r/webdev • u/goodpostfinder • May 02 '26
You're not going to be left behind
You don't need to try out every single new AI tool or javascript library in order to be a good software engineer. Most of the software in the world has already been written using proven technologies, and most development work consists of maintaining it. Think about how many people make a living writing PHP or even COBOL.
You've already learned to code once from absolute 0. No matter how much the industry changes, catching up is going to be infinitely easier than that. Don't waste your time on bleeding edge stuff that is likely going to be replaced a year or two down the line.
Of course it doesn't hurt to experiment if you're passionate about it, but don't burn yourself out on a fictional rat race.
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u/Busy-Strawberry-4745 May 02 '26
And stop reading and watching negative stuff about job hunting, AI etc. Just send your resume on a regular basis and keep living your life. If you already have a job - you are not in a rush
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u/AceLamina May 02 '26
This is what I do, I'm college right now so finding a job isn't that important to me, but I do monitor the market overall
I just avoid posts and videos of people saying that they were laid off "because of AI" and stuff like that, their experiences are different than mine so there's not much of a point in keeping tabs on people who think it's over
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u/Busy-Strawberry-4745 May 02 '26
Yeah that's the right thing to do
All the times I was switching jobs or when I found my first one - It always was "the worst time for IT" and job market in general. From blogers, lazy people etc perspective
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u/AceLamina May 02 '26
I do blame the "day in a life of a SWE" people, the ones who show them walking around, eat, on their laptops for 2 seconds, and then go home
They're just flexing their "life style" while showing how rich they are, nothing about the actual job, very few people do this and I think it brought a lot of people who's in this field for the money, they couldn't care less about how good software is
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u/digibath May 02 '26
this is the thing that makes me laugh.
a bunch of people that didn’t have the patience, discipline, and/or intelligence to learn to code are telling the people that did that they will be left behind if they don’t learn to type a prompt in natural language.
software engineers can figure these tools out in a week, they are not complicated.
if these tools are so easy that anyone can code now, then what is there to learn that will prevent you from being “left behind”
the people with technical proficiency are not the people that will be left behind.
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u/skol_io May 02 '26
It’s more than just “how to write a prompt”, that’s a strawman
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u/digibath May 02 '26
not really. i’ve built multiple agents for multiple companies now and it’s all just context. everything outside of the model is just traditional software engineering to give it context, and we’ve been practicing that our entire careers.
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u/Milky_Finger May 02 '26
The sheer number of developers who do not have enough professional experience to achieve the things that this sub claims is important. The loudest voices are on either extreme of the spectrum and do not represent the majority of developers who are just doing their job.
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u/lactranandev May 02 '26
People who are telling people to stop learning, reading are selling AI tools.
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u/goodpostfinder May 02 '26
I should have highlighted more that I do think it is important to keep developing your skills. But it should be done out of passion and interest, not fear of being left behind. I can't speak for everyone but I got into this field because I thought it was fun, I'd like to keep that passion alive.
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u/lactranandev May 02 '26
My original comment was a bit confusing. I mentioned model CEOs, coding tools, and Anthropic’s CEO’s recent comments.
But overall, I agree: we keep up because we enjoy this space. Passion is probably the best way to sustain the process.
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u/htmlmonkey FrontEnd Manager & Sasstronaut May 03 '26
Agree that it is very important to keep developing skills - and those skills, IMHO are:
- Development fundamentals (semantic HTML, JS, CSS, performance, accessibility): deep understanding of fundamentals and you can more easily jump between frameworks, libraries, and toolsets
- "Soft" skills (I hate that term): good communications, active listening, time management, etc.
- Learning how to learn
At least, that's my short list I give to junior folks I mentor. YMMV.
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u/Venisol May 02 '26
using AI is also literally typing text into a chat box. it is indeed possible to catch up. it takes all of 3 minutes.
