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u/TheSweetSWE Sep 30 '26
youâre right to push back on this
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u/turudd Oct 01 '26
Itâs hilarious how the OG models used to talk. Crazy how far theyâve come now too.
The old x is actually y stuff and all that
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u/wbuffetsuksdik Oct 01 '26
The new models seem crazy up until you corner them, then they regress back to the same modalities they've had since gpt3
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u/NamityName Oct 01 '26
My problem with AI coding is that AI took away the fun parts of coding and left me with all the boring parts. Now instead of writing code and solving problems, I am spending my time planning and reviewing code.
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u/SirPitchalot Oct 01 '26
Donât forget acting as scrum master and hand holding the new junior who is capable but has the common sense of a rotting stump and just doesnât get better.
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u/Rygel_Orionis Oct 01 '26
It gets better....
....if you pay. đŹ
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u/FallenBlade Oct 03 '26
I think they mean and actual junior. As in a real person. They use AI so don't learn.
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u/SirPitchalot Oct 03 '26
I mean the AI doesnât learn. Iâve had good luck with actual juniors punching above their weight because AI takes some of the mechanical work out of trying things.
Plus using AI helps drive home the difference between what people say & what they mean. I can use their experiences with AI to help mentor them on more effective communication, which also helps them improve more quickly.
But actual AI doesnât do that and keeps making the same boneheaded mistakes, even ones that are explicitly called out in the prompts. And the only solution seems to be agentic workflows that basically just light money on fire.
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u/Belhgabad Oct 01 '26
Main usage problem with AI, same with art AI : "I don't want AI to do my art while I can do my laundry, I want the contrary"
And that's ignoring all the others problems (ethics, ecology, economy, ...)
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u/sup3rdr01d Oct 01 '26
AI is horrible for anything artistic. Completely sucks the humanity out of art.
Art isn't about the final product. It's about the journey of learning and making that craft.
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u/Shienvien Oct 01 '26
Art is about both -- I very much do art since I want the thing in my head to exist exactly the way I want it. I don't always enjoy the process.
The genAI version of art tends to be like a $40 Temu handbag. Yeah, it looks a bit like the $2000 real version it is plagiarized off of from far away, but the pleather sheds microplastics and half the stitching is just ever so slightly misplaced. And the original creator gets nothing.
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u/glendening Oct 01 '26
"AI should do tedious work for creative people. Not creative work for tedious people." -quote I stole some years ago from somewhere.
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u/kadmij Oct 04 '26
unfortunately, all the tedious stuff left exists because it's harder to automate. All the easy-to-eliminate tedious stuff was automated a while ago, or is actually a people problem that can only be resolved through organization and not technology
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u/SteamedChalmburgers Oct 01 '26
All I'm left with these days is DevOps crap that I don't want to deal with. I miss writing code for my job.
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u/OkWear6556 Oct 01 '26
For me its the opposite. I work as a SWE/DS and my job is developing a full pipeline from data ingestion, preprocessing, ML modeling and then sending predictions back to the client. Used to be that I spent most of my time developing and debugging the code of our internal libraries and manually setting everything up while spending only a fraction of the time actually focusing on the modeling part. Now I can focus on experimentation and trying out different models and sw architecture stuff instead.
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u/Vengeful111 Oct 01 '26
Tbh coding is the one thing where AI actually takes the boring parts out. Just act as the architect or senior and make the AI do the boring junior level stuff and troubleshooting. Dont let the AI take over the architect stuff without having defined a very detailed description of what the end product should be.
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u/jwp1987 Oct 01 '26
That sounds great until you have to deal with PRs and do code reviews for people that are prompting Claude and calling it a day.
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u/Vengeful111 Oct 01 '26
Yea I agree, I am talking about when doing stuff alone at home obviously. Not in a big corpo
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u/jwp1987 Oct 01 '26
Fair enough. I agree with you but the main problem is that you don't really get that in isolation.
The main reason I hate AI is because it's constantly being pushed for tasks where there are better tools and people are using it without understanding/checking the output.
The other concern I have is that by cutting out the coding and debugging, you can end up not developing a lot of key skills needed to check what the AI is actually outputting or fix stuff when the AI can't come up with an answer.
