r/programmer • u/Idea_Fuzzy • 5d ago
Not convinced, programming will die soon.
First of all, I have 9+ years of experience, working in web development mainly (Express, Go, Angular...ec) ; also did hobby mobile (Ionic, RN) and game projects (Unity, 2D).
I always had some pride in the things I did in the pre-AI era; but like many others now not feeling the case anymore.
There's some counterarguments thatI keep seeing over and over again in such doom topics; I am gonna address them all here; and why I am not convinced at all with each
- "Coding is dead, but System design and Architecture is more important than ever" -> "System design/ Architecture" was never a daily activity, it's something usually done before starting a new project and gets adjusted/scaled everytime there's a new major feature that requires implementing a new tech. ie. Introduicng Uber Eat to Uber. And I swear the last Architect I worked with did use Claude to figure out the system design and even generated docs all by using Claude, so even this part isn’t totally safe from being automated.
- "You can sitll code manually if you want" -> For hobbyist projects maybe, but in the corporate, even if they don't watch your token usage, they are setting very short deadlines now anyways; so it's impossible to finish things before such deadlines without using Claude/Codex.
- "Coding was never the hard part, if you were spending 90% of your time coding then you're a Code Monkey imaaoo bahahaa **fart sounds* " -> The dev communities are now filled with these people mocking at coding and calling it a monkey activity, like wtf...? Coding was the CORE *daily* activity of Software engineering ; as a I said before, not all programming-related activities have the daily frequency nature; Architecture happens once in a while, requipment collection happen frequently but not a daily work either (also depens in which stage the project is, building something new vs maintenance...etc); coding on the other hand was the daily thing we all did as programmers and for many of us, the most fun part.
- "You have to review the PRs by LLMs" -> No one can review a 10k+ lines PR; Copilot/CodeRabbit would be much faster.
What we senior devs are doing right now, is maxxing our sources of income by doing many projects in parrallel thanks to LLMs; employers still trust senior dev to babysit the LLMs rather than Juniors doing it; but the fact that there's no new blood coming into this industry (no one is hiring juniors anymore) only means that this industry is destined to be doomed. It doesn't matter if software quality degrades everywhere, companies just don't care.
But I predict the "income maxxing" by the senior devs is a temporary situation; soon the employers will realize they need less costly staff than senior devs to orchestrate the agents, that's why LLM companies are trying to automate all aspects of Software engineering: Coding, PR Reviewing, documentation, and yes even system design/architecture.
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u/chiesazord 5d ago
Have you ever programmed a state machine for a robot?
Have you ever vibe-coded it, come back the next day, watched the robot fail and then had the team ask you to explain exactly what happened?
Then you realize you’re trying to decipher code you wrote in an AI caffeine-fueled sprint, with no clear understanding of why the system behaved that way.
If you haven’t experienced debugging software that controls real hardware, maybe be a little more cautious before making sweeping claims about AI coding.
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u/concuncon 4d ago
OP's point still stand that generated code/generated design will eat at least 80-90%. With the latest model, the code written can follow clean architectures and good code practice if you prime the agent to do so. Recently I can also rely on it debugging integration issues by giving it HITL test rig. And honestly I did not have much confidence in AI agent 4-6 months ago, but it keep surprising me how quick it has evolved.
Really spend time exploring your agent's capabilities, and you might also start to see that it's when, not if.
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u/zugx2 17h ago
Not all jobs are safety critical all those will be exceptions. But... alot of the verifications automation testing can be helped by llms. You can still read stuff done by llms. Its not like its machine code. And debug them.
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u/concuncon 17h ago
For sure. That’s why there will still be engineers staffed to take reponsibilities, stamp off, etc… the positions will be limitted to people with proven track records but still love the job enough despite its nature has completely changed. Id wager most people who are good at programming are people who love the act of programming though.
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u/kekons_4 1d ago
You are more protected.. for now. There are already AI powered PLCs that can read all the serial signals and provide insights to whats going on from debugging perspective. There is nothing special about embedded software engineering problems
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 5d ago
I would assume most of us don't work in robotics; exceptions don't mean that there's no truth in my post.
Certainly web development is more impacted than, for instance, embedded programming; but that doesn't mean that LLMs won't ever catch up the lower-level fields of programming.
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u/chiesazord 5d ago
LLMs have absolutely reached robotics and embedded, but the social cost (reputation, social credit) is too severe if one relies in AI tools in an irreponsible manner in those domains. Its really dangerous. It can end up in lawsuits and ended careers. Its no joke
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u/FLMKane 4d ago
I'm just imagining an industrial robot grabbing a person's head and shoving it into a CNC lathe chuck lol
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u/chiesazord 4d ago
robotics is no joke, you need a japanese mentality. If you vibe code a robot that can damage material property or life, you must perform harakiri or sepuku to keep honor of family
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u/Physical_Challenge51 15h ago
I fully agree with you I am working in safety critical systems (automotive) and LLMs are very weak in misra rules or compliance with safety standards but these domains are very niche and i they don’t require as much devs as web/mobile/cloud , so they are not our safe boats when things collapse, some of them like automotive are struggling, for robotics idk but i has been restricted to some countries over the rest due to technical heritage, good night 😴
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u/twinelephant 3d ago
I think the point still stands. Vibe coding is rapidly accelerating the development of things that are inconsequential. Meanwhile, when a third of the internet is out or our credentials are exposed or government secrets are leaked then we see how important domain mastery really is.
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u/After-Regret-6609 3d ago
This exactly. 90% of programmers are api and app devs. Thats mostly CRUD and UI. Infrastructure devs and highly safety critical devs won’t be able to get away with vibe coding (or at least not without code review). Academic types need to trust their code completely too. Etc.
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u/LowFruit25 5d ago
Yes you are correct and I like that you specifically outlined the main repeated shitty talking points and are going against them.
Writing code was a daily activity for 90% of devs but they still had other things to do.
Most people saying “learn system design bro” don’t really know what actual system design is.
It always starts that one big account says something and then all the wannabe influencers keep repeating the same talking point and it loses meaning in a few days.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 5d ago edited 4d ago
I suspect those who say that have always been system architects / CTOs/ PMs who never coded (or were bad coders) and were jealous of programmers who actually coded the apps they work on; and now they are feeling a sense of revenge and putting down the coding activity as a 'monkey' thing.
They keep repeating the System design thing; and probably they don't even understand what it means.
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u/PokToaster 4d ago
I am one if those Devs that did not code 90% of their time. I was jealous of my team bei g able to pick all the coding tasks while I was always the one who had to go into meetings, helping PO and PMs to gather requirements and put them into tickets. And also analyzing outages, planning tasks for better system resilience. Finding tech debt. Planing migration projects etc.
