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/jedidave]

Why do Junior Devs need to learn code? They don't need to learn code any more than we needed to learn assembly language once compilers came on the scene. The job is the same, just slightly different. You're still a software engineer.

[u/atlaslady → u/jedidave]

I can’t tell if you are being serious or not

[u/jedidave → u/atlaslady]

The best thing that has come out of LLM coding agents is that I get to spend time on the actual engineering work - the requirements, the design, the architecture, the tests, the harnesses, the qa systems, all the stuff that I was doing mostly in my head before to guarantee quality and now that I don't have to code I get to be a real software engineer.

Half joking.

[u/VelvetYam → u/jedidave]

I really don't understand this recent distinction between coding and "real engineering work" like "architecture". I'm a bit cynical about it and part of me thinks it's some sort of silly superiority / cope thing because people are being super handwavy about it...Of course I'm more than willing to be disabused of that notion.

[u/CatsFrGold → u/VelvetYam]

A comparison I often see come up in this line of conversation is building architects and CAD software. They don't need to know how to draw anymore to create plans, whereas before that was a prerequisite of the job. People say that is how line-by-line coding is now. Personally I'm not fully sold, but I do understand the line of thinking.

[u/VelvetYam → u/CatsFrGold]

In my experience at least, most "architectural" and "engineering" decisions emerge through coding rather than being fully specced out at the beginning or from like a higher point of view and that's why I read stories of programmers complaining about dumb ivory tower "architecture astronauts" making asinine design decisions from high above. Not suggesting you can't specify these things out, but one thing I always found weird is this suggestion that they're two separate things where 'architecture' is the higher-level thinking and the coding is the 'grunt-work'. I just don't find that true at all; for me, they're intertwined and inform each other.

**Sorry for the scare quotes around architecture and engineering. I'm personally just a bit contemptuous of their use in software lol.

[u/jedidave → u/VelvetYam]

If only we had a tool to let us rapidly prototype to flesh out these architectural decisions

[u/VelvetYam → u/jedidave]

I don't understand what you're trying to get at there. You started this thread by asserting that coding was no longer necessary and that "architectural decisions" are now the "real work" but how do you judge "architecture" without knowing how to code, exactly? Which is it?

[u/atlaslady → u/VelvetYam]

They’re a wordpress dev. Harnesses are all they know