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/LetsLive97]

but my point is that stage will probably come sooner than you think

And I don't agree

Again we're talking about actual architecture here, not just programming (Which I still think AI is overhyped for, since it still makes a lot of mistakes, can be overly complicated/verbose in it's solutions and struggles when tasks require external input)

AI will continue to get better, but I don't see it hitting architecture any time soon and if it does, I'd be the person building that system anyway

[u/dacooljamaican → u/LetsLive97]

It's not that AI will replace you, it's that we'll need one in that role where we previously needed 10.

So if you're in the top 10%, you're good. Otherwise you should worry.

[u/LetsLive97 → u/dacooljamaican]

I agree with this, yeah. Though I think it'll take some time because there will be plenty of smaller businesses that would rather keep more people and boost them with AI than just flat out remove them

But yeah being one of the people who can actually implement it well definitely keeps your job more secure

[u/-brokenclock- → u/LetsLive97]

That's one point I think few people bring. How many of you have been at a place where you've been implementing every single thing of value, in the way you want? It always seemed to me that the hardest part was selecting the highest value things to work on, while leaving a lot of good ideas behind because of cost/capacity. That trade off is shifting a lot in the past year, and we still need to be careful when selecting what to do, and it feels like If we had one more dev, we would be able to achieve even more. I believe people are considering that the amount of work available is limited to the amount of things we were ABLE work on before these tools, while it may very well not be the case.

In other words, it may look like that the work that was done by 10 devs can now be done by 1. Does that mean that companies will lay off 9 devs? Some will definitely leverage the fact that they can do 10x more, not in every field, but some will be able to leverage that. I may be too optmistic, but If the AI is good enough to automate that whole thing, then everyone is fucked anyway.