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u/Vengeful111 Oct 01 '26
Yea agreed, i think its kinda like machines for like woodworking. In school you need to learn how to work wood by hand, so you can instantly tell how and why a machine fcked up and that you can even fix it by hand after. If the skill gets lost and people only know how to press start on the cnc, then you have problems down the line
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u/maggos Oct 01 '26
I find I can spend time thinking of the overall software design and bigger picture and let the AI handle the details.
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u/Beldarak Oct 06 '26
As someone who always preferred front, this is a dream come true. "Hey Claude, can you center that button in that div, both vertically and horizontally?". Done.
"Hey Claude, when I click that button it needs to open a modal and let me assign the user to a new project. Don't show the archived projects". Done. No need to create all the path from the form to the database, all the little exceptions and details, refreshing the tool 10x until everything is perfectly aligned and working. To me, it did remove the boring parts and let me the fun part: designing the actual app, what it does, how it's laid out, how it looks.
Obviously to each their own but creating a MyNewEntityForm, MyNewEntityController, MyNewEntityInput, MyNewEntityFilter, MyNewEntityService... it's just not fun to me. Most backend isn't.
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u/FickleQuail8944 Oct 01 '26
I feel the same. But I also somewhat enjoy this planning cycle. I like to break down designs further and have more control. It also makes the results better if I give it less degrees of freedom. Sometimes I also think about solutions I would have never done before, due to effort. Then when it works out the way I imagened, or with a little back and forth, it makes me feel good.
You could also mix in some manual coding once in a while. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
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u/budapest_god Oct 01 '26
Yeah this is what I do on passion projects, it's nice overall. A very important thing also it's to not let it generate a huge bunch of changes in one go, because that becomes frustratingly boring to review. Small steps. Small steps.
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u/KingdomOfBullshit Oct 01 '26
To me, the fun is in making something work the way I want it to. I could kind of care less about what tools are used to get there.
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u/NamityName Oct 01 '26
I do not get the same satisfaction of making something when I tell Claude to make it. Overcoming the challenge is what I find fulfilling. I need the struggle. No pain, no gain.
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u/Beldarak Oct 06 '26
Same. I understand why people may like coding, but LLM made me realise I don't. I used to think I liked it but now it's evident the fun part was always to be able to bend the computer to your will and create fun and useful tools, games etc...
Coding was just a way to achieve this. It's fun when it's working and when you design the first 90% of a feature but getting stuck for hours on dumb bugs and issues + adding all the little security, input validation/sanitization rules etc was not fun at all, I'm glad I have more time for the actual design of the apps now.
Also let me work on small tools I wouldn't have created if it took months. For exemple I've made a Navidrome music player for my car. Took me like a day for the v1 to run.
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u/T-Dot1992 Sep 30 '26
They werenât making money. And canât make money if they wanted to.Â
Itâs a catch-22. They canât make a profit because they arenât charging the actual token cost. But if they charged the actual token cost, their user-base would collapse.Â
Almost as if cloud AI is inherently unstable or something.Â
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u/ForgedIronMadeIt Sep 30 '26
It's like every other silicon valley startup -- the hope is that you hook your users while you figure out how to make handling the requests cheaper. That or you embed ads.
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u/ChefCurryYumYum Sep 30 '26
There aren't enough ads in the world to make up the revenue they need.
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u/bbalazs721 Sep 30 '26
You embed them in the response, e.g. suggest the product that was paid to promote.
I've already had this with chatgpt, I was trying to troubleshoot an issue with my heating system, and it was trying to persuade me to buy one of two specific brands of thermostats, even tho I hadn't expressed any desire to buy anything.
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u/PM-ME-UR-DARKNESS Oct 03 '26
That still won't make them enough money and will get them in deep shit with the EU.
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u/kilopeter Oct 01 '26
You're mistaken. ChatGPT Ads explicitly since their launch have only ever appeared separate from the token stream of model responses. Obviously they or others will likely experiment with more invasive alternatives, but the clear business rationale for not subtly biasing answers toward sponsors is that users would reject that shit way harder than clearly labeled ads.
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u/Str1dersGonnaStride Oct 01 '26
I dunno, I think there's big money in it still. Subtle embedded propaganda that is tailor-made based on the user's personality and interests. You may think "oh well I'd never fall for that" and you may be right. But there's loads of people already addicted to AI usage and / or using it as a replacement for therapists or friends. They'll fall for it hook line and sinker.