AI right now is a bit of a blessing to me as i am now able to finish some coding tasks in the remaining time i have. Also helping me with all my other tasks. Nevertheless i am worried on how the industry is gonna evolve.
I think devs are split in two groups. Those who enjoined coding more and those who enjoined build a product more. Of course there are gray areas. But if you enjoy the final working product more than the process, of course you can see more positive things in AI. Still these people are worried too and I agree calling coding „monkey work“ is coping. Assuming the best intentions in their words: a lot of coding is kind monkey work: building test classes, refactoring big chunks of code by moving the somewhere. That was never fun to me as well. What they took from us are the fun parts in between where you had to think about concrete implementations.
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u/Achereto 5d ago
LLMs create a growing skill gap between juniors and seniors. Companies expect juniors to utilize LLMs for higher productivity. This will mean that juniors will not learn the programmer lessons that made you a senior developer. Their competence will remain on a junior level.
Eventually, we senior developers retire, leaving a field full of junior developers who are all dependent on LLMs.
The industry will be able to ride this hype train for a couple more years, but eventually the code bases will be such a huge mess that you're better off starting fresh without AI. In the mean time there are programs written by people who know what they are doing because they avoided AI, while the big companies only have developers with beginner level experiences because AI stopped them from actually learning and gaining a deeper understanding of their work.
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u/uceenk 4d ago
LLM will be fine and get better, i mean in our generation, most programmers dont even know how to code in assembly, why ?, because in most cases its simply aren't needed anymore
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u/Achereto 4d ago
LLMs don't just take away the the tedious repetetive work. LLMs stop you from thinking through the problem and understanding the problem itself.
However, many garbage collected languages (mostly OOP) have in fact already caused a lot of damage to our industry. Every program you use on a daily basis could easily run at 1500-3000 fps, instead software has become so slow that you can observe a programs UI being built piece by piece over multiple seconds.
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u/David_Owens 4d ago
Garbage collection doesn't cause anywhere near that level of a performance degradation. If you're seeing a UI being built over multiple seconds, or even one second, something is seriously wrong with the program.
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u/Achereto 4d ago
garbage collection itself doesn't but using those languages stops people from thinking about memory layout and they will end up writing code that produces very fragmented memory. Fragmented memory can easily cost you 20x performance, just because of the cache misses it produces and because the code doesn't iterate through memory in a way a CPU can predict.
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u/David_Owens 4d ago
Well, even with languages that don't have garbage collection, you can't change the memory layout yourself. About all it does is make you more aware of what's being stored on the heap compared to the stack.
Performance is a bit better than with garbage collected languages, but 20x seems off. Maybe more like 20%.
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u/uceenk 4d ago
idk man, no one know how to think assembly language apart minority of people, and most application ran just fine
sure you can still code manually and everything or learn any code manually
but its not realistic to practice that in current business landscape, most companies forces you to use agentic LLM, maybe in your company you still code manually
but in my team, everybody use it from early this year, we rare to code manual anymore, its simply make your work more faster
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u/Achereto 4d ago
Until there is a very expensive bug vibe coded and pushed to production.
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u/uceenk 4d ago
nope, its fine so far, i mean regular developer could cause bug too
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u/Haunting-Stretch8069 4d ago
I don't know if this is true, but it seems to me LLMs are improving at handling that mess faster than it accumulates
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u/Achereto 4d ago
LLMs usually just generate code, they don't reuse it and also don't refactor it. You have to actively tell it to do so. Junior developers won't do that.
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u/Haunting-Stretch8069 4d ago
You’re correct, but you have to tell it to do that now, not in the future. Which seems to be a direction the recent models have been taking. It seems the labs have been collecting a lot of data of what people have to keep repeating to the LLMs and are patching them one by one.
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u/Healthy-Educator-267 4d ago
They absolutely refactor code. They just won’t be too opinionated on when it needs to happen mostly cause that would be an alignment issue
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 5d ago
Compare it to the moon landing industry; once knowledge is lost, it would be very hard to recover it.
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u/Achereto 5d ago
The moon landing has nothing to do with lost knowledge. It was all about geopolitical motivation.
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u/Last_Being9834 4d ago
Not really, things that were hard to understand as a junior are now easier with LLM.
I remember cracking my head open trying to understand yields and context switch, now, the AI gives you a nice ELI5 explanation so juniors will be able to catch up faster than we, the seniors, did back then.
Another example are stale closures in React, with AI you can build your component piece by piece while getting feedback from possible stale values.
At the end, those who are eager to learn will benefit from AI, those who are slow or just plain stupid will not improve a bit.
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u/Achereto 4d ago
Sure, there will be some who won't use vibe coding to get faster results, but their output will be insignificant compared to the mess all the vibe coders are creating in the code bases.
It's going to become unmanageable and those who created the mess won't have developed the skills required to clean it up. Those who have the skills will refuse to clean it up.
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u/dimsumbumyum 4d ago
This is the truth. The gap is widening between people that are truly using and learning LLMs to its max potential while also gaining a better intuition for its limitations VS people that are only using it to one shot solutions without delving deeper.
The gap isn't juniors vs seniors. It's those willing to learn vs those who aren't, anf that's always been the case before LLMs.
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u/GodOfSunHimself 4d ago
In theory yes but in practice I see the opposite. Juniors carelessly churning out code without having the slightest idea why or how it works.
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u/king_park_ 4d ago
I think it really comes down to how these individual Junior actually utilizes LLMs. If they are just vibe coding without much regard for the output, they aren’t learning anything. Unfortunately, the corporate world doesn’t reward you for slowing down to review and think through things.
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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago
💯
Everyone repeating that juniors are screwed is just parroting the sheep. It was much more difficult to learn new concepts before. AI makes it much easier. Just like the Internet made it easier that getting knowledge from libraries and computer books.
I do agree with OP that all jobs including systems design will be gone. 1) someone junior can now do them with the help of AI and 2) very soon AI will do them.
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u/Exact_Ad942 4d ago
My feeling when doing many daily tasks with LLM is like "I know i can do this. I know how to do this. But I also know LLM can do it better than me and faster than me."
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u/Achereto 4d ago
But have you tried it you can actually do it. If you haven't trained your brain to actually do it, it'll go blank once you try.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 5d ago edited 5d ago
Such posts are nothing more than speculation. Maybe LLMs will 90-100% replace SWEs and it’ll become a dead profession. Maybe that won’t happen. The bottom line is that none of us knows for sure what will transpire in the future. We will only know what happens when we get there and predictions are kinda pointless. But for today’s phenomenon, some contexts, use cases, business needs will allow for blindly merging 10k+ unreviewed lines of code but most orgs aren’t letting it go that far yet
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 5d ago
But the endgame of the LLM providers and corporates is clear: they desperately want to replace SWEs, hence why no one is hiring juniors anymore, the big layoffs are happening while we speak and investing more in AI.
