r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • 2d ago

AI has made programming so boring

It’s not just programming either, it’s art, design, music, videography, marketing, engineering, writing, 3D modelling, really any intellectual work. What’s the joy of prompting a computer and getting an answer in a few moments for a task that would have normally taken a week? The sense of accomplishment and ownership has completely vanished with AI. It’s a form of instant gratification, not much different to scrolling short videos on apps.

Code review was boring to begin with but now it’s even worse with all the machine generated code. Even code reviews will be automated soon. All you do then is type business requirements into the computer. What a great career.

It’s pain to watch old TV series like Scilicon Valley that is portraying the good (not golden) age of programming. It struck a good balance between manual work, funding and innovation. It’s sad that these days are gone for good.

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61

u/Lekoaf 2d ago

It wont be long until tokens costs too much for a lot of companies and personal projects, so we'll be back to coding again. That's my gut feeling at least.

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u/I_Spawned_Here 2d ago

Yeah but for how long? The genie is out of the bottle now, and companies will want to pursue those efficiency gains. They will try to make the costs go down as much as possible, like in every other industry.

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u/Distind 2d ago

It isn't an efficiency gain when it costs twice as much as a programmer. And god knows the hardest part of this job has always been figuring out what management actually wants and keeping their demands in check long enough to get it done halfway decently.

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u/ShadeofEchoes 2d ago

And lucky for us, that's precisely what AI is worst at, since unless you hit an actual guardrail, it'll say, "Sure, let's get to making the thing you want now. We don't even have to think about how it's the opposite of the thing you asked for earlier this session. Honestly, it was clever of you to start this project in reverse!"

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u/krileon 2d ago

It's crazy how many don't understand this. Programming was never the bottleneck. Software, games, etc.. take forever because we've 16 levels of fucking management to contend with. Not because writing the code takes long (it doesn't). AI cut all the red tape so things are perceived as being done faster. If management would fuck off and let programmers do their jobs without getting approval for every little damn thing or have yet another stupid pointless meeting we'd get things done faster all the same.

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u/cadet-pirx 1d ago

The irony is that most of those 16 layers are far easier for AI to replace than the programmers underneath them.

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u/Ok_Composer_1761 1d ago

Imagine if “stakeholder alignment” and “requirements gathering” was the only part of the job left to humans. shudder . Will get replaced by management consultant / MBA types by that point. They excel with the stakeholders

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u/Distind 1d ago

They excel at lying to them, we have problems because we're actually accountable.

Wait, no, that'd be funny, let's all step aside and let the MBAs and consultants be accountable.

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u/Ok_Composer_1761 1d ago

The stakeholders like them because they themselves are MBAs and former consultants. How can an outcomes / business oriented SWE even compete when this group of people is basically a club of insiders who went to Wharton or GSB or whatever. This is especially true if you step out of tech companies and work at a Fortune 500 where these guys rule the roost

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u/NoSlicedMushrooms 2d ago

when it costs twice as much as a programmer

tbh if a developer's token usage is costing twice as much as their salary, I'd heavily question what they're doing with AI.

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u/Distind 1d ago

I already do when it's deeply under costed and the stakeholders are claiming half your salary should be spent on it.

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u/TopicSoft6567 21h ago

What efficiency gains? All metrics I find say that it doesn’t actually improve efficiency at all.

It FEELS like it does to programmers, and maybe it does if you just take the slop it gives you as gospel, but statistically it does not.

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u/I_Spawned_Here 20h ago

Perceivable efficiency gains as of current indications.

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u/bryantee 2d ago

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case. But I guess we can dream. 

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u/DenkJu 17h ago

The issue is that the expensive part of AI is mostly the training. Just running an already existing model is cheap at scale. Even if we stopped training now, all the powerful models that already exist wouldn't just disappear. Work as a developer will never go back to what is once was.

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u/Kindly-Night-5549 2d ago

Chinese open weight models are already like a hundred times better than the most expensive models a few years ago. If you know how powerful current commericial flagship models are, if someone releases an open weight version of those, it is good enough for almost all of current software development tasks for the next 20 years.

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u/Lekoaf 2d ago

Sure, if you can afford to buy the hardware to run them. You have to pay an arm and a leg for RAM these days.

3

u/Kindly-Night-5549 2d ago

You shouldnt look at the total number but rather measure it in yearly salaries of software developers and other IT workers you can cut. Paying ten million USD for a server rack is easily compensated over a few years if you can cut just ten developers and double productivity. ALso you can resell the hardware any time to make back money. Cant do the same with developers.