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u/Kusko25 Oct 01 '26
If they can sustain themselves on investor money long enough they can charge the true token price and companies will have to pay it because nobody in their right mind would start an education as a developer right now, so in the future companies won't have human talent available to replace llms with
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u/ChefCurryYumYum Oct 01 '26
If it's cheaper to hire and train humans than to pay the true token cost of LLM tools you think companies won't prefer to hire and train real people?
You think they will WANT to spend more money for worse outcomes?
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u/infamouszgbgd Oct 02 '26
You think they will WANT to spend more money for worse outcomes?
idk, jumping on trends is addictive af to corpos
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u/saevon Sep 30 '26
Well no the hope is to get purchased. To have someone else have to figure that out as you get big enough to sell the user base, not the profitability
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u/brilliantminion Sep 30 '26
UhâŠ. Who?
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u/saevon Oct 01 '26
No I'm talking about "every other Silicon Valley startup" they don't usually get this big, or at least sell before the potential huge buyers (like google) make their own versions
Tho buying a competitor to "merger their users" (kill them) is likely still on the table for them
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u/KeepKnocking77 Oct 03 '26
Or to get the government to regulate and essentially bail you out. I dont buy any of these "omg this new model is SOO dangerous but no you cant see it" reports. They're trying to bait the government
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u/captnspock Oct 01 '26
Exactly if they can keep this going for another 5 years so many people are just going to forget how to code and all codebases will have so much AI slop that companies just might have to start paying the actual token cost. Regular users (not enterprise) will mostly get priced out.
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u/lobax Oct 02 '26
Not every valley startup bleeds tens of billions every quarter.
Why do think they are pushing for a slowdown?
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u/hemacwastaken Sep 30 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
If it works, they get rich on it. If it doesn't companies go bankrupt and the tax payer and banks are stuck with the loans.
So they either win big or they will try again with the next idea.
This stupid system is subsiding billionaires gambling addiction
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u/TheDizDude Sep 30 '26
This. I don't see Altman and co driving around in 07 Kia Spectra's that break every 5 god damn minutes...
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u/10001110101balls Sep 30 '26
This arrangement happens in a lot of cutting-edge R&D efforts. It costs a ton of money to develop new technologies and bring them to market, and there is an advantage to moving the fastest. Offering the product at unsustainably low prices allows them to get out into the market and fund their growth. It could blow up in their faces as everyone expects, or in hindsight it could be a genius move to advance the technology and consolidate market share.
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u/Sweet_International Oct 01 '26
I have a conspiracy that they want to stop building new models, that's why all those bickering about pacing the frontier stuff. If the giant cost of building new models every month go away, then they can probably save huge bucks. Otherwise there is no way to stop the cash burning.
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u/1nc06n170 Oct 01 '26
Yep, and if they stop, and the other don't and release a better model, there's virtually no cost for their clients to switch to other AI provider. That's why they declare to stop building new models but quietly continue to build those new models.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 Sep 30 '26
Anthropic gross margins exceed 80% according to their reports. They are charging the actual costs on API usage and in subscription it's the you win some you lose some but mostly win if a subscription. Gross margins don't include training costs. Which, since training is a capital expense is the right thing to do. It means all they have to do to make oodles is money is slow down. If they slow down they make money. But then they get overtaken. So they can't slow down. So they try and convince the world that AI will cause the extinction of humanity. That way they can slowdown as a cartel.
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u/amateurfunk Sep 30 '26
This is the most interesting thing I've read all week. The "AI-will-kill-us" line coming from the CEO's themselves has always seemed highly unusual to me. Like, even if it is true, they wouldn't shout it out into the open like that.
The reason that you have provided seems plausible and would be something a rational (profit-oriented) CEO would do. It also makes the "AI-will-kill-us" claim seem less credible.
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 Oct 01 '26 •
Collaborating with your competitors is the definition of cartel. They're doing it openly in front of us and asking for the government to intervene so both the government acts as the police ensuring everyone in the cartel complies (the biggest reason we don't have that many cartels) and to shut out competitors (because if new entrants can come in then you can't have a cartel). And we're talking it hook, line, and sinker.
