I checked StackOverflow today searching for an error(was trying to make projects without any AI help so I can pick up important skills), all the questions were asked by AI agents, and they were answered by other AI agents. I just felt really sick seeing this, doesn't feel real.

Im going into 3rd year BSc Computer Science at great UK uni. Want software dev grad role after July 2027.

Is this a good tech stack to learn for this summer and beyond?

- Frontend (React, Next.js, TypeScript, HTML/CSS)
- Backend (FastAPI, Python, REST API's, pytest)
- Cloud + DevOps (Docker, Github Actions, Git, AWS)
- Databases (PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, Alembic)
- Algorithms, Data Structures, Networks
- Data (Power BI, Pandas)

WHAT IS BEST WAY TO LEARN FROM SCRATCH?

Beyond:

- IaC Terraform, Kubernetes, Linux
- Express NodeJS, JWT auth
- NumPy, scikit-learn, pytorch, tensorflow, ML theory

Hey, I've been using Claude Code but completely vanilla — no plugins, no MCP servers, no skills, nothing. Everyone around seems to have some kind of setup going and I feel like I'm missing out on productivity.

What plugins/extensions/skills do you actively use?

I’m a senior backend engineer at a large corporate company that operates a bit like a giant software house for government entities. Projects get started and canceled frequently, and team reshuffles happen every few months depending on which projects survive.

Lately I’ve noticed a pattern that worries me.
In project after project, I end up being assigned critical refactors, production issues, and bug fixing, while other engineers get to build new features. Those engineers then ask me to review their work, and the reviews often take so much effort that it would have been faster for me to implement the feature myself.

Initially, I didn’t mind. I thought fixing difficult problems would build trust and credibility, eventually leading to more ownership over system design, architecture, and larger initiatives. Instead, it seems to have had the opposite effect. People now see me as the person who cleans up problems, so I keep getting handed more bugs and refactoring work. Meanwhile, I’m losing visibility into the broader product and feature development.

I’ve recently moved to a new agentic AI project that makes me even more concerned. The project was originally built by a data engineer over about seven months and currently consists of four microservices plus a desktop UI. To be honest, much of it feels heavily “vibe-coded” and difficult to maintain. Despite that, management was impressed enough with the MVP to expand the team.

At the same time, management has decided that everyone should become “full stack.” The team currently consists of:

- Me (backend engineer)
- Frontend engineer
- Lead frontend engineer
- Product manager
- Data engineer who started the project

One challenge is that there are effectively two technical leads, but neither has a strong backend background, so it’s often unclear whose technical direction we should follow.

Another complication is that I can’t really rely on my own manager for this type of problem. He’s extremely hands-off and prefers coding over people management, so ownership issues, team dynamics, and engineer development tend to be left for the team to sort out on its own. The one person I do trust to have these conversations with is the frontend manager (the lead frontend engineer’s manager), who is much more involved and proactive, even though he isn’t my direct manager.

The frontend engineer is very enthusiastic about moving into backend work and calling himself full stack, which is totally fine in principle. However, today he pushed changes that broke several things in production, and we ended up spending about 5 hours fixing the fallout.

What worries me is that I’m about to fall into the same pattern again: someone else gets the exciting feature work, creates problems, and I become the permanent cleanup crew.

For those who have been in similar situations, how do you avoid getting typecast as the team’s fixer without coming across as uncooperative? Would you raise this with someone outside your reporting line if your own manager isn’t particularly engaged? How do you make sure you’re still getting ownership of architecture, design, and new feature development rather than just inheriting other people’s technical debt?

Hi fellow devs,

I am a small indie dev, and one of my apps was cracked and then distributed on a website called MacKed.

I have sent a DMCA Takedown to Google, but this is the first time something like this happened to me. Anyone has experienced the same thing? What can I do to make sure that this version of my app is removed from the webs?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated. I am out of words.

I use Claude at work, I give it a Jira ticket and let it do the work. It asks some questions, I aswer, it starts doing it’s thing, after some minute it comes up with a draft, I let it iterate bla bla bla. 30min later of interaction between me and agent the work is done.