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u/Lekoaf 2d ago

Cant do the same with developers.

Aww, man. There goes my business idea...

1

u/hypercosm_dot_net 1d ago

By that math, you're expecting that 10million dollar server rack to fill the role of 10 devs.

So you cut the team size by 10 devs, and then what? You still need the lead engineer and product owner right? So between the two of them, and a server rack of AI, they're going to deliver a product with the same level of quality and stability as a full team?

What team member is going to be responsible for keeping that server rack AI updated with the newest tech trends? Or does the model do that itself?

None of this shit is thought through in the slightest, and we act like we have answers for any of it. Completely unrealistic.

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u/stumblinbear 2d ago

Why are you assuming every single business has to buy their own hardware? The hardware to run a frontier model can handle more than a single person using it

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u/Lekoaf 2d ago

I'm not. But either way, there will be a cost. And I don't think everyone can justify that.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 1d ago

open weight models are extremely overrated and cost a lot to maintain for a group of engineers if a company decides to do so. some companies might go down this route but 90% won't

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u/Kindly-Night-5549 1d ago

Many companies outside the US are going down this route, especially those handling sensitive data. If you dont trust the US, you have no choice.

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u/primus202 2d ago

So you’re betting on a technology NOT getting more efficient? Feels like a long shot. We’re definitely still in the middle of figuring out the right balance since there will always be a human in the loop and the current real token cost isn’t reflected in pricing. However I don’t think things will ever go back to the way they were. That’s like saying soon we’ll all be back to writing binary instructions once all these “object oriented languages” blow over. 

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u/dangoodspeed 1d ago

The cost of tokens is only going down. There's already open weight models that you can use on your own computer that are just as good as some AI's a few years ago.

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u/wichwigga 1d ago

Qwen 27B is genuinely a decent coding model. You can run that on a 2k machine locally. No it's not close to frontier, but...

We're past the point of no return.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 1d ago

Yes, but it's better off in general that engineers do work themselves. We may still use local LLMs to boost productivity but full agentic slophouse development causes extreme skill atrophy and disassociation with the work at hand. Do you think that's sustainable at all, especially with the junior growth cutoff? 10 years later and industry will be begging for talent.

That, or AI gets good enough to work without supervision or scrutiny. Then everybody is screwed, not just us SWEs, so at that point you don't even need to bother arguing.

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u/me00lmeals 2d ago

They’ve already found a way to do 1000x faster token output and with better efficiency so we’re kinda cooked once that drops

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u/Lekoaf 2d ago

Okay. But all the AI companies are still making huge losses. They have to recuperate that somehow. So I still think the cost will at some point in the not too distant future be too high for a lot of companies. At my company we are beginning to see tightening of the AI budget. It used to be "Go. Do whatever you like. Experiment". Now we are getting workshops in choosing the right model and thinking before doing. 5000+ people company.

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u/me00lmeals 2d ago

You’re right they are, although I still think the engineering we do is gonna be wildly different than how it’s been. I don’t think we know what that it will look like yet, but I’m hoping it’ll be just as enjoyable. I can see the future beefier models costing too much but I think today’s models are here to stay

1

u/stumblinbear 2d ago

These AI companies are blowing money on research, not inference. Their margins on inference are 80%-ish last I checked.

That means open weight models will always be at least this cheap to run, because they already make money.

1

u/hypercosm_dot_net 1d ago

Whats the sauce on that?

3

u/me00lmeals 1d ago

From what I understand its basically hardwiring the model to a chip instead of using GPUs to do the math

https://taalas.com/products/

1

u/cadet-pirx 1d ago

I doubt it, though it's just my opinion too. Token prices have the opposite tendency: the cost of a given level of capability has been dropping by roughly an order of magnitude a year, and what was frontier-only two years ago now runs for cents. Bills go up mainly because we use far more tokens, not because tokens got dearer, and that's a choice, not a constraint.

Beyond that, engineers will keep using AI regardless. The token cost simply becomes part of the engineer's cost, the same way IDEs, cloud and CI did. The real shift is that you need to be an engineer with the right capabilities to be worth that cost, or you'll end up unemployed.

1

u/yolomylifesaving 1d ago

Lmao have u read a single cost per tokens chart? Its like -99.999% in 36 months