Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
This is how I feel too. I’m in several work chats where everyone seems to be pretending that Claude doesn’t have its arm shoved up their ass, wielding them like a puppet.
Several of the projects I am working with are just AI generated. In fact, if I need to suggest any fixes, they will be denied unless it’s AI generated.
I’m tired. I’m depressed. I used to take so much pride in solving problems, but all of that is gone now.
I’m going to try to ride it out and see where it takes me, but the work is mind numbingly boring and the trades look better and better every day.
Keep holding on. LLMs are still in the operate-at-a-loss-to-control-the-market stage. Once they start charging the real cost, human software engineers will be more in demand. That and refocus. All of human history is careers reinventing themselves as new tools become available.
There are already industries balking at having to pay for the chatbot tokens even while the chatbot companies are still hemorrhaging money. It will quickly become non-viable for almost every industry.
The only ones that should continue to worry are the entertainment industry. If companies can get the copyright laws changed to be able to own chatbot content, they will go hard into making it impossible for actual people to make money in the arts.
Then again you have industrialism and the slave labor that took a century of labor unionizing to cut down to a modest 8 hours excluding bathroom breaks and weekends and then you got robber barons and magnates and political meddling and bribery and HEYYYY
In my experience that’s only been the case for functionally non-unique software.
At my job we write software that’s effectively unique. There isn’t a pattern to fall back on.
It makes a lot more mistakes very frequently, since the nature of it keeps trying to guide it to the known path. It’s great for debugging since the manner that some check failed is chasing through known logic, and it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t see the existing code as probable or fitting a known pattern if the shape of a switch statement is still the same.In my personal projects I’ve even run into issues getting it to do stuff like vulkan synchronization barriers in a way that doesn’t continuously devolve into what you see in tutorials, with an ultimately unstructured pile of adhoc resource allocation and barriers.
Same, I don’t find “vibe-coding” very useful. It just produces slop. With enough back and forth with an LLM I can usually get something that “works,” but works poorly. I don’t have the motivation to read the slop it produces, so I don’t know if it’s doing things correctly or not (when I do investigate, it often is not). I often feel like the time I spent prompting the LLM in English would’ve been better spent “prompting” the compiler or interpreter in a language designed for software development.
I’m finishing my thesis in software engineering and at this point it’s hard to justify it. 6 years of my life pretty much wasted. At least I don’t have any debt
My friend, that amount of education, your diligence, fortitude, intelligence, and determination to see it through was NOT wasted. You learned how to think, reason, analyze, perform. Those are invaluable skills that will forever set you apart from anyone who didn’t follow that path.
You will always find gainful employment, because your studies shows that you are a force to be reckoned with, and a serious person.
In fact I think that you may be precisely on time to make the best use of your studies that you could ever imagine.
You’ll be fine, kid.
LLMs are an algorithm. There will be times it should be used and times it shouldn’t be used because it’s to inefficient and/or to expensive. Then there’s the whole field of decidability… lots of halting problems that have no solution. Who will decide when to make the call that enough tokens have been used and should stop the agent because there’s probably no solution?
Who will decide when to use LLM (and which model) and when it makes more sense use another algorithm instead?
Deciding which algorithms to use sounds an awful lot like the job of a software engineer.
here i am in the game industry watching practically the entire industry move overseas. I’ve given up.
Tokens are still insanely underpriced, especially on these bigger models/projects.
Look at what you can do locally with a couple of 5090’s. That’s probably what’s reasonable at the moment.
They’re currently sending through tokens in batches to clusters running balls to the walls but the cost is WAY higher than the $20 a mon you can get for Claude or midjourney.
We may find a happy medium after a pretty sharp collapse where AI assist development is somewhere in between you writing your own loops and you just rubber-stamping something else’s code.
I am for some reason reminded of glass making by this. If you wanted glassware a long time ago it came from people that made it by hand, the glass blowers. Industrial methods were invented and made a big chunk of industry obsolete. But years and years later some people still want to know how to hand blow glass, learn how, then market it to people who want hand made stuff. It is pretty niche, but does still exist, and the factory made stuff does not compare.
All considered, this is so fucking bleak hahahahaha
My uncle is a glass blower artist, it’s crazy how much he gets for even small pieces and he just sells his stuff on Instagram. He mostly does art but also makes some sick bongs, if weed ever becomes legal federally I’m buying a bong from him.
Well, just today I had 3 meetings with different AWS techs about why a policy wasn’t working or why users couldnt use certain services. Turns out all of them used AI to generate the aws policy they tried to use and the policies were wrong. The techs were rookies and lacked the understanding needed to correct the code. I was able to fix each and rewrite policies by hand.