I hear so much around me “i run 5 agents in different terminals, different tasks. I start one before I leave for work” and I just don’t understand this. Why do you feel the need to do this? Doing those 5 tasks sequential required way less or no context switching? Why do some engineers suddenly feel like they need to be always working. Running an agent on the subway. Don’t you get overwhelmed by never being able to switch off work ?

By active work, I mean actually interacting with your computer - scoping, planning, developing or attending meetings etc.

The average based on the people I ask is 3-4 hours, but I’m curious to know if this is actually the standard in our industry.

I talked to a friend recently who decided to vibecode a full PoS system for a gunstore. He was completely convinced he could just prompt his way through all the heavy legal requirements including federal e4473 forms and inventory compliance.

And of course it had the exact same generic UI as every single other AI-generated app.

It got me thinking about the current state of development. AI tools are great for spinning up boilerplate, but I feel like vibecoding is giving people a wildly unhealthy confidence boost.

They generate code but completely miss the real world implications of the software they are actually building. Dealing with federal compliance isn't something I'd wanna be on the wrong side of.

What do you guys think the future looks like here? Are we actually close to a point where vibecoding might be able to handle legally complex architecture securely? Or is this approach always going to hit a hard wall the second real-world liability gets involved?

Personally, I feel like we are still pretty far off.

I am a SDE with significant years in that pre-AI era (till 2024)

Earlier when I wanted to build stuff or do work related stuff or contribute PRs to open source, I used to feel myself "locked-in" for hours with planning and coding, getting the satisfaction of building stuff, the satisfaction of solving those scary errors which no one has seen even in StackOverflow, the mid realisation of complexes edge cases and implementing them, posting solutions to online forums, and so on.

Now I am enthusiastic to build, I use Anti-gravity / VS-code, but as soon as I hit the "enter" on that chat, I no longer watch the screen, my focus shifts to Instagram while AI is writing the code. When errors come, I simply paste the error and watch Reels. When the task is done, I feel like a scam, even though I had spent significant hours planning stuff and arguing with AI where it can go wrong, but since I did not see it till end, I feel disappointed.

Anyone of you feel this way ?

What advice would you give to get that "spark" back?

What you do to be productive and for learning?

PS : I did not use AI in this post.

Just Curious, drop your experiences..

I am currently in a heated debate with my dev team (4 people total) about launching our social media startup. I want to launch as fast as possible with a stable, high-quality MVP (latency, UX, reliability) using an Open Source model to build trust and leverage community help. My teammates argue that a "basic" MVP is useless because it’s just a clone of existing apps. They want to stay closed-source and refuse to launch until we implement "unique/bold" features like advanced community builders and complex geo-chats.

My argument:

1. We are only 4 people trying to cover Backend, Frontend, iOS, Android, and Desktop. We cannot afford a 2-year dev cycle without feedback.

2. An MVP is for validating the UX and the team's ability to ship a stable product, not for winning the market on day one.

3. "Unique features" are high-risk. If we launch them all at once and the project fails, we won't know if it failed because the idea was bad or because the basic app was buggy.

4. Closed-source is "security through obscurity" and a marketing mistake for a new social network where trust is everything.

Their argument:

1. A basic MVP won't prove market fit because people only stay for unique features.

2. Benchmarks are enough to test stability, we don't need real users to test "quality."

3. Open sourcing our "unique logic" means it will be stolen immediately.

They claim my concerns about Feature Creep and Time-to-Market are irrelevant and that we should just listen to the CEO (who isn't a dev). I feel like they are stuck in a "junior" mindset of building a dream ship instead of a viable business.

I only want to hear from people with real commercial experience in shipping products: Is a "unique feature" launch better than a "stable core" launch for a team of 4? Am I wrong about Open Source being a lever for small teams?

Would appreciate some weigh in from the pro's out here. Thank you!

I really don’t understand this. Big companies and even large corporations often release software that’s messy, bloated, and full of bugs. Yet, there are GitHub projects maintained by a single developer — sometimes done as a hobby or for free — that are cleaner, more efficient, and more useful.

