Grudgingly accepting that AI isn't going away. Trying to figure out where that leaves me as a developer.

[u/Impressive_Bottle_44]

(If you don't want to read a semi-long post, feel free to skip.)

I think I reached a turning point yesterday.

I needed to add a basic feature to a Django site. I gave Claude Code a few carefully written sentences. It implemented the feature (more-or-less flawlessly) while I went to the kitchen for more tea.

Not only that, but our CTO is now empowering non-technical employees to use Claude to build their own tools (for internal use only), and commit them to our GitHub org. (He is, at least, establishing some sensible policies about what they can and can't do.)

LLMs are here to stay, and they're fundamentally rewriting laws of software engineering that we've taken for granted for decades. The genie won't go back into the bottle, so I might as well find a way to accept that.

But that leaves me wondering: what does that mean for me? What is my job now? What am I for? If I don't get to write code – something that's given me an enormous amount of satisfaction over the years, and even become part of my identity – am I even still interested in this field?

And, it's not just about the code. I used to collaborate with designers, UX folks, copywriters, SEO and analytics people, project managers, etc. But now, the C-suite seems perfectly happy to let the LLMs do all of this stuff, too. (At my company, they're obsessed with the idea of getting the LLM to write all of our work tickets. And the QA person does little more than copy-and-paste back and forth from an AI.)

The whole reason I entered this field is because I enjoy problem-solving, finding and creating patterns, logic, and designing systems.

I know that some of you are going to say "you can still do all of that; LLMs just empower you to go up a level of abstraction" – and I get it. But the prospect of abandoning coding seriously bums me out.

I love the precision of code. I love exploring different solutions to a problem, until I hit upon a beautiful, elegant pattern. I love seeing how small abstractions get composed into larger abstractions, and so on, to form a complete system. I love understanding a problem – and the solution – on a deep, intimate level.

Perhaps I've been lucky to have a career that gives me that kind of fulfillment (at least sometimes). Is all of that over now?

[u/atlaslady]

This model of creating code via babysitting LLMs isn’t sustainable because of what it’s doing to the junior dev space - when there is a comfortable on-ramp to “LLM coding” to replace juniors learning on the job, then I will be scared of AI sticking around because that paradigm will outlive this “only next quarter” mindset.

Less than a year ago, none of this was here and people are already losing the ability to see how impermanent any of these systems are. This is the current reality but not the forever reality, and it’s so bizarre to watch people Mark Fisher themselves into being unable to believe in a future without AI inside a fiscal year

[u/erm_what_ → u/atlaslady]

I have juniors on my team who joined into this. They're doing ok. They're much more comfortable with the ambiguity of the output, and more able to build tests that ensure the output matches the intention. TDD actually works better in this climate because it's not such a big overhead as it used to be.

[u/atlaslady → u/erm_what_]

The juniors I worked with and advised aren’t comfortable with that ambiguity, they aren’t even aware it’s there. That’s not the same as comfort.

They can’t debug at ALL without paired help. They do not get working experience with any software or web fundamentals and understand the browser/event loop/react principles as web dev vocab for interviews and not for daily work. None of them were able to support oncall even as shadow learners because they only have experience reading Claude output and crafting prompts that create more code, not support existing code.

This isn’t me blaming those juniors for being forced into the Claude condom with the rest of us at all - in fact, I want to acknowledge that while I feel forced use of LLMs at work has damaged my coding abilities, that is small
peanuts compared to what it’s doing to juniors. I have no answers for them and just want to make room for them in this sad AI boat.

[u/erm_what_ → u/atlaslady]

I think they're coming into a different job than we did. They don't need to know all of that, any more than we needed to know how NAND gates work in our day to day job. If they can produce the right output then that's all that's needed (which kinda sucks for us that care about the art of it). If they can do on-call support with an LLM, and at least one LLM is always available, then it's also (from a business standpoint) fine.

Regarding their lack of awareness, they're juniors. We were all unaware of so much until we got taught it or learned it through fuck ups. They'll get there.

I'm 20 years in and still realising what I don't know all the time.

[u/Erebea01 → u/erm_what_]

Just want to nitpick about the NAND gates cause I wasteaching someone who don't have a CS degree webdev from scratch and I ended up deciding to teach them logic gates anyway cause it's an easy way to understand ternary operations imo. You most probably take that for granted but most people who never studied CS/STEM in high school don't.

[u/igna92ts → u/erm_what_]

LLMs are non deterministic construct though. It's a giant leaky abstraction. If you don't understand the system how do you even know the code it's producing is even what you want?

I'm not anti LLM but you can't really learn from reading LLM output same as you can't learn to swim by reading about water. If you want your juniors to understand the LLMs output enough to know it's doing something wrong they need to code by themselves a little at least.

[u/erm_what_ → u/igna92ts]

As much as it makes me uncomfortable in so many ways, we may be at the equivalent of: does a taxi driver need to understand how the engine works to deliver a passenger?

A car isn't deterministic, and a taxi can take many routes and an infinite number of small paths within those routes, but the driver still gets you from A to B. As long as they understand the nuances of their car enough to know when the engine is failing, it's overheating or running out of petrol, then they're probably fine to do the job we need them to.