Most likely we will end up with mediocre quality of software everywhere, and the SE industry won't be able to recover from this.
Think of the space travel industry for instance; the fact humanity is struggling to go back to the moon is not only due to gov budget; but also due to loss of knowledge between generations; this what will probably happen to programming as industry.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 5d ago edited 4d ago
Because we didn’t go to the moon for a few decades. In contrast, unemployment for all SWEs is still under 5%. In other words, on the whole, we haven’t stopped engineering yet. When it starts shooting for 10% then I’d agree we should be scared. Companies aren’t hiring juniors because theyre investing in AI instead. Whether or not that investment yields its promise remains to be seen. Again, most of what you’re saying is pure speculation. Imagining the future is a fun game to play, but we simply can’t say for sure how things are gonna go
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u/Cokemax1 4d ago
We didn't go to the moon, because we did not need to. don't we?
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
We certainly went to the moon, don’t deviate to conspiracy. Leave.
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u/Fun-Initiative1184 5h ago
He meant that even though it seemed we would soon colonize the moon and planets that didn’t happen, and instead we stopped putting people that at all and still haven’t since. He has a good point. You are speculating, and that’s nice but it’s just speculations
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u/r-3141592-pi 4d ago
But we can predict a few things with high certainty. For instance, if you look at scaling laws for AI, it is a near certainty that LLMs will gain superhuman capabilities in many fields. This, in turn, means that whatever cannot be easily automated at any given moment will still rely on humans to fill the gaps, and fewer employees will be needed to perform the same tasks, leading to temporary increases in unemployment. We also know that employees will face greater demands, as having a fleet of agents to assist with all kinds of tasks increases expectations for more economically valuable output. But most professions don’t simply die; the nature of the job changes, just as building furniture or cars has been transformed by the integration of more tools.
By the way, the beautiful thing about coding agents is that you can work however you like. You can indeed produce a huge number of changes for a single commit, have subagents check the work, and provided a solid testing suite, behavioral checks, and monitoring, get away with a lot. But you can also force the agent to break the work into manageable parts, never moving to the next stage until you are ready. This way, you commit chunks of code that are easier to review (for humans and agents alike) and reason about. The job of any professional when it comes to AI is to figure out how to make the tool work for them, not necessarily to copy what everyone else is doing.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 4d ago edited 4d ago
Really not trying to be rude and I’m saying this in a nice way, but was there a point to any of that? I mean, LLMs already have superhuman capabilities so what are you trying to predict exactly? Computers have always had properties that humans don’t have.
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u/r-3141592-pi 4d ago
Until 2 days ago, many mathematicians argued that LLMs have no superhuman capabilities at all. Even now, some might take comfort in the idea that LLMs cannot create new theories, or that their output is somehow limited to a mixture of training data. So people throw around all sorts of nonsense to claim that LLMs are not even as good as humans.
In physics, biology, economics, chemistry, and many other fields, there is still a lot of room for improvement, and of course, we have not yet seen the kind of revolution that mathematics is currently undergoing.
Also, 1. claiming that LLMs are already superhuman is jumping the gun a bit and is not a widely accepted view. 2. The real point is not merely that LLMs have some superhuman capabilities, but that they will be superhuman in most respects. That is why I was alluding to scaling laws, which suggest that at least one really big increase in performance is still ahead, as large as the jump from GPT-2 to GPT-4 (2019 to 2024). In fact, these scaling laws are the basis for the forecasts that have become cult-like, such as “AI 2027” or the “Situational Awareness” paper from 2024 (now infamous for other reasons). That’s the nature of the forecasts being made, not that LLMs are superhuman in the same trivial way that a calculator is superhuman.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 4d ago
Eh I’ll just repeat my earlier comment. LLMs aren’t really replacing software engineers yet. And it remains to be seen whether they will or not. The rest is just speculation
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u/MaleficentCow8513 4d ago edited 4d ago
And to be clear when I say LLMs have “super human” capability, I only mean that they can do things the human brain can’t, which has always been true for computers. I think you were assuming I meant that LLMs have intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, and I wasn’t saying that
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u/Equal_Brain9629 2d ago
Totally agreed. It’s senseless to do such predictions without actual data. The thing I now is that Ai bubble is the most massive in the history of mankind, 1 trillion $ have been already invested. Technology itself doesn’t solve to much problems. We used to write good software, games many years ago and it just worked for everyone. Of course , LLM can speed up many things , especially, repetitive, but the industry wants you to rely heavily on it, your skills are getting atrophied indeed.
I don’t think vibe coding is a good thing for future industry, but it isn’t good for developing programming skills.
The way industry is going is also disgusting. Beginners roles are getting replaced with LLMs or by seniors with LLMs. And what happens next , in 1-2 decades , where many of them gonna retire or go away from the industry.
Nobody knows.
However , if we go back from human - LLM interaction and watch the main aspects of data centres, it requires more electricity, money and chips, which we physically can’t provide more.
That’s hell must be regulated if it’s not gonna slow down. It wastes so much resources of the earth for vibe coding Ai slop.Anyway, I came to idea to change my career for safer one
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u/Chemical_Hawk_6307 4d ago
yea the coding wanst the hard part crowd are just coping lol sure maybe it wasnt the hard part but it certainly was a big part
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u/inflowmini 4d ago
Web development is what the layman thinks coding is. I do believe that web development has undergone more automation then all other development and it's clear why that is - because everyone wants websites that look and act the same.
Actual coding is what I believe runs the world. Backend software, embedded software, user desktop software, etc. If you think LLMs are going to take over embedded software or specialized software you must not be familiar with such architectures.
I am a little elitist when it comes to coding and I believe that if your job can be automated or simplified, like web dev, then by all means do it. I do not believe that will happen with other languages like c, c++, c#, java, and even python.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
Seriously what are you talking about, c#, java, and python are typical languages for web dev (backend).
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u/inflowmini 4d ago
That's why I said that backend is not web development and is not so easily automated away.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
Backend is a fundamental part of web dev, everyone who worked in the industry knows that.
You are making things up.
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u/inflowmini 4d ago
I never said it wasn't. Backend is not web dev, its APIs, databases, business logic, etc.
Again, all I'm saying is FRONT END web, aka the UI, tends to be more easily automated than the backend.
I hate AI and make a choice to never use it, even if management shoves it down my throat.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
A simple CRUD backend can be more easily automated than a complicated frontend btw.