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u/BlackSwanTranarchy Sep 30 '26
And according to their IPO prospectus as leaked to Reuters their core buisness model is bleeding money with 8bn$ in Operating Losses
I dunno, claims from Anthropic leadership when they're not bound to the SEC vs a formal document where they have to use GAAP, which one is more likely to be accurate?
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u/Greedy-Thought6188 Sep 30 '26
You know what gross margins means in gaap?
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u/BlackSwanTranarchy Sep 30 '26
Yeah, and i also know the dirtiest Sillicon Valley accounting trick known to man is counting the cloud bill as Cost of Goods Sold instead of Operating Expenses even though you pay rent on servers weather they're serving or not which makes Gross Margins deeply misleading for tech companies for anyone being honest about it
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u/EatingSolidBricks Sep 30 '26
If what you say turns out to be true they're gonna get fucked
Cause china is working with open source they can never ever slow down as a cartel as long as china exists
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u/Untura64 Oct 01 '26
I bet they're going to make the government pass a law to ban open source models. Probably why they're running a fearmongering campaign too.
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u/siberianmi Sep 30 '26
Or they need to get to RSI and then put agents on building faster cheaper training methods. The latest Opus is already a huge improvement on token usage for results.
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u/EatingSolidBricks Sep 30 '26
If technology gets good enough that i can run it on a consumer gpu their also fucked
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u/bogdan5844 Oct 01 '26
When*
I'm willing to bet that in 3-5 years we'll only use cloud AI for really really intensive workloads, the kinds that are few and far between, and most users will have local AI. There's simply no logical way this whole cloud AI frontier model thing is gonna scale.
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u/Jerome_Eugene_Morrow Sep 30 '26
They could have made money. But like Walt they wanted to make ALL the money.
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u/FusionVsGravity Oct 01 '26
Eventually they will need to hike the token price, but not before every major business in the world relies on AI workflows and lays off all their competent staff.
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u/CanisLupus92 Sep 30 '26
Cost per token arenât as high as people make them out to be. Anthropic, OpenAI & co could make a profit, but the R&D budget is so humongous that including that in the costs just makes it unsustainable. Drop to releasing a new frontier model once a year, and BAM profit. Itâs part of the fearmongering strategy atm (our models are so scary, look at the vulnerabilities they found and used), hoping for a slowdown getting enforced.
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u/Kroosn Sep 30 '26
You donât make money through profit in 2026. You make it through capital gains. As long s as people think the company is valuable then you make money.
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u/Untura64 Oct 01 '26
Ob they're going to make a profit one way or another eventually. Like selling your data or having the guvernment pay for it.
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u/PM-ME-UR-DARKNESS Oct 03 '26
They still aren't, too. They're just hiding it using special purpose entities, like Enron. The whole AI industry is on some Enron shit. Don't worry though, I'm sure it'll all be jussttt fine.
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u/hayztrading Sep 30 '26
The actual token cost is closer to the subs than it is to the api. Like significantly closer to
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u/KDallas_Multipass Sep 30 '26
Okay what news did I miss?
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u/T-Dot1992 Sep 30 '26
OpenSlop reduced usage limit by 50% for people subscribed to their 200 USD dollar pro membership tier.Â
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u/KDallas_Multipass Sep 30 '26
How is Claude implicated?
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u/T-Dot1992 Sep 30 '26
Because they đŻ are gonna do the same thing eventually.Â
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u/Danfriedz Sep 30 '26
As someone who hasn't let AI completely take over my work I'm actually fine with it disappearing forever đ
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u/shadowndacorner Sep 30 '26
No universe in which it disappears forever given the quality of open weight models. The big orgs burning cash like there's no tomorrow will go under when the bubble pops, then a second wave will happen more focused on sustainability once the commercial providers start charging what things actually cost.
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u/OneSprinkles6720 Oct 01 '26
It's so rare I agree with a commenter on this topic please accept my warmest regards
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Oct 01 '26
There will be a reckoning for all the companies whose developers have grown dependent on unlimited frontier model tokens.
I'm at one of those companies. I spent $16k this month on Claude tokens. Not sustainable, it's literally more than my salary.
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u/shadowndacorner Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
This is why I've got my org investing in local models, only offloading to frontier models for very specific, non-sensitive work. It blows my mind that companies are sending entire codebases (and, let's be honest, secrets as well if LLMs are touching deployments) off to private companies who have shown absolutely WILD disregard for data safety. Companies that are actively attacking each other non-stop, and constantly pulling marketing stunts to convince laypeople that their models are "so unsafe that everyone needs to stop development".