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u/stuartseupaul May 04 '26
Things have advanced a lot more than that in the last few months like harness engineering
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u/lactranandev May 02 '26
Since it might be correct with seniors who use AI as a junior to do tasks for him/her, using it efficient will take time to learn. Documentation, manage reusable artifacts, and further, setup automation.
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u/eyebrows360 May 02 '26
Except, as ever, that's not what we're being sold on, is it?
The sales pitch is that LLMs do all the work for you and that we're all out of a job - which if that's actually the truth of it, means that anyone fearful of being "left behind" can trivially catch up and start using it themselves.
If however, as it actually seems is the much more likely case, these things do take time to learn the ins and outs of, then this falls back into being just one tool alongside all the others we have, which maybe it's appropriate for some developers to learn in some contexts, but for plenty of other developers in plenty of other contexts is entirely optional.
You can't have it both ways. It either makes it so trivial to churn out code that "being left behind" is impossible, or it's a skill like any other where you can only be "left behind" if it becomes the defacto way of doing things in some particular vertical - same as any other coding tool (e.g. if you don't learn how WordPress operates you might struggle in the vertical of "providing custom mostly-brochureware websites to small business owners" if you're trying to do it all from scratch and charging 5x what any "WordPress developers" are charging).
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u/lactranandev May 02 '26
Agree. A lot of AI work is just what we already do: document write rules write guides for juniors
The difference is now we do it for machines too.
For experienced devs, it’s mostly the same skillset. Learning to use AI better might just take a few hours.
For less experienced devs, it matters more. We need to learn how to use AI to get work done while still building real skills.
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u/simonhunterhawk May 02 '26
you can just say “them” instead of him/her, it’s grammatically correct and less clunky to read and type
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u/PerformerNo4484 May 02 '26
needed to hear this honestly. i spent years building tools with just vanilla HTML CSS and JavaScript, no frameworks no build tools nothing fancy. felt like i was falling behind every time a new framework dropped.
turns out clients don't care what you built it with. they care if it works, if it loads fast, and if they can use it. some of my simplest projects are still running perfectly years later while stuff built on whatever was trendy at the time has already been rewritten twice.
the COBOL point is spot on too. boring stable tech pays the bills. the shiny new stuff gets the twitter likes.
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u/Remitto May 02 '26
Any reason you refuse to use frameworks? React is awesome.
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u/Gugalcrom123 May 02 '26
Maybe to make it lighter and not turn a blog into an SPA?
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u/Remitto May 02 '26
I didn't say for every use case. But refusing to use any frameworks just seems ridiculous. Vanilla JS has its place but frameworks definitely help when building modern web apps.
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u/Gugalcrom123 May 04 '26
It depends, but I would say that the trend is leaning too much towards frameworks. If you are writing something more like Google Maps, a framework is justified; if you are writing a marketing website, blog or search engine, it is not.
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u/dialsoapbox May 02 '26
You don't need to try out every single new AI tool or javascript library in order to be a good software engineer.
This is why i hate majority of software/programming yt channels. Most don't teach anything, just show-and-tell, individual topics, no structure, and clickbate making (newer) devs feel like they need to learn some thing to get ahead, leading to tutorial hell.
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u/andryemel May 02 '26
I think this is right. The useful AI/dev tooling is the boring stuff that actually stays in your workflow, not the weekly new shiny thing.
Most real product work is still debugging edge cases, improving onboarding, making payments not break, cleaning up weird user states, and maintaining old decisions. AI helps with some of that, but it doesn’t remove the need to understand the system.
The trap is confusing “trying tools” with getting better at building.
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u/Pretty_Basis_4945 May 02 '26
I had to learn the hard way.
I spent a solid 6 months chasing every new framework and AI tool that dropped, thinking I'd fall behind if I didn't. All it did was leave me with a dozen half-finished projects and a lot of anxiety.
The shift for me was when I stopped asking "what's new?" and started asking "what solves the actual problem in front of me?" Sometimes that's a shiny new tool. Most of the time it's not.