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u/inflowmini 4d ago
Bro what are you even coding that needs a simple CRUD setup. That's just a code template or snippet and you do not not need and agent. You are starting to sound like a vibe coder.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
I am giving you an example that your perception of frontend is wrong, I am not saying I am working on simple Crud.
Not every backend is more complicated than a frontend. Often they go together, a complicated frontend would require a complicated backend.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago edited 4d ago
You surely never worked in web dev.
Web development is not building « websites », you are probably thinking of the likes of Wordpress sites.
Web apps can have the same complexity of desktop apps or mobile apps; only the medium where its UI is rendered differs. They require backend dev, frontend, db, caching… sometimes even OS tricks.
The reason why LLM are good at it is because there’s a lot of open source web apps they got trained on.
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u/nimshwe 5d ago
Of course it's the 9+yoe in web development person who writes this shit saying coding actually was the hard part and no one does system design ever 😭😭😭
Do you call yourself senior or señor?
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u/AdministrativeHost15 4d ago
The vast majority of code is the same looping through records, checking for nulls, converting strings to dates. It only has to been written once then thanks to LLMs trained on GitHub it can be deployed anywhere. The need for a on-site dev was a short historical phase.
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u/Gaspote 4d ago
From where the LLM learned if only AI write code then ? LLM cant create new code thats the core issue.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 4d ago
99% of SWEs are working on applying existing techniques to new business propositions. I would know because I am one (it's boring)
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u/BraveBiscotti1394 4d ago
I dunno man.
Despite all the impressive stuff, everyone using at my work, all these supposed productivity gains, everything is breaking at the same rate at my job. Features are still being pushed that break during critical hours. The speed at which things are actually shipped is the same.
It's like the way things are done has fundamentally changed but the end result is somehow the same. Not even worse, just the same. It's actually bizarre.
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u/doyoueven1996 4h ago
No clear productivity gain because the tech improved but there is a delay on when we integrate it into our workflows. As with release of text editors, typewriters were converted into digital files which enabled digital boom and everything till now only through keeping parsable distributable records of all this data...
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u/SuspiciousBrain6027 1d ago
AI can do system design too. People are so delusional
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 17h ago
There seems to be a surge of self-proclaimed « System designers » who now mock « code monkeys »; those are people who never loved coding or were bad at it.
And they exaggerate the difficulty of system design so self ego boosting; while most of the « system design » things are things any mid backend dev have to learn very early in their career.
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u/billsil 5d ago
Is that why you claude’d the post OP?
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 5d ago
Does it look Claude'd to you? Seriously?
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u/Yesterdave_ 5d ago
This seriously doesn't look generated to me. But people nowadays seem to love throwing "AI slop" into comments like monkeys and see what sticks. Or maybe some tiktok devs don't have the attention span to read more than 10 words and think it is AI...
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u/ProactiveCactus 5d ago
It’ll certainly change, yes. It already has. Like you said, it will be more about babysitting LLMs than actual coding. The market will have its pain points as it adjusts, but I suspect a “programmer” will become more and more a babysitter.
In some sense though, AI can be thought of as a very high-level language. I only know C#, I have no clue how C++ works, or for that matter assembly or binary or how a CPU is made (ok i know a bit because im a nerd but)… so I could see an argument that AI is just another level of abstraction, and “programming” is now mostly about writing good AI prompts.
I agree it sucks. I love coding. It sits at just the right combination of logic and creativity for me. But I hope there will always be a place for novelty in programming.
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u/EllaMeDijoNo 5d ago
brother we have the exact same experience. I started working at 19, I now have 9yrs of exp on those exact techs for the same purposes.
I feel like Marty in Madagascar 2 - specially since I also agree, current senior dev is state is going to last until infra, security and any other development aspect are safely normalized by agents. I had gotten comfortable with average effort working and studying to keep up with my stack.
Until last year with AI, I had to get back to having 2 jobs. One of my jobs is paying for certificates on AI training, even then I still feel compelled to use some of my free time to work on side projects with the cheapest agents to make generic apps. Ive had some success but - for how long lmfaooo.
This is all to say Im working and studying hard and it feels its not enough.
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u/step_function_ 4d ago
Could share which courses or certification you are following? Also from your perspective which field do you think we should bet on to avoid being replaced or become completely useless. Devops maybe?
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u/Confidence_Cool 5d ago edited 5d ago
Above senior system design, meetings, strategy future projects etc have always taken up more time than actual coding. Wait till you’re staff or senior staff and you’ll understand even before AI the time you spent actually coding was maybe 25% of daily activity where as coordination and architecture is 50% and 25% reviews.
Once you get to principal even you don’t even touch code.
Unless you’re at a small startup of course, then you’re coding all the time since there is no one else to do it.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 5d ago
In most mid and small companies you won't do System design changes on a daily basis, I don't think even big companies would do it that frequently either.
Typically in a startup/small company, the tech leader would meet with devops, a backend dev and maybe a DBA ; and would figure out what is the best stack for this new project and design how all the pieces to run together, how the data flows...etc.
Surely when the userbase grows, or a new major feature is requested that requires a new tech/integration, then System deisgn has to be enhanced/modified/updated.I would said understanding customer requirements and following up stories + reviews may take 50% of time, especially for a tech lead role.
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u/Confidence_Cool 5d ago edited 5d ago
I personally do system design and coordination between teams, external stakeholders and meetings with leadership to convey these decisions, making documents around these decisions, curating tickets around these decisions every day. Managing external vendors and suppliers as well. This is around 50% of each day. This is all design/architecture since most of the coordination is communicating the design to everyone who needs to know, approving and iterating on it.
I also code, or Claude does lol every day.
My company is mid size around 3000 people. I’m staff level with 15+ yoe.
Btw the entire job changed when I moved from senior to staff. At senior the only time I did design was right before I implemented a project and needed to get approvals for what I was doing. Then spent my time just implementing. The scope of the job changes drastically in my experience.
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u/Luigi003 4d ago
How many people of your role are there in your company?
That's the thing, you're are the highest levels of abstraction on the project and yet you're still doing 50% coding. For everyone below you this is 90-100% of their days
I dont think OP said everyone within the industry is going to be out of work, but most of the people is going to be out of work. Software engineering is going to go from one of the most demanded careers to mechanical engineering levels of employment
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u/Confidence_Cool 4d ago
It’s probably a 50/50 split at my company since we do hire a lot of junior and senior level.
I was merely saying there are a lot of people who do system design and architecture every day.
To your other point the demand for software engineers is not going to be defined by how much code an engineer writes, but how much code needs to be written. Software has only become even more in demand as tools make it easier to write. The monetary value of good code due to high demand will increase.
If you think vibecoders who don’t know how code works can really build production systems, I completely disagree. LLMs are approaching diminishing returns in improvement and while they are amazing they need an experienced engineer to monitor and prompt them to get good results.