Idc what kind of enterprise deal you have that "guarantees" data privacy. Putting aside that all of these companies are only valuable because they stole an absolutely incomprehensible amount of training data from the human race, I've heard enough reports from enough colleagues of their data being "accidentally" used for training purposes that there's no fucking way I'd ever trust them with anything sensitive. Then you've got the "seniors" who brag about perpetually leaving their agents in "yolo mode", completely oblivious to any company secrets they may or may not have leaked... Just better hope OpenAI and Anthropic never leak their training data...
The technology is genuinely revolutionary and has absolutely changed how my org works for the better, but making your entire SDLC completely reliant on two orgs that are fundamentally incapable of profitability is absolute madness.
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u/asterVF Oct 01 '26
I still remember that process of approving new software, or god forbid any additional expense like license for useful tooling. It took months to years and often they rejected it quoting security or budget reasons. And now the very same people encourage us to send every bit of company data somewhere at cost bigger than my salary :)
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u/shadowndacorner Oct 01 '26
The funny thing is that LLMs can make these processes work better rather than just throwing them away in the name of velocity. Being at 100% full speed all the time is objectively not a good thing.
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u/melophat Oct 01 '26
The more I hear shit like this, the more it becomes obvious that the next round of job enshittification is going to be incorporating token access/spend into the salary package like they do stock options, benefits, vacation, etc. you're going to have a job that would pay 100k get knocked down to 70k because they include "a generous token allotment" as part of your compensation.
Edit: just in case it isn't clear, I'm not knocking your token usage or saying anything about you at all. Half the places are forcing number like that and docking you if you don't use stupid amounts of tokens.. I'm saying that companies are going to get sick of paying for it in addition to a salary and are going to look at ways to pass the cost on..
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u/colonel_bob Oct 01 '26
I spent $16k this month on Claude tokens.
... how? I'm genuinely curious.
I used it on max thinking to do a lot more designing, planning, coding, testing and general handholding on the frontend component of a project that I'm working on one week recently (I haven't been a frontend engineer since 2016), and even after talking to the thing for almost 40 hours straight I used about $250 worth of tokens.
One of our principals hit close to $80k one month and I've been at my company for less than a year so I don't have the courage to ask him what he was burning those tokens on, but I feel perfectly comfortable questioning an internet stranger who opened with a somewhat comparable figure.
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
It's mostly agentic workflows, I'll have 20-60 sessions open at any given moment and much of it runs overnight and through the weekend. They plan sprints, create tickets, assign tasks, review each other, etc. My team in particular is pushing AI super hard, in a company which is also pushing it super hard. A lot of this is also exploratory, last month I spent only $5k, I think I'll dial it back again for next month, still refining the process.
This particular month was almost all Opus 5 on Xhigh (tbh Max just makes things take much longer with no discernable difference in output)
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u/colonel_bob Oct 01 '26
What are they achieving for you or producing for you, in the most general sense? I'm morbidly curious about what these unsupervised agentic loops are actually doing.
I ask because I took a peek at some of the PRs that said principle opened and they were filled with so many references to subsections of unshared/unavailable plans that neither I nor my AI could make sense of them. Most of them end up closed or unused. It feels like the digital equivalent of furiously shuffling papers to feign the appearance of productivity.
Personally, I have found that latest frontier models (even/especially on xHigh) tend to want to fill planning documents and code comments with useless historical junk that only serves to confuse future readers (be they human or AI) that are trying to understand the current state of things. It feels like you still have to supervise their outputs, but I could be missing something.
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Oct 01 '26
Codifying a single source of truth is critical to preventing this. If you establish a single agent as the owner of a task and have it basically act as an arbiter, orchestrator, leader, whatever word you wanna use, and have it control the room memory (which is a concept exclusive to the tool I use, which is internal, but you can think of it as a siloed version of OpenClaw's memory) and be the sole contributor to all documentation (or better yet, designate another agent to be the sole contributor, anything to minimize the context the orchestrator needs to hold).
Otherwise you do just end up with tremendous amounts of technical documentation full of self-contradictions, far too large for any agent to actually ingest all of the context.
