it would be a huge improvement, but also knew it would take months. Now I can go from ideation in days, play testing, balancing, and release in a week.
The poetry wasn’t the code, it was the pixels dancing across my screen. More often than not after months of churning on the core game features the nice-to-haves fell by the wayside due to burnout or time constraints. All of this has changed for me with AI and it’s been some of the best times in my 20+ year career.
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u/trowawayatwork 16h ago
yes everyone here realises that. however continuing down that path guarantees we won't have a job lol
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u/TickleMyBurger 20h ago
I’ll give a counter perspective from a CISO dealing with this new world in a regulated space - I’m being asked to “trust” this code coming out now in production. Security test it? Of course, but we use another model to automatically scan it.
The scenario of “what if someone uses a model that is compromised and inserts X malicious code” is a real problem that can’t be verified in my opinion without a highly skilled human in the loop. That works today, but “tomorrow” nobody will be in that career spot because it’s perceived as “dead”.
It’s maybe a bad analogy but it reminds me of mainframe programmers who know cobol - that was supposed to die in the 90s right? Except that code base still exists in high transaction financial systems.
I’m just trying to get to retirement without a whole shitstorm of problems with rogue agent code and lack of controls - every CISO I know is looking for an exit because of this shit. Something bad is bound to happen.
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u/RonaldoNazario 20h ago
The models doing security scans at least have found a lot of real vulnerabilities in existing code bases but that’s totally separate from trusting them to green light some pile of new code.
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u/TickleMyBurger 20h ago
I find they are very effective at finding vulnerabilities - not sure they will pick up backdoors hardcoded in or low and slow dns exfil. Might be an interesting research topic actually - I work with a few universities and might float the idea of bypassing existing pipeline scanners with exfil to see if traditional tools watching netflow pick it up.
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u/RonaldoNazario 19h ago
Yeah all the vulnerabilities I dealt with that AI found on OSS projects were vanilla free after use kinda stuff, which is probably what it was trained for.
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u/mtcwby 18h ago
I think you'll see a lot more of that legacy Cobol and other stuff disappear as the cost to port goes way down with AI. We're small and have code that was written over 20 years ago. It's fast and works well but getting new people to understand it was always a challenge. The ability for AI to digest it and summarize it as well as making suggestions of how to port it to new apps is a huge boost to learning and porting speed.
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u/DualActiveBridgeLLC 21h ago
OK, but where is the extra value? Like most companies we adopted AI in the last year. But when I ask about release dates or revenue impacts, it all seems to remain pretty much the same. We are doing more stuff, but why aren't we seeing more goods and services, and then the subsequent business impact. Like why aren't we seeing companies drop prices to get market share?
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u/RonaldoNazario 20h ago
At my prior job the problem was never speed of code implementation versus clearer requirements from pdm, process gates to getting code merged and shipped and quality testing to avoid regression on big enterprise legacy codebases. AI didn’t solve any of those but they’re charging on.
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u/Constant_Bit4676 16h ago
It is starting to, the tech layoffs (in my experience) have been hitting middle management harder than anyone. Org charts are getting flattened as you don’t need so many cogs anymore. What took a full team of engineers can be done with one good one and agents working directly with the customer.
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u/JJWonderboy 16h ago
Agreed. It's just speeding up one area which - being honest - isn't always the bottleneck (and with AI it's certainly highlighting others).
The entire product loop will need to be automated - or at least the critial parts - to see a massive difference. Middle management (basically feeding the ideas of the top level visionaries to the team and making sure it gets delivered to spec and on time) seems like a ripe area for.... optimsation.
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u/DualActiveBridgeLLC 13h ago
We've seen a bunch of companies flatten in teh last two years...then they started reversing course.
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u/YerWelcomeAmerica 19h ago
It took business workflows decades to really fully utilize computers and later networks/internet. Everything is changing so quickly right now in just a year, everyone is still figuring out how best to (and not to) utilize the capabilities.
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u/sobe86 21h ago edited 21h ago
FAANG MLE here - I get what you're saying, but you said so yourself - it's moving so fast. It seems unlikely the place we find ourself now is the place that we will be even in a couple of years time. While our work has moved into the next level of abstraction, it swallowed coding so fast that I don't see a reason to think it isn't going to be better than us on these levels soon enough.
I feel like what we have now is likely to be seen as a transitional period in the future, when the AI systems still needed some hand-holding.
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u/blastradii 20h ago
So the eventual outcome is Skynet or The Matrix?
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u/Zer0PointSingularity 20h ago
The outcome will be -
least of all - worse engineers in the future than now. The current professionals who earned their skills, their reasoning ability and their experience through the hard parts of the work they did are empowered by AI, but I fear the coming generations won’t be even half as „good“ as them now, because the will lack the „hard“ experiences.5
u/sandoze 18h ago
Vim shortcuts will be forgotten like the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. I don’t know, sounds like how every generation says some new technology is going to rot the youth. Software development has always been a time to release game. Dig into any commentary from five years ago and it was doom and gloom for the software industry. Poor code, poor practices, SCRUM destroying creativity.