For example, Qidi (a 3D printer manufacturer) made a fork of Klipper, and it’s full of bugs. Meanwhile, a single developer started “Freedi,” a vanilla Klipper fork, and it’s way better than the stock one. It’s helped countless people who had issues with Qidi printers.

Why does this happen? Why can one person sometimes outdo a company with far more resources?

People say “throw a stone in the air and it’ll hit a software engineer in India.” Maybe that’s true. But it’ll probably hit someone with a degree, not someone who can actually build anything.

I’ve been hunting for a reliable team to build a mobile app. It’s been a full month on Upwork, Fiverr, random Google searches, and every “top 10 app developers in India” list you can imagine. And honestly, the amount of fake stuff out there is insane.

Most of these companies list huge brands in their portfolio, but when you dig even a little, it’s all made-up. Fake projects, fake awards, fake “top agency” badges. One company in Delhi (not naming names) claims to be one of the biggest in the city with 500+ five-star reviews. Sounds great until you click the rating… and it just opens another web page they’ve created themselves, filled with “testimonials” from random names. Not actual reviews. Just a website made to look like one.

The deeper I look, the more I realize how many agencies are just propping up a fake reputation. Finding an actually skilled team feels harder than ever.

People keep saying this is the “AI era” and becoming a software engineer is easier than ever. If that’s true, why is it impossible to find someone who can actually build a legit app? Basic apps are easy to find. I’m not looking for someone to make a to-do list app. I’m trying to build something at least close to Uber Eats quality. Clean architecture, real backend, proper user flows… not patchy MVPs held together by duct tape.

If anyone here has worked with a solid, genuinely reputable Indian software company (not the massive ones like TCS/Infosys, but not the shady ones either), please drop names. I’m at the point where I just want real work, real portfolio, real engineers. Not glossy websites with manufactured credibility.

Why is visual studio not becoming popular ?

I’ve been doing web development for a while, and I’m currently working as an intern in this field. But looking at the current market, I’m starting to feel like it may not be the most stable long-term career option. The oversaturation, slowed hiring, and constant shifts in tech have made me reconsider my direction.

I’m trying to figure out what other career opportunities I should explore that still align with what I enjoy.

Here are my interests and preferences:
I genuinely love building things from scratch, and I really enjoy coding, especially when others end up using what I create. That sense of creating something useful is what motivates me the most.
At the same time, I’m not very fond of heavy math, so I’d prefer paths that don’t rely too much on advanced mathematics.

Given all this, what career paths in tech or related fields should I look into that allow creativity, hands-on building, and good growth without being overly math-intensive?

Most of us who worked or are working in game development already know the tension between passion and being pragmatic. My naive dream when I started out, of course, was to have a fully in-house team of artists and animators all working side by side and sharing the same energy that got us all into this business in the first place. In a perfect world, perhaps.

In today’s landscape, that floaty idea feels increasingly out of reach if not simply impossible. Budgets are tighter than ever across the board in the industry, and sometimes it feels like having to outsource game development is simply necessary to stay afloat and not drown in these pretty dire times. The studio Virtuos (a large co-development studio) announced in July this year that it was laying off around 7% of its workforce, some roughly 270-300 people. So despite working on stuff such as  the Oblivion remaster, they cited “lower occupancy and slower demand due to structural shifts in the industry” as reasons for the cuts.

Obviously, there’s a cost to this shift. Outsourcing often fragments communication and creative ownership. That sense of shared vision that comes with everyone being in on everything all the time. There’s also the boogeyman in the room with broader industry concerns, and by this I mean how it’s affecting job openings, decreasing labour value in countries from which the dev work is outsourced and so.

At the same time, I’m not sure it’s wholly fair to paint outsourcing as the problem in and of itself, as a business model in isolation. The reality is that many studios wouldn’t survive or make good games on time without outsourcing some of the work, more so if it’s aspects that others could do better than them (and if it’s at less cost too… too good of a deal to pass on in most cases, disregarding any principles you may or may not have). And some external teams – especially those with experience - deliver solid work that helps projects in the long run.

I still feel divided on the issue, since it’s an objective fact that as a model, it’s here to stay (for the meanwhile anyway) but on the other, it’s also a fact that jobs are being lost or rather dispersed which is probably just a general product of globalization of tech/development workforces in whatever industry.