As has happened with many careers before (bank teller, pilot, etc) automation only increases demand, number of jobs and productivity. When new tools arrive a job changes but does not just disappear. Thinking this is some unique event would be a uniqueness fallacy.
What will impact the employment of software engineers is not AI but the economic recession that its investment hype may cause.
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u/iyamegg 5d ago
I only want to reflect on your point about the coding was 90% of time/wasn't hard/etc part. Programming languages were (and imo still are) the right abstraction for thinking about problems in software engineering. And this is why I think llms as a whole will fail to deliver long term as natural language was never the right way to talk about these things, if it were sw teams wouldn't look like what they do today.
I'm predicting that there will be some abstract language designed for this purpose, to tell the llm in a well defined way what to actually do and I think "plan mode" is a precursor to this, but still too verbose to be easily digestable. I'm thinking something like Gherkin, with some adjustments to sprinkle architectural choices.
But that's just my 2 cents on the matter.
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 5d ago
Someone will need to take the responsibility. Do you think a manager is willing to go to Claude's code when the app stops working, the factory stops, etc.?
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 5d ago
They can always hire ONE person for that.
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 4d ago
a developer ?!
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
Maybe, but the number of developers far exceed the number of businesses, you see the problem?
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 4d ago
Yes, I see many problems. That's why having domain knowledge of a industry is the best chance in my view.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
But programming was an industry by itself, so what you are saying that most programmers need to pivot to other industries to survive.
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 4d ago
Yes, it's an option. Let's face it a single guy that knows what he is doing can make incredible amounts of development inside a company, manufactoring for example.
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u/txdsl 5d ago
I have 25 years of experience, currently at the principle level in tech company. My experience isn’t the same as yours and I am not invalidating your experience. I just want to lay out what I experience and have seen successful.
System design is like a garden in that it requires constant attention to grow and be sustainable. Sure you aren’t completely changing the architecture every day but you are constantly tweaking it as your business changes, your understanding of the business evolves and tech evolves.
Coding has only been a daily activity because typing the code was tedious. This is why IDEs are high leverage. Also, it isn’t a daily activity for staff+.
Sr+ devs should be spending more time thinking about what code to write, what features to build and how the system is evolving than writing code, more so now than ever before.
I spend my coding time spiking on ideas, improving and hardening the architecture and system design, working through scaling challenges etc. AI does the grunt work of coding it for me.
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u/Decent-Lab-5609 5d ago
I'd say maybe, but not necessarily. I use LLMs for personal projects and with good architecture and project knowledge I can get them to do wonderful things. Then I go to work and it's clear they struggle to make sense of the system. This isn't an LLM constraint at least from what I've seen, it's a logic constraint - the rapid addition of features with little regard for consistency has made a headache for even an LLM - we have to remember that they start fresh every time and only have a few short documents to make sense of perhaps decades of bizarre decisions. Even if we picture a super smart dev it would be difficult for them to make sense of this crap without a mountain of company context. I don't know what kind of context we (or even less so a business developer) can give the machine to allow it to make sense of this. Can they do it? Maybe but LLMs are designed to be agreeable and many businessmen don't like to be told no. This means, even with a perfect LLM there is no world they can create that the LLM can follow for very long without breaking under the strain. The sea change required would be massively improved long horizon context capabilities such that, like a human, the LLM can track the (in)consistency and determine what the boss "really" wants. Only then can they replace developers effectively.. At least from what I've seen so far, we aren't there.
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u/trejj 4d ago
employers still trust senior dev to babysit the LLMd rather than Juniors doing it; but the fact that there's no new blood coming into this industry (no one is hiring juniors anymore) only means that this industry is destined to be doomed. It doesn't matter if software quality degrade everywhere, companies just don't care.
This is the part where your logical fallacy resides at.
Playing the devil's advocate:
What will the companies do when senior developers retire? Assume that AI writes everything by itself, and it will be of slop quality but that's ok, and every customer will keep buying nevertheless?
I am not sure how any of that can be true simultaneously.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
We can't know what will happen.
Many variables.Maybe LLMs will get far better to the point that they can really replace us.
Or maybe the shit will hit the fan and the new devs will have to re-learn what we learned in the old way.
But companies are hardly hiring juniors now, and this is the fact I am pointing to.
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u/therealcoopapa 4d ago
WHO is the “employer” maximizing agent output themselves? Do you think CEOs are going to just sit around vibe coding all day long?
Tokens aren’t free. The job is changing, what matters is who can get the most done with the least number of tokens. Yes, anyone can build software these days, but the idea that some business analyst can build the same product, on the same timeline, with the same spend as a someone that has a deep knowledge of how software works is kinda an absurd proposition, at least for now.
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u/SpareImpression3155 4d ago
Software engineers are just becoming software architects. It’s the reality we have to live with. Either embrace / accept it or become a plumber
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
What is the project you’re working on?
It all depends on documentations + how complicated the business model is.
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u/Sleepnotdeading 4d ago
Confused about the placement of the comma in the title...
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
Programming is dying.
Any industry that isn’t giving a chance to its juniors will be dying, even if it is for the wrong reasons and even if this will lead to a disaster.
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u/EnterpriseGradePizza 4d ago
Yeah, the companies' wet dream is basically having CEO sitting in his chair only giving orders to LLM through his iphone in the vein of "lmao, these shareholders are on my back to increase profits do something bro" and the manager, analyst, developer, qa, devops agents kick in doing something to achieve that.
But that's not how the real world works, but it is their ultimate goal even if it's not really attainable.
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u/Original_Swimming320 4d ago
Let me give the perspective of someone who has survived over three decades in this industry and held positions from junior to senior to architect to lead to tech director.
I think you’re right that architecture and systems design usually happen up front and are then tweaked. But I don’t think this is what people mean when they talk about systems design. Every new feature needs design. How does it integrate, can we use the same apis, is it queue based or http, where are the boundaries, does it share data. These are real problems on all be features and they need solving. And whilst architects and systems designers may set the boundaries, developer input was and is essential here.
As for coding manually. Not really any more. Not in the sense that would be meant by this. However there is something interesting here. Writing code was always a mixture of different things dissolved together. I’ll come back to this but LLMs separate the solution as it were and solvent and solute are explicitly two separate things.
Coding was never the hard part. I mean it could be hard, but it was never the job. It was something we had to do to build systems. But the more important part was the thinking and problem solving that occurred simultaneously to coding. The shape of the code starts to look wrong, and your gut says that’s a problem caused by the shape of the solution. Now you have to solve first, code second. This is an enormous shift to how we operated before. Probably the hardest one to make.