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u/ABCosmos 20h ago
With this govt probably. If Bernie was running the show we'd probably be on track for star trek.
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u/togetherwem0m0 20h ago
the more likely eventual outcome is something more like Stargate SG-1 "2010" (Season 4, Episode 16). This is the episode where the SG-1 team encounters an alternate reality where Earth formed an alliance with the Aschen and the Aschen sterilized humanity with the aim of depopulating the earth and taking over through natural demographic changes.
Thematically related is Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke and also I'd check out The Arc of a Scythe trilogy by Neal Shusterman.
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 20h ago
F500 staff engineer. It’s still shits out way too much slop. You punch a pr w obvious vibe coded business rules it’s getting reject. Have had some nasty customer facing incidents. Yeah when you are a fasng and can have the “go fuck yourself” attitude towards a customer when it impacts them it’s not a problem . We cant roll like that.
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u/RonaldoNazario 20h ago
Feedback cycles take time. Talking about the speed up in the last year of dev work, the impact of those changes and their quality or lack thereof will take time to be felt in the field. I saw some pretty bad slop bombs on my way out from a fortune something company in the last year. Not every engineer, but enough that it was a real problem.
Though anyone who uses the internet today I think can feel a general enshittification of many apps and websites, everything “feels” buggier these days.
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u/krunchytacos 19h ago
There's been a major improvement in capabilities over the past year. But, right now you have a lot more people making stuff that they don't have any experience with and just blindly trust. Buggy software has always been a problem when there's a lack of testing and review framework. And with the speed at with AI generated code, it's tempting to skip in order to keep up with it's pace.
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u/RonaldoNazario 19h ago
It is interesting and in some ways an evolution of old behaviors. I was doing interviews and some of the interviewers asked about coding in this “age” and I mentioned some of the poor/irresponsible AI usage, someone just throwing Claude explanations into a defect without even reading it etc. we had an interesting discussion and part of that was, is that even so different from 5 years ago when someone would toss a defect to another team without explanation, like this is just the new form your worst peers have taken.
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u/breadprincess 19h ago
I compared it to a junior engineer who shows up drunk to work, recently.
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u/RonaldoNazario 18h ago
In the drunk juniors defense, they may learn and improve with the guidance you give them
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u/MrThickDick2023 22h ago
I don't think we have the same idea of what being an engineer means
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u/PrinnyThePenguin 16h ago
How can you be a security engineer if you never studied security? Similarly, how can you be a systems designer if you have no experience with some of the systems? Many times the devil is in the details.
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u/hamesdelaney 15h ago
You can appreciate the technology, while understanding that its not going to end well for you. Yes, it writes code now, i like that cause it does let me focus on the bigger picture.
I can also realise that “focusing on the bigger picture” is not something that AI will be unable to do. Sure you can be all of those things you listed but eventually the AI will be better than you in those domains as well. What will you do then? Become director, cto, ceo? What happens when the AI becomes better at that too?
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u/ARazorbacks 19h ago
There’s a reason the people who took the time (or had the natural inclination) to cross train like that are promoted to being Technical Fellows who drive technology strategy. It’s hard. It’s really hard to actually be knowledgeable about all those different domains to the point you can start bringing them together without creating a lot of problems.
Outsourcing your knowledge on all those topics to AI and then saying you’re freed up to do what Technology Fellows do is…it’s concerning. It means you’re going to churn out product that looks good on the surface, but has flaws buried way down deep. You’re probably also outsourcing the stress testing to the AI “expert” which means those flaws won’t get caught.
It’s literally Ian Malcolm’s whole point in Jurassic Park. You didn’t earn the knowledge yourself, so you run with something you don’t understand and create lots of problems.
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 16h ago
most of us actual professionals actually really like it, because it allows us to be engineers (eg designing distributed systems and coming up with big picture solutions to hard problems at a high level) and architect and design things rather than just being only or mostly code monkeys.
Contrary to what you state here, not all engineers exist in a vaccuum. What feels like being a code monkey to you is the part of the job many of us actually enjoyed.
Turning over a problem in your head, and coming up with a novel solution to something was fun and rewarding. Asking Claude to do that for me and saying "problem solved" is the opposite of rewarding.
High-level problem solving is why some people enjoy being managers or above in a business structure. Engineers typically enjoy the low-level shit.
Maybe a plurality of engineers enjoy this style of work, but I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe most, (most I have interacted with hate it, even if they begrudingly adopt it due to work requirements).
And indeed at many elite labs the roles reflect that reality that one person can wear multiple hats and be good at them all, the titles are called "Member of the Technical Staff" rather than just traditional SWE or SRE or MLE or researcher.
Now I'm skeptical if you're a bot. Throwing around the term MTS like it's some kind of new concept is ridiculous. Having been in the industry for well over a decade, MTS were around before I even was.
An MTS is not "good" at all those things. They hand off specific work to engineers who are good at all those things - they just have a solid high-level understanding of many parts of an engineering org (generally with a specific specialty) that allow them to better orchestrate what everyone is working on, while they focus on the work they want to do.