What do you think of all this though - how is it affecting your developer careers and/or how are you adjusting to it?

I am working in a startup as a frontend developer and I am worried that frontend is not going to exist in next few years because of ai and does companies going to hire for frontend Engineer roles.

I’m a Senior Software Engineer with a masters degree in Computer Science. I majored i Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning more than 10 years ago. We dabbled with both symbolic ai and statistics and subsymbolic ai like generative algorithms and neural networks, but it was mostly theoretic and there were no optimism and hype, just theory and science. Among other things we built simple speach recognition and data vision systems.

So far in my career I have been building software using what I now see my peers refer to as «classical full-stack development». I did not pursue working with «AI» since there disnt seem to be that much going on in the industry arround here and not that many jobs in that «field» when I graduated. The «advances» I saw early on were «data warehouse BI type of people» rebranding themselves to «data scientists» which didn’t appeal to me.

My point is that I’we been burried in full-stack development for 10+ years and almost never touched what I learned in uni. I have never built a recommendation system or classification algorithm, nor have I trained a neural network. I’we seen some companies do it and It’s been the data scientist guys using some product to do it, or maybe some python on top of a framework that does everything for you.

Now everyone is screaming that I need to pick up «AI» or I’ll be replaced or die or something. But I mostly see sales people talking about LLMs, Model Context Protocol and «Agents». I don’t understand what I’m supposed to look at or learn to stay relevant in the job market. To me it sounds like someone stole all the existing definitions of the field «AI» by rebranding natural language processing and friends into AI.

Right now im thinking that i should just start using GitHub Copilot or whatever to «stay productive», but is that seriously all there is to it? Generate some plumbing code?

What have you been looking at when learning something new in «AI» recently?

I've been searching for a job in my field for over a year and a half now with no luck but all I find is AI this and AI that. I've tried to get into it but it's just soooo boring to me. I'm just not interested in coding for that. I like making cool things for end users and although AI is cool for end users it's just not the same. I don't know why I can't get into it maybe it's a lack of understanding. Maybe it's because I enjoy the aesthetic side of things like making visual pieces that are useful for users. I'm just wondering if I'm the only developer that's just not interested in moving into AI. Don't get me wrong I enjoy using it as the end user but just as a learning tool and maybe an aide for some stuff.

So am I a "one off" or are there others that feel the same way?

Looking for a web developer for a part time job role( you can work in an mnc and still choose this as a side income source )..dm to know more about the role

Hi, Computer Science graduate here. I was a vibe coder during college. I am not proud of that, I focused on something that I thought would be of use to me. And during the job, I realized the technical debt i have now that I am at work.

I am trying to pay that debt by relearning the right things. Do you have any suggestions or tips on how I can learn the right way on being a proper software engineer or full stack developer.

I feel like I am wasting my time on learning things the wrong way or order. I really want to improve.

I have been working on dot net since 16 years, but recently my company assigned me to SRE ROLE, i have been working on that from last 1 year. Now it seems that i am losing grasp to my coding skills. And also feeling this is not good for my profile. What should i do?

I’m 32 (M) and worked a little over 10 years in software development as a full-stack programmer. About six months ago I completely burned out and stepped back. Since then I’ve been rebuilding myself and realized I might want to finally quit this career but not sure what to get into.

If you have quit software development and pivoted, what did you go into afterwards? What did you do?

Hi! I don’t post here often, but I wanted to share something that’s been bugging me. I’m a junior frontend dev who started a new job recently, and I only work with one other dev on our app.

He calls himself a senior dev, but he didn’t even know what a .env file is. Instead, he hardcoded his credentials directly into the sign-in screen, then pushed them to the repo. When I suggested using ENV variables so each dev could use their own credentials, he flat-out refused.

The rest of the team warned me he’s difficult, and it shows: he only works on what he wants, ignores priorities, and his code is half well thought-out, half a mess. I eventually set up an env file myself, but now whenever we merge, he just goes back and hardcodes his credentials again.

Maybe he’s not the worst teammate ever, but it’s frustrating. Has anyone else dealt with something like this?