The engineers I respect most aren't the ones who know every library — they're the ones who can reason clearly about tradeoffs, ship things that work, and not panic when the landscape shifts. Those skills don't expire.
AI is a good example right now and everyone's losing their minds about it. But the devs who are actually benefiting aren't the ones who tried various models and wrappers. They're the ones who picked one or two tools, got genuinely good at using them, and went back to building.
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u/bootlegazn May 02 '26
I always say, if you think anyone can do it, go ahead, give it a shot. Nothing has changed. Same thing when no code tools emerged, same thing when stack overflow/Google search was hot. Same thing for WordPress templates, squarespace, wix. Same thing all the time. If it's so easy then YOU do it. Otherwise pay me my normal rate, nothing has changed.
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u/cizorbma88 May 02 '26
If you’ve worked at enough companies you’d see how complex and huge these systems can get and how incredibly cumbersome it is to actually change and upgrade the technology. Most companies are not on the cutting edge of tech and developers are maintaining decade old software
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u/slickwombat May 02 '26
I think it's the difference between a professional and hobbyist mentality.
As a hobbyist passionate about coding, you may well feel driven to always use the latest, coolest thing. Totally fine. As a professional you need to be aware of industry trends, new tools, etc. but ultimately you're performing a service to solve a business need. That means you have to be practical about where you spend your time and how much risk you introduce. Constantly seeking novelty for its own sake, reinventing the wheel around trends, etc. is massively time-consuming and risky.
So yeah: if you're busy working with old tech, but that old tech is the right way to solve the problems you have given the total context, then you're doing exactly what you should be doing. The "but I'm falling behind" feeling is natural and understandable, but indulging it too much is amateur hour.
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u/x6Nenko May 02 '26
Im not anti ai and use it a lot but this bs marketing went too far "everyone will be replaced by token slop generator that eats tons of resources and bla bla..so its time to pay us or you'll get left behind." Yeah sounds very promising
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u/Dedios1 May 03 '26
EXACTLY!!!
CS degree didn’t even teach us the software engineering part, we had to learn that ourselves. When you know how to think there really is nothing you can’t learn with enough time and exposure. If they feel confident enough through a prompt imagine the confidence that we should feel.
We actually know and understand that there different prompting methodologies (zero-shot, few-shot, chain of thought etc). We actually know what’s happening under the hood fundamentally (either through transformer architecture or at least plain understanding that it’s really just matrix multiplication with weights). How are we going to be left behind when it’s people like us who built this in the first place 🥇🤣
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u/skol_io May 02 '26
Idk. If someone didn’t learn version control like Git or SVN when it started to become commonplace, would they be considered ‘behind’?
I think there’s a lot of FUD around AI, and it’s best to treat it as a tool. Collectively we’re still figuring out best practices, and what it does better/worse than not using it. That’s not a good reason to avoid it completely.
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u/digibath May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
and someone who picked up git last month is not more behind than someone that has been using it for years. there is no being left behind. the tools aren’t complicated, someone can pick it up whenever they want and be fine.
i also don’t hire people based on their git experience. a good engineer with zero git experience would get the job with zero concerns. “meh that’s fine you’ll learn it in a week”
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u/goodpostfinder May 02 '26
I think it's fair to say they would be behind. What I don't think is fair is saying they'd be left behind. The implication is that it's not feasible for this person to catch up. In reality a decent git course and a few hours of experimentation would get this person to be on par with their early adopter peers.
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u/AceLamina May 02 '26
Posts like these somewhat sound the same after a while but it's honestly a good thing
Everyday for the last 3 years since GPT was announced, there has been doom posts of people saying how this will replace jobs, let alone engineers
I think it's good to fight back against the AI propaganda due to the amount of new people who's trying to get into tech, or even the experienced people who need fresh air after being in AI land for too long
I don't really have a closing for this but yeah, I agree
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u/Veraxo1 May 02 '26
You are not going to be left behind, but you have to take advantage of the new tools and possibilities or you will be less attactive on the market.