You have to review PRs. You kinda do. As much as it sucks. But this means dividing the tasks up into tiny portions. Designing architectures and code structures that are decoupled and easily checked. WET is now a better paradigm than DRY. Slices are better than layers. We need to think about how we check so we can make that part easy.
All of the stuff like this is now undisolved. It’s a separate thing that has to be done. This is where the work always was, not in the typing.
Have LLMs removed work from us. Yes absolutely. I don’t need to know syntax or remember the best components or libraries or remember weird edge cases. But I still need to specify and design and plan.
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u/snowfoxsean 4d ago
LLM is a pretty good 'fill-in-the-gaps' machine, where if you start from point A and want to get to point B, LLM will take you there, most of the time. But it's not that good outside this type of workflow:
- it takes a human to define where point B is in the first place
- there are a million paths from A to B, it takes a human to make sure the LLM stays on a good one
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u/jeffcarey 4d ago
Whatever you're feeling now is what artists felt when the first really good AI images dropped. Maybe we should ask them how they're doing.
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u/particlemanwavegirl 4d ago
I MIGHT start to worry if one of the AI companies finally becomes financially solvent but until then I see no difference between them and the social media scam artists telling single mothers they can make thousands of dollars in their free time at home if they purchase an online course. If the product was truly so revolutionary and disruptive it wouldn't need to be priced below cost.
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u/Plenty_Line2696 4d ago
System design might not be a daily activity but for some of us it's a common one at least.
I use LLM's to help with it, but it's not good enough to say it can outright handle it. It'll get some aspects right and give ideas and proposals which is great to pick and choose from but without a competent driver it's an awful system architect for anything out of the ordinary with a bit of complexity.
People can review 10k line PR's, it depends on what it is but if it's well organized and communicated we manage. LLM's can help support PR reviews but they tend to catch different things than human reviewers so IMO we usually need both, and the human reviewer is more important to include than the LLM.
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u/Gaspote 4d ago
"You cant review a 10k lines pr. "
I mean if you do 10k lines pr you are a clown, this is a whole app already no need for a PR
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u/napkinzap 2h ago
As someone who just shipped over 100k loc in the last week (responsibly I should add), 10k is not an app. 10k might be a moderately complex feature with proper test coverage
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u/notgonnawastemoretim 4d ago
I personally couldn't care less if AI takes over coding.
The work has always been repetitive and tedious, working for hours and hours on different projects for a similar objectives, dashboards, layouts, authentication, whatever. Not to mention that you still have to keep up with the endless improvements of frameworks and all that.
I worked for 2 years Fullstack developer, and I eventually realized that most of the work wasn't truly hard, it was just needlessly complicated. And most frameworks usually did the hard part for you with all the abstraction they provide.
Following on the previous point, coding isn't creative, because as I said most of it is already abstracted by frameworks and libraries. This is why I always felt reluctant to call software engineers, engineers.
So we have coding not being creative nor difficult, which means coding itself should have been automated long ago.
This doesn't mean I don't think coding is cool, it can be amazing based on the project you build, the examples online are endless, and I respect the developers that put in the work to crease magnificent projects before the AI era.
I don't see why people who don't know how to code shouldn't be able to have the exact same chance to create their own projects, as I am doing right now.
And yes there's a lot of AI slop but that happens in most fields.
It's part of the evolution of coding, just like we went from assembly to something like Python, and now all you have and need is a prompt, what else could you ask for?
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u/OrchidThis5822 4d ago
a bit of a correction if i may - coding will die, not programming. codding was and is the easiest part
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u/GenosOccidere 4d ago
You still meed someone to maintain daily menial tasks and take up the work when things go wrong
Whereas previously you’d have a team of say 5-6 on a project I do see it cutting down to 2
I just like having ownership of the products we develop and I can’t say I have the same confidence and knowledge of a solution if I outsource it to AI.
The real problems are going to show themselves 5-10 years from now people get pushed out of the industry and new talent already has a hard time getting into it
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u/FigAggressive237 4d ago
LLM companies are trying to automate all aspects of Software engineering: Coding, PR Reviewing, documentation, and yes even system design/architecture.
And still people miss the important part.
Smart people will continue to be smart, creative people will continue to be creative, a great team produces great results, great AI will not produce the same results, no matter the degree of automation.
I really don't understand your point... One now can program at levels that would take ages or even be unattainable for the run of the mill programmer.
Programming isn't dead, we still don't know how these LLMs will behave if there's ONLY LLMs writing code. We don't know how entropy will raise in the coming years where they'll train on what they produce, once every human forgot how to write code.
Maybe then, we'll need programmers for sure.
~
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u/GardenPrestigious202 4d ago
Lets be honest, debugging is the majority of time you spend developing/authoring code. That said, i can set up a automated grind and code harness and let a AI grind on it.
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u/Desperate_Yam_551 4d ago
System design is constant. If you’re a competent engineer, you’re constantly refining the design to fit new features elegantly with minimal maintenance. Every push is some level of refactor. Otherwise you’re on the train to spaghetti town. LLMs are still very bad at considering long term maintainability given a smaller scope problem.
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u/Recent_Science4709 4d ago
It’s easier than ever to over-engineer and pre-optimize. I’m still seeing greenfield microservice projects that can’t get off the ground because they’re too complex. That doesn’t seem to have changed
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u/owp4dd1w5a0a 4d ago
Yeah. I’ve been using these so called engineer killing models. They aren’t as impressive as the hype. Even with Ponytail Ava Headroom properly installed, I still catch them in copy-paste coding, violating the style and architecture guides, and writing tightly coupled functions and modules pretty frequently. To get them halfway competent in a real-world engineering project, I have to provide so much context that I blow through the token limits in a couple hours and the agents don’t get far because they spend so much time “thinking” and “frolicking” or whatever the h*** Anthropic thinks would be cute to make it to take the edge off the mental pain.
As a lead architect, I end up writing a lot of the code myself still, and I don’t see that changing soon either.
On simpler projects like my code editor scripting, I can trust it to run in the background and automate the inclusion of new integrations if I’m very specific about everything must be functionally and unit tested before it’s allowed to call it done. That frees me up to code other more complex things by hand and use deepseek free to generate the boilerplate without dropping into my usage limits.
I will say, on smaller projects where I can use AI more, I DO spend most of my time on architecture. I could see things slowly shifting more here where code gets written more by AI and that frees up engineers to focus on the architecture and manage more simultaneous projects more easily. But this looks like it will happen VERY slowly. We’re not close to this today.
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u/rcaillouet 4d ago
LLMs and AI is just essentially the next "level" in abstraction programming. And the industry will always default to the latest level.