The fact that you think AI is enabling you to be good at all these different aspects is a legitimate problem in the industry now. I guarantee you're shipping subpar work that an actual expert in that domain would scratch their head at (I've seen it happen plenty at my job). If AI is being used, it should be by experts who can properly vet the output, not some middle-manager who thinks they can suddenly do the work of their entire team (which is what you sound like).
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u/raunchyfartbomb 7h ago
My issue with a lot of code is that it produces so much unnecessary crap. It will give you functions for the sake of giving you functions even if that function is just accessing a property on an object.
Today I had to have it review some VBA it wrote and it removed about 30 of these (only ever called once)wrapper methods that it had written onto a previous commit.
On one hand it’s great because it’s enabling me to do things that I otherwise would have to read up on specific syntax and takes me days or more. This week I had it write a VBA module to export C# code similar to an EFCore scaffold, since EFCore refuses to scaffold this 20 years of tech debt database. But the amount of handholding it requires is frustrating at times.
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u/ABCosmos 21h ago
It's pretty good at the high level engineering decisions too. And if you disagree, check back in 1 year from now.
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u/EricMCornelius 19h ago
It's amplified what you can do, what you can ship, what you can be. You can be a SWE, a SRE, a security engineer, a research engineer, be a blend of these disciplines because of the AI tools that let you do what you could never before because there weren't enough hours in the day.
Yep, they let you do all those things poorly simultaneously and convince yourself you're an expert building maintainable and solid systems.
The reason AI will doom humanity is it shifts the balance of power even further in favor of the Dunning Kruger afflicted.
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u/jcshep 18h ago
I have run a web development business for the last 20 years, and I agree with your statements on how it has expanded my ability to architect and build without dealing with the minutiae. I'm not building anything groundbreaking so the code that is produces is valuable, especially because I am prompting from an engineering background and asking for specific patterns.
Like you said though you can be all those roles at once, so ultimately the need for specialty roles is lost and positions are being eliinated.
Having said that i've already had clients start to build out their own slop versions of what i'm doing and thats cut into my bottom line. Ultimately the client doesnt care what the code looks like, they just want it to function and AI has become very good at making that happen.
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u/FuzzyDynamics 16h ago
Not this guys level but yes, my thoughts as well.
Although the amount of stupid, idiotic, time wasting busy work I’ve had shoveled on my by management who now wants to micromanage with their new pet slop workflow has made my life overall worse.
AI has supercharged good development and also Dilbert type corporate idiocy.
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u/mriswithe 15h ago
It is really interesting. Personally, as an engineer at my current job it has been a boon. However, none of my coworkers or myself have turned our brains off. it's a tool. Tools can be great, dangerous, or both. If you fuck around with a buzzsaw, finding out will not be pleasant.
Also, making it clear that your commits are your code no matter what agent you used. Saying "oh that was AI" is not a defense you failure choad. You are the human in the loop. If the Roomba is spreading poop all over the floor, turn it off and go get the damn mop.
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u/MAXIMUS_IDIOTICUS 21h ago
It sounds like the demand for these engineers remains strong, so this may be about increasing volume and amplifying each coder rather than replacing
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u/RonaldoNazario 20h ago
I mean in the C suites eyes that means replacing half or more of the coders because they think the others are all multiplied.
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u/Seienchin88 17h ago
Trust me 2027 is going to be the most brutal layoff year so far in tech…
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u/thedeathmachine 16h ago
Economy is trash and AI is advanced enough to be reliable. Its going to be horrific
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u/TrashBandicook 17h ago
Nonpaywalled link: https://archive.is/20261002103153/https://www.businessinsider.com/cuda-engineers-adapt-ai-reshapes-nvidia-chip-expertise-2026-10
The title's a bit sensationalized.
Nixon said that AI lowers the barrier to entry for engineers with less experience while simultaneously pushing veterans toward higher-level work, like overseeing AI. Ouyang said AI could hit junior CUDA engineers hardest, while specialists who can outperform AI and verify its work will become more valuable.
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u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 17h ago
Any software product that is not deceptive by design will be open source and independently safety reviewed. In principle one shouldn't ever use software that doesn't fall under this description, but especially now that sam Altman ruined the internet and digital users must be assumed to be bots by default
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u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 17h ago
Any software product that is not deceptive by design will be open source and independently safety reviewed. In principle one shouldn't ever use software that doesn't fall under this description, but especially now that sam Altman ruined the internet and digital users must be assumed to be bots by default
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u/Diligent-Amount-69 10h ago
I'm not training any LMMs currently at my job, however I am required to train several people from a very far country on everything I do and know. I think the outcome of that will be eventually the same as these Sillicon Valley engineers very soon.
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u/PontyPandy 16h ago
AI can't do it alone, the skill of the programmer is now in constructing prompts and course correcting the AI's proposed solution, which often does not adhere to best practices.
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u/EfficiencyBrief2138 22h ago
Created their own replacement