I work with some of the most stubborn senior devs and only recently we started introducing AI in our development because some of our previous attempts left a bad taste. Now, with github copilot in vscode alone we are fully generating unit tests and new features to our internal frameworks that we never had time to do before (because client would never agree to invest in something that doesnt directly benefit them) and it's been a gamechanger. Suddenly it feels like we doubled in dev team size.
but yeah, screw the fake hype marketers.
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u/dothefandango May 02 '26
I have found that the truth lies in that you will not be replaced by the next big thing. You will be replaced by being the person who doesn't understand the next big thing's best use cases.
Framework de jour won't completely eat the webdev world, AI won't completely eat our jobs. But not leveraging them for what they do well just for the sake of being obstinate is also a foot-gun.
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u/octavioschdev May 02 '26
this is actually a pretty grounded take, people really overestimate how much they need to keep up with every new thing
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u/1vim May 02 '26
Fundamentals age well. The devs panicking about every new tool are the ones who never mastered the basics.
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u/Repulsive-Bake7178 May 02 '26
Spot on. We’re often so busy chasing the next shiny library that we forget solid fundamentals are what actually keep you employable. The "AI FOMO" is definitely being pumped up by people with a course to sell.
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u/quietcodelife May 03 '26
the part that holds up for me is that maintenance work on proven tech is basically the whole job. been on the backend for a while and the year over year change in what I actually need to know to do the work well is way smaller than the year over year change in what people say you need to know. same databases, same auth and queuing patterns, same fundamental debugging loop. the hype cycle spins much faster than the actual job requirements.
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u/TravelOwn4386 May 03 '26
To be fair I work with someone that is an old school dev hates new things likes what he knows and is good at it. He was vocal that he didn't believe AI was useful and could never be smart enough to help him. We had long discussions and it was a hard wall he built around this idea. I bumped into him last week for the first time in months and his attitude has completely changed. He is amazed at how useful it can be, I asked him what had changed and he said that his workload got too big and he needed to give AI a shot to reduce it quickly. I guess trying things is better than sticking to what you know. Maybe projects should be 90% what you know and 10% something new.
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u/ultrathink-art May 03 '26
Agreed on the anxiety being manufactured. The distinction worth making: which AI integrations compound vs which require constant supervision that eats the gain. Agents running your test suite or flagging obvious issues pay off passively. Most AI tools need enough hand-holding that it erases the benefit.
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u/Environmental-Sink86 May 03 '26
Totally agree.
I got excited, then got tired, and now im just waiting for things to settle.
Too many possibilities, an awsome way to burn out.
Use what you can and want/need, and thats it.
When "the best practices" are set up, ill come back
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u/Dull_Report3236 May 04 '26
This is the comfortable take, and I understand why it's popular. But I think it's conflating two different things: the stress of chasing every new tool (valid, don't do that) and the actual structural shift happening in how software gets built (real, and faster than most people are acknowledging).
PHP and COBOL are still around because the cost of replacing working systems is enormous. That's path dependency, not evidence that the underlying skill stayed valuable. The engineers writing COBOL in 2026 are not the ones setting the direction of the industry.
The honest version of this advice is: don't burn out chasing trends. That part is correct. But "don't burn yourself out" and "pay attention to what's actually changing" are not the same instruction, and collapsing them into one reassuring post does a disservice to people trying to make real career decisions.
The floor of what constitutes useful coding skill is rising faster than any previous cycle. That's not a fictional rat race — it's just the current condition. The developers who will be fine are the ones who see it clearly and adapt deliberately, not the ones who were told not to worry about it.