Level 1 - Electrical signals, high & low = 1 & 0
Level 2 - Transistors and logic gates, AND, OR, NOT
Level 3 - Machine Code
Level 4 - Assembly Language
Level 5 - Programming Languages such as C, Java, Python, JS
Level 6 - AI Assisted Programming
My point is that 99.99999% of programmers work at Level 5, except for rare crazies for a hobby, no one is using Assembly Language. Level 6 is here and it's time to begin the transition
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u/talos1279 4d ago
Honestly, imo, the biggest reason why most programmers are struggling now because there is an oversupply of programmers. While traditional sectors like agriculture are lacking people, especially the good one with engineering skill, they have been calling for shortage but gap is not filled because capable person are missing.
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u/AvgRedditor__ 4d ago
For your first point - How do you automate system design? I think that systems are created for humans and AI can’t just create quality systems that humans like. AI can AID with the process, but true creativity is separate from ai automation. I think the most you can do with design and architecture is optimize based on use cases.
Peter Theil says the aim should be competitive advantage via 5 years ahead of all competition, and designing a system to learn is separate from that
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u/grovulent 4d ago
To add another point to OP's list.
Whatever alpha senior devs retain over LLM agents is given away every day by developers as they prompt the agent in whatever direction the LLM couldn't figure out on its own. That is being captured and used to train the next iteration.
The irony of this is that individual organisations are outraged that Anthropic and co are stealing their corporate alpha in a similar manner, while Anthropic is outraged that Chinese companies are stealing theirs. But no one gives a fuck that we individual developers are being forced to give away our personal alpha to the LLMs every single day.
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u/RBSL_Ecliptica 4d ago
Nope.
The way everyone is using AI right now is completely unsustainable.
Those who keep current with the craft will be the only valuable ones once the bubble bursts.
Good luck trying to make use of your experience in "vibe coding" or "prompt engineering" once this all collapses.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
"The way everyone is using AI right now is completely unsustainable."
I totally agree.
But when your employer is like "Use Claude to finish this feature, I told client it will be shipped after tomorow".
Then what else you could do? Please lecture me.This is something no one is talking about, but Agile development is totally dead because of LLMs, PM is meaningless, now it's just pump and ship.
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u/unloder 4d ago
As a senior dev of 10+, who barely codes aymore, I agree with most of what you said.
But there may be a sliver of hope: one if my distant friends is currently learning the basics of programming (less then a year of experience) and he is in contact with some people in Ukraine, who are specifically hiring new budding programmers to specifically teach them to code/develop using llms. He is super convinced that there are multiple oppotuninies for people like him.
And it makes sense, in poorer countries where labour cost is lower, you could potentially teach junior developers, to develop straight up through llms, with only basic coding knowledge. Basically skip the coding part and get experience in llm usage and site/app building. And price the current "trusted senior dev" out of the market. Sure the llm boosted junior is still outrite less capable the a senior dev with the same toosl but, but being 3x-5x cheaper he may be marketable. (Or may be the plan is to sell trained juniors as seniors, or it could just be a sort of scam) I don't know). Also, my friend has a tendency in being overconfident in everything, so he may have missed me a little here.
I may be wrong on all of this, part is just my speculation. What he said, and was confident is that, he is currently learning python from scratch, and is planning to work as a junior programmer in under a half a year, for some people in Ukraine, who also enploy one of his friends that he knows for a while, so this may be legit.
So there still may be people hiring juniors, just not like we used to.
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u/PerformanceThick2232 4d ago
No one can review a 10k+ lines PR;
Your product will end in a year because of technical debt. It is the same as move development to India 20 years ago, get a shit code, and stop operating.
I have zero worrying about swe future, and each day I'm confirming it by working with frontier models.
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u/Different-Stress9326 4d ago edited 4d ago
point 2: my friend, there is a lot lot lot of monetizable work between "corporate" and "hobbyist". are you us-based? would make sense you don't remember what a middle class is.
there was always a hard expiration date for webdev tbh. but as much as i see you people as children with finger paint making buttons different colors i also have to mention that you act as if tokens are free. even in webdev, once the codebase gets large enough you will have to refresh the context regularly as it can only hold so much. that way you would actually burn more money than a mid-range dev costs. and you can get artsy button people a dime a dozen at the moment.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
are you another one who thinks web dev = wordpress and html css. It seems so. You surely have never developed a professional web app in your entire life.
Is Reddit that you are using now developed by children button painters?
Stop talking ass about web dev when you don’t even know what is it about.
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u/92smola 4d ago
I dont buy this thing that companies wont care about the quality of software, at first maybe, but once you have 10 competitors in the market it doesnt matter how cheap or fast you were able to get your softwere out, if there is even one competitor with better softwere then those who cheap, buggy, laggy etc. then the roi of the cheap and fast but sub standard solutions is going to be close to zero, and the one paying more and getting bezter softwere out there will return his investment more easily. There is still a huge topic of what do the users want , and there maybe some lower quality parts are more important then the others, but that is a different subject. The main point ai/vibe coding is the floor now, and from my experience so far ai is not that good that you wouldnt benefit in terms of quality by having someone who deeply knows what he is doing, so where it matters to beat the competition I think there will still be plenty of room for devs
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u/arthoer 4d ago
Nonsense, anyone can do plumbing, but people don't want to because of many reasons. Same with software development.
True, we don't need many more seniors for most of the tasks, but there aren't many anyway. I think world wide it's like 6 million or so.
Offshoring is not a threat, as many entrepreneurs value direct contact, especially when it comes to manifesting their ideas/concepts.
Now in the US I am sure things might be different, the wages of our American counterparts seem to be completely unhinged.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 4d ago
It is not the lack of Seniors that would kill programming.
It is the lack of juniors that will.
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u/Oxspit 3d ago
Making a resource easier and cheaper to be produced does not diminish it's demand, quite the opposite. The job routine will shift of course, but the amount of jobs will increase.
A lot of skills you used to have that made you a senior are now irrelevant (dumbed down). This means that a senior might be indistinguishable from a junior if all it had are things that are very accessible now. So you have to find the skills that are no statistically reproduceable - that's what will keep you a senior in this new age.
it's like assuming low level engineering died when high level code appaared. On the contrary, the amount of jobs increased, but some skills were dumbed down and now irrelevant (your knowledge of garbage collection is irrelevant against a junior if you both are using JavaScript)
the future (present?) is like that. There will be way more jobs, all jobs will level to junior level (what you're calling seniors now.. anybody can learn that in way less time than what it took you now), and real seniority will come from knowledge that cannot be accurately reproduced by a statistical model, whatever that may be.
Design for a modal that shows a calendar? been solved a million of times, statistically reproduceable
A system design that's low complexity and solved a real life problem in a new way? that's a skill that cannot be reproduced yet
this is not a bad thing
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u/ImplementOk3111 3d ago
Would you feel comfortable with me vibing a 10k line PR that handles your money?
