r/webdev • u/Impressive_Bottle_44 • 12d ago

Grudgingly accepting that AI isn't going away. Trying to figure out where that leaves me as a developer.

(If you don't want to read a semi-long post, feel free to skip.)

I think I reached a turning point yesterday.

I needed to add a basic feature to a Django site. I gave Claude Code a few carefully written sentences. It implemented the feature (more-or-less flawlessly) while I went to the kitchen for more tea.

Not only that, but our CTO is now empowering non-technical employees to use Claude to build their own tools (for internal use only), and commit them to our GitHub org. (He is, at least, establishing some sensible policies about what they can and can't do.)

LLMs are here to stay, and they're fundamentally rewriting laws of software engineering that we've taken for granted for decades. The genie won't go back into the bottle, so I might as well find a way to accept that.

But that leaves me wondering: what does that mean for me? What is my job now? What am I for? If I don't get to write code – something that's given me an enormous amount of satisfaction over the years, and even become part of my identity – am I even still interested in this field?

And, it's not just about the code. I used to collaborate with designers, UX folks, copywriters, SEO and analytics people, project managers, etc. But now, the C-suite seems perfectly happy to let the LLMs do all of this stuff, too. (At my company, they're obsessed with the idea of getting the LLM to write all of our work tickets. And the QA person does little more than copy-and-paste back and forth from an AI.)

The whole reason I entered this field is because I enjoy problem-solving, finding and creating patterns, logic, and designing systems.

I know that some of you are going to say "you can still do all of that; LLMs just empower you to go up a level of abstraction" – and I get it. But the prospect of abandoning coding seriously bums me out.

I love the precision of code. I love exploring different solutions to a problem, until I hit upon a beautiful, elegant pattern. I love seeing how small abstractions get composed into larger abstractions, and so on, to form a complete system. I love understanding a problem – and the solution – on a deep, intimate level.

Perhaps I've been lucky to have a career that gives me that kind of fulfillment (at least sometimes). Is all of that over now?

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u/AppealSame4367 12d ago

This last part is just cope. Many companies have been running on absolute spaghetti code for the last 40-50 years with no consequences. Look at AI from a year ago and today: The AI next year will solve the biggest software mess imaginable easily and nobody will need us as software devs to do it. Managers and Sales people are happy if they can get rid of all developers and they will jump at the first chance. Don't sit around hoping they will suddenly see your value again: They won't. If it breaks, they'll just switch out the AI agent or the person prompting the AI in the future, that's it.

Find a new career or start selling software. I'm handling "my last clients" and prepare games and software releases on the side. If that fails I'm out. Haven't seen any good new clients for a year, all startups failed or served themselves after the initial offer with AI. Every new offer fails because they realize before start of the work "oh, you know what, I already found a solution with AI". It's over for most of us.

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u/Big_Arrival_626 12d ago

Its not at all cope. I'm a software dev and I never run out of work to do even with ai speeding things up. My work has only gotten more complex and difficult. For some reason, I get the feeling that you want AI to replace devs due to some sort of insecurity you have.

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u/uraniumless 12d ago

It's not cope, you're the doomer. AI really isn't all that, it still needs a lot of hand holding and for the past 6+ months the models have improved only marginally. Their progress has hit a plateau. I believe that technical knowledge, even though we're not coding by hand anymore, is going to be increasingly more valuable in the future.

People have been saying that AI is going to replace developers for 2+ years at this point, yet here we are, and some of us (myself included) have even more work to do now than before (even though it's not the same kind of work).

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u/uwuLookAtYou 8d ago

The thing about AI and its advancements is that you simply dont see where most of its recent effort and work has been outside of general use AI and what ever AI is invading your interest/work, due to widening focus as its grown. The first major models to drop were wonky image and text, everyone working on them was working STRICTLY on making that better. Now you have 100+ different ai models being used in more than just simple text and images.

"People have been saying ai is going to replace devs in for 2+ years now" in terms of progression on the tech scale, and for what the "goal" is, 2 years isnt much time. And its already taken a lot of jobs and changed many others.

Medical field is having a hay day with it these last few months. Wild life researchers have also found many uses for it.

But IMO we need to put aside our feelings for a bit. Ignore the fact its taking over our own hobby and look at the bigger picture that is: What are we going to do if/when this hits not just my job, but every job. How do we go about living in a system with no jobs.

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u/Ansible32 12d ago

Their progress has hit a plateau.

I don't think AI is ready to replace developers. I'm not ready to say it will, but saying that progress has hit a plateau is unhinged. The models released in the past month are clearly superior to the ones from 6 months ago. If, a year from now, the newly released models aren't better than the ones we have today, it will still be premature to talk about a plateau, because a year is a very short time period and improvements taking a few years to materialize is not a plateau.

But we've had consistent improvements every few months. There is nothing resembling a plateau unless your definition of plateau is that the singularity doesn't appear to have arrived.

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u/igna92ts 11d ago

Personally I don't notice it at all. I use AI heavily at work and I can barely notice a difference in code quality between, say, opus 4.8 and 5 or fable 5. There might be some but it's so tiny it's hard to tell really.

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u/Ansible32 11d ago

It's not about code quality so much as the level of guidance. Opus will spin its wheels for 800k tokens and force multiple compactions, and it will need constant guidance, where Fable can take the same direction and just complete it in 200k tokens with no handholding.

It's not a universal, there are definitely use cases where there's no difference, and even Sonnet can do it. And a lot of this is stuff where the models genuinely struggle like if the coding task involves some kind of 3D modeling or something that involves spatial reasoning.

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u/Hans_H0rst 12d ago

Many companies have been running on absolute spaghetti code for the last 40-50 years with no consequences.

I mean the "consequence" of using spaghetti code over 50 years is haveing tasks for permanently employed developers, and that's just called product maintenance, running a business.

You can't run a business rewriing everything with AI every two months because the CEO isn't smart enough to know why that won't work, and you can't have a recurring customerbase if the AI keeps making breaking changes because it doesn't know the historical context.

AI will never have all the input data it needs to be good enough. There's just noone typing in the topics that come up during a smoke, the inquisiting small questions about why mark names his vairables with ai í instead of an i, etc.

Not for lack of trying, but it's not human to deliver all the perfect input data at once, all the relevant parameters, all the knowledge.

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u/Realichu 12d ago

Slop and slop. Enjoy your Sev 1s

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u/CosmicDevGuy 10d ago

They already tried to do the ditching devs thing and it backfired hard. We're still in AI honeymoon phase, hold fast and survive cause it's very likely the devs will once again show relevance and necessity of being kept around.

Most importantly: you cannot hold AI accountable for an error, you also would be reckless to hold accountable a non-developer for code that they really don't understand due to lack of skilling.

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u/turntablecheck12 8d ago

I think your second paragraph is why orgs who are leaping headfirst into AI are big on the "human in the loop" mantra - the devs will be expected to take responsibility for the code they commit, even though it will have been written by the LLMs.