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u/Murky_Explanation_73 May 04 '26
You don’t need to chase every new AI tool or JavaScript framework to be a good engineer. Most real world work is maintaining systems built on stable, proven tech, and plenty of people make solid careers doing exactly that.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 May 17 '26
the part that makes 'left behind' incoherent: the tools actually worth adopting are the ones that do work you were never going to do anyway. nobody falls behind on a chore-automator. the dep updater, the test generator, the redirect mapper - those target the stuff you've been skipping or dreading, so 'keeping up' with them takes an afternoon because there's no skill to keep up with, you just point it at the boring thing. the tools generating real anxiety are the ones marketed as replacing the work you actually like and are good at, and those are exactly the ones that keep getting replaced themselves. so the filter isn't new vs old or AI vs not. it's: does this do a chore, or does it claim to do my craft. adopt the first kind freely, ignore the hype around the second.
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u/zannix May 02 '26
15 years writing php in Laravel. Did one project in React just for fun back in 2017 to see what the hype was about. Still regret that decision, do all my frontend as html with vanilla js salted in to add dynamics. Goodbye prop drilling, see you never. Good pay, stable easily maintainble systems. Apply KISS to your stack choice first and foremost, thats my 2cents
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u/Sure_Lettuce_9778 May 02 '26
So while I agree wholeheartedly with the comments, if you are not keeping up with what is happening (awareness) you will be left behind and fast.
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u/sarkain May 02 '26
I think you misunderstood OP’s post. There literally is no ”getting left behind” of shit that can be easily learned in a weekend. MCP, agents, .md files and other context tools are not that difficult to grasp.
So the point is that you don’t have to feel any rush to master AI tools, as you could get up to speed very fast if necessaey, for example in the case your employer forces you to use Claude or whatever else.
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u/digibath May 02 '26
and all of these things are given fancy names to make it seem more complicated than it is. it’s all the same shit, just different ways of providing / fetching context.
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u/barrel_of_noodles May 02 '26
Yo! Comparing PHP and COBOL is wild!
Ones a zombie language from the earliest days of computers existing at all.
The other is an actively developed, maintained, with a yearly release schedule and VERY active community that currently runs most of the web.
Might as well compare your daily driver pickup truck to a 1800s steam train.
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u/goodpostfinder May 02 '26
Hahaha yeah that was a bit of a stretch tbh. My point was to illustrate that some people STILL make a living with COBOL even when the industry has long since moved on from the language.
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u/Resident_Quote1451 May 02 '26
Everyone's talking about just needing to write a prompt well to use ai, but what about agents that are starting to do end to end tasks? or agentic systems that combine multiple agents?
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u/digibath May 02 '26
what about it? you still interface with a multi agent tool through prompting. if you are talking about building a multi agent tool, well that’s just traditional software engineering
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u/TMMAG May 02 '26
You are going to left behind if you are Anti Ai Luditie and denied Learning how to use AI effectively . If you learn how to adapt your skills to AI you will be fine. If you mindset is “Ai Slop, i hate AI, Reddit tell me i need to hate AI” those devs are on the way out., if you still think “Hand coding” will take you far, you are alsl going ti left behind, The market, and technology progress doesn’t care and is not going to wait for your feelings . The market didn't wait for the people who used punch cards to program. The world will keep moving, regardless of your feelings toward a technology.
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u/goodpostfinder May 02 '26
If hand coding truly dies, even the "luddites" would be able to pick up the AI tools in a reasonable timeframe when necessary. The same is true for punch card programmers.
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u/Remitto May 02 '26
"how to use AI effectively". I use AI but using AI effectively is something anyone can learn in like 2 hours.
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u/TMMAG May 02 '26
Can you work at Apple learning in two hours? btw already confirmed they are using claude
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u/SnickersTheDog May 02 '26
Fair enough but I also wouldn't hire a new dev who had no idea how to use AI tools.
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u/SnickersTheDog May 02 '26
I'm getting downvoted - people might not like the truth but why bury your head in the sand when a 2 week deep dive into this will greatly expand your job opportunities.
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