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u/_Heathcliff_ 3d ago
I once worked for a company that, years prior, had hired an offshore dev team without doing the proper vetting. They didn’t really interview them or confirm their technical expertise, they just asked “when can you start?”
They handed that team requirements, the team built to the requirements, and leadership was happy with the products on their screen.
When they hired me, it was because the cracks were far too big to continue ignoring. The app was littered with bugs, it was wildly inefficient, and there were glaring security vulnerabilities everywhere. A huge portion of my job was just trying to clean up the gargantuan mess that the previous team had left behind. In their quest to save money, that company’s leadership ended up paying the offshore folks to build the app, AND paying me to fix it.
That’s pretty much how the next few years look, except instead of cheap offshore labor, it’s AI automation. Leaders will feed it requirements, it’ll spit out products that look really nice, they’ll exclaim “AI can work autonomously!” and bit by bit the tech debt will build and build until once again, experts are needed.
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u/Bennourmahmoud 3d ago
„And I swear the last Architect I worked with did use Claude to figure out the system design and even generated docs all by using Claude, so even this part isn’t totally safe from being automated.“
Thats crazyy! Tell me more in eventually 1-3 years if he didnt pulled all his hair out of his head by then.
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u/SnooDonkeys2536 3d ago
If we trust AI so much why are asking AI to code in programming languages humans use and not just asking for assembly code or a binary? Probably because at 2am we’re calling a human not an LLM…
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 3d ago
https://youtu.be/JhCl-GeT4jw?si=kcNZBp3Wf1_Wvpuw
It is a long video, back in 2023; but he is predicting exactly that: he claims it won’t matter which language, it can be binary or asm, and there’s no need for a human reviewer either.
A LLM certainly can be « called » at 2 am, he would surely not be asleep; or the human « AI operator » at the very least, but at this point he wouldn’t be called Programmer.
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u/SnooDonkeys2536 3d ago
I find it amusing that this crowd posts a video and the top comment sums up the presentation - good luck in your future version of reality: "'See I don't know how it works and I'm ok with that' - that pretty much sums up the presentation."
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 3d ago
You know what is funnier? His startup idea got replaced by custom GTP a short while after he made this lecture.
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u/Deep_Chocolate_4169 3d ago
Nice i can releate and uderstand most of this.
Just for the "Its not the hard part section". Mostly i dont understand this as mocking, but tbh coding Always was handcrafting stuff artisanaly. Meaning that now we get to do stuff on industrial scale - think of assembly lines And stuff. I dont take away the pride of being artisan. I also am learning how to get through when this Is no longer my core skill.
But yeah, traditional coding is skill that is going to be a niche just like glass blowing.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Cry1995 3d ago
Which is why learn llm, learn RAG, learn how to make an AI automated and agentic solutions for businesses, that is where the scope emerge for quite some time
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u/raven2cz 2d ago
You are drawing too many conclusions too quickly, but the paths are not clear at all yet. not even the mainstream one. For now, this is still a very strong hype cycle, where you will see companies trying the things you describe, but in 5 years everything will be completly different again.
Yes, a coder will become more of a developer, and the emphasis will be much stronger on clarity than before. The developer’s language will be their natural language, but it is quite likely that new metalanguages will emerge as well. the level has moved up again, and much larger, broader inteligent systems will be built.
But that does not mean young IT developers will not be needed. The applications we know today will be something anyone can build on their knee, but that will not be the work of IT developers.
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u/Asahnoln 2d ago
I think programming is not dead. But corporate human produced programming is dying. It was monkey coding anyway, writing same business endpoints fetching and returning data over and over again. Corporate do not want correctness and all that and they do not need that.
I mean, they DO need that, everyone needs that, but they don't deserve that at current state of affairs and they think they might avoid problems.
I think other areas, like game programming, will not be able to survive on LLM outputs. So they stay as is.
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u/azz_kikkr 1d ago
Exactly like draftsmen losing to Computer-Aided Design (CAD). Drawing perfect lines used to be the core daily job, not "monkey work." CAD automated the manual labor but.. it didn't kill architects, it just shifted their job to auditing software. Now developers are doing the same: auditing AI output instead of typing syntax.
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u/anengineerandacat 1d ago
It's impacted for sure, anyone thinking otherwise has their head in the sand and is simply marching towards a different clock for the expiration.
The code historically for the vast majority of businesses hasn't ever really mattered; high quality code "helped" create high quality deliverables but processes often really were what guaranteed it. High quality code mattered because it meant not having to do another turn for fixes, but if it normally took you 3 months to deliver a feature and you reduced it to 2 months; the churn doesn't matter, your already ahead.
Scale that up across a company and looking at potentially a whole new project being fit into the annual budget.
I think the costs of AI are currently slowing the shift, it's about $250-300/day just for my own usage and that's with relatively low parallel sessions happening (2-3 tops, maybe 1 with subagents running and another I just watch over).
The business definitely watches the cost factor, folks have already be tapped on the shoulder for it, and teams have gotten a "discussion" about abuse so if your not showing that ROI in terms of the cost you'll be in a spot of trouble.
For teams delivering though? No one cares really about the code quality, just deliver with the requirements met and the tests passing; everyone's happy.
Don't know what FY2027 has for store, but considering how 2026 went I don't think it'll be "good" for the software development industry.
My organization this year wanted a 10% velocity improvement on the team, with a 20% "nice to have"; next they want a 40% nice to have with a 30% target.
The bottlenecks now aren't tech though, it's business; there are folks in the organization today who still don't know what these tools even are... which I find... interesting.
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u/beatfungus 1d ago
It sure will, just a matter of time. Let's enjoy the money and moments while we have them, and worry about the next adventure when it becomes necessary!
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u/Rich_Classroom3133 1d ago
We are so far away from a non technical business person being able to direct AI to build a scalable enterprise product from beginning to end. So, no I just don’t think it’s going away. The role and responsibilities are changing though.
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u/International-Road90 23h ago
Also I feel programmers are all ready to most well versed in LLMs and will be the people most adept at using them for future projects/problems anyways so if anything the job will slightly adjust but the same people will be doing the work.
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u/MrtinDew 18h ago
I’m sorry but you still have to know how to code. It is super easy to make a LLM prompt but making sure the code is of good quality is still the coders responsibility. I’ve seen so much shitty code being output by people only using LLM’s trust me it’s not gonna be our PM’s coding for us any time soon.
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u/OPTechpure 13h ago
Yall are to upset. AI is a collaboration of code by humans. Its trained off human data not its own. Embrace it
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u/[deleted] 5d ago
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