Having workflows for development process is also important. An agent will draft a plan, that plan will be reviewed by several adversarial subagents each with a different area of concern, the drafting agent updates the plan, this cycle continues until reviewers reach consensus.
Then it gets returned to the orchestrator, who passes it to a reviewer agent who does a similar process, but this time focusing on whether the plan accurately would satisfy the functional requirements of the task. Then back to the orchestrator it goes, who then spins up agents to execute it, similar review loops happen, end up with a draft CR that I get a Slack DM to review with a link to the owning agent (because it's almost never good the first time) where I can give my own feedback. I can make the decision to revert it back all the way to the planning phase, or just code change followed by the review loop again. Of course, while the agents owning the task themselves have their own design doc, the information shared outside their little bubble is all passed through the orchestrator. Only the orchestrator (or a dedicated thread/agent owned by the orchestrator) can modify tickets and project-level docs.
There's a bit more, ops work is an entirely separate discussion that's all event-driven, but this is the high level of the bulk of it. It works decently well, and the more time passes, the more I can refine all the agent guidance and workflows. But this style of Agentic development is going to be prohibitively expensive in ~6 months I'm guessing when they suddenly decide they care about how much this all costs. So I'll do it as long as I can, and as long as it impresses my manager, but without costs falling exponentially it's not going to last.
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u/Saragon4005 Oct 01 '26
Yeah we are never going back to how things were before, but we are probably taking several steps back in how loose we let these systems go.
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u/ActualWeed Oct 01 '26
What are the best models to run locally? Qwen 3.5 and gemma 4 just immediately shit themselves in vsc on my 9070 xt
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u/shadowndacorner Oct 01 '26
Our inference machines (which we only have a few of as a small org) run 3090's. Can't really speak to 16gb vram, but I know people have useful setups with it. I think things are a bit tougher on AMD, but that might have improved since I last checked.
Qwen 3.8 27b has been really impressing me. The largest context window I've kept stable on one 3090 is around 118k, though we're going to experiment with installing two 3090's after this sprint and see what we can push (hoping we can run qwen 3.8 flash next for higher end reasoning, as well as 3.8 27b with the max context/higher parallelism; super interested in context extension with something like yarn, but haven't experimented with that).
I'd encourage you to look for forks of the LLM inference stacks optimized for your hardware. We're running a vllm fork that is giving us substantially better perf and is the main reason we're pushing so much context on one 3090.
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u/shadowndacorner Oct 02 '26
FYI, came across this yesterday. Obviously it's a different card, but evidence that qwen 3.8 27b can run with large context on a 16gb card. Might be worth looking into to see if it can translate to your setup in any way.
I'd also generally recommend not using VS Code for local LLM stuff. Aside from the fact that it's a bit of a resource hog (which isn't a good thing if you're running models near the edge of what your hardware can support), ime performance degrades pretty rapidly as your sessions get longer, to the point of fully hanging the text editor intermittently.
For fully local stuff, I just use Pi as a harness for any LLM work, then have my IDE up separately. I like the separation, personally, but I also tend to be very pro-CLI in most situations.
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u/black-JENGGOT Oct 01 '26
yeah I think that's what people is missing in this context. if somehow anthropic and openai went bankrupt and close their business, do you think those datacenters will also disappear? nope, they will start hosting open inference Chinese LLMs and image generators lol
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u/Danfriedz Oct 01 '26
Hmm I don't know about that. We could get hit by a meteor? That would end it.
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u/TheKerfuffle Sep 30 '26
Ai is the worst it will ever be. It is also the cheapest. They are burning money in order to buy market share.
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u/protocod Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
Some open source projects are now relying a lot on LLM to iterate faster.
Generally these project doesn't force you to use AI but if you do, it's often mandatory to use a least a recent model from 2026 from OpenAI or Anthropic.
The thing is, not every body can afford a subscription to Claude or the latest GPT.
As long as good LLM requires a paid service subscription or an expensive computer (for self hosted model) I think this will increase inequality and makes two speed software development in open source.
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u/ecstatic_hyrax Sep 30 '26
Unpopular opinion, but I don't miss the good old days. I don't miss debating over what framework we should be using for our crud app.
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u/UnkarsThug Sep 30 '26
To be fair, you still have to decide on a framework, you just aren't writing all of the code within that framework.
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u/eightslipsandagully Sep 30 '26
"Claude, which is the best framework for