Now when I and the rest of my greybeard generation start to retire, the rookies coming in will not have the exposure to code, policies, etc that we had. The knowledge gained from trial and error will disappear with the retirees. That’s when the crisis will really begin. When we in the know will not be around to correct the rookie mistakes.
…The knowledge gained from trial and error will disappear with the retirees. That’s when the crisis will really begin. When we in the know will not be around to correct the rookie mistakes…
My good man, that is when you offer your services at extortionate consultant’s rates to fix the problem, and make crazy bank a few days a month.
Yeah as much as I hate llms, I know they can be useful for programmers that know what they’re doing. But that’s the key. New programmers still need to learn and do their time actually writing code so that when the machine does something wrong they can spot it and fix it, even if its a rare occurrence. That also means senior devs need to keep their skills sharp too
Theoretically since op can work more effecientky now, they should be able to work less (fewer hourd) for the same amount of money and output. That’s what they always promise with new technological advancements. It never seems to actually happen though. Instead it usually means more on the to-do list since you can do things faster or fewer people on payroll bc you can do the work of multiple people
I feel like I see one of these posts every three months or so, and it’s just beginning to feel like meaningless doomposting, like the boy who cried LLM.
I don’t care how carefully the code gets reviewed, you don’t know it as well as if you had actually written it, and that will make all the difference three months from now when someone discovers a bug in your code (there’s always a bug in the code), or when the customer comes out of left field with a feature request that you didn’t forsee and isn’t easy to just add in (the customer always wants what you haven’t accounted for).
Don’t give up hope. Don’t let the clankers win. Continue to hone your craft. We will need senior devs more than ever after the AI bubble pops.
I just don’t understand why any programmer would let go of the fun stuff. The problem solving, the language learning… It’s all just sad. I’ll never use LLM to code simply because I enjoy coding.
Most of us haven’t let go of it; for our own projects, we still write them. But businesses will increasingly no longer settle for paying us for 6 months to release a project or a couple of years for a platform.
Someone will come right up and spend 10k crapping something marginally not horrible out and coax it into the company’s vision over a couple of weeks.
For me the fun stuff was never the act of coding, it was more about coming up with an elegant solution for the problem at hand. The LLM let’s me focus on that and takes care of the boring part of implementing my design.
My company is in the process of buying a vendors “autonomous software factory”.
It’s over… doesn’t even matter if it produces pure slop, the business and sales team wants engineering to move faster.
The problem with all of this is that nobody understands how the code actually works anymore. Yeah the focus has shifted more toward design which may not be a bad thing but the underlying functionality is just totally not understood.
My lukewarm take on this is that it’s like assembly. Virtually no one writes it manually anymore, as we’ve kept moving on to higher and higher level languages. LLM programming will end up being its own kind of programming.
That’s really not a bad analogy. I may steal that.
imagine how it will be after couple of generations. Though at that point being able to code might become very useful again, at least since you could write novel solutions instead of canned logic the llm are limited to.
Tbh I legitimately do not buy this. I use the best models, top of the line harness and the code still sucks it sucks less granted, but it’s still just not good lol.
If I’m ever in the situation that “typing the code” was a bottle neck instead of figuring out what to type then I know I’ve fucked up somewhere.
Here is a new mission for all the Post-LLM-Depression existential crises developers:
Community Computing.
Use your skills to build a network with big tech alternatives for your community! Federate your network with other likeminded people’s networks. Restart the internet with real people without bots, ai agents, or advertisers.
Don’t quit your passion! Use it as fuel to motivate yourself and help others move away from big tech!
The hard part is getting paid to do it.
That’s a volunteering organisation, no?
It looks like a non profit structure with membership dues
Maybe you aren’t talking about this but I think we software folks have to get used to the idea that the big huge paycheques are not coming back our way.
You don’t get paid that kind of money in this economy unless someone is getting screwed over.
Man I love this comment so much. I’ve dreamed about doing this kind of thing
dev here, you are correct that LLM can do a lot of things and it sure looks like we arent needed anymore. But their codes do contain errors if not inspected carefully. That is the number 1 thing I am afraid: AI hallucinations. And that imo is a conscience thing: your team can audit the codes carefully even with LLM doing 90% of the stuff, or you just half-assedly audit or worse, ignore the audit…
This comes from the experience we had before LLM. New devs coming up won’t have the same experience and will rely on LLM for everything.
It works for now and corpos are betting on LLMs becoming good enough to get over that void of knowledge.
And like many, I don’t want to become a babysitter for a LLM. So I am rethinking my career this year because it will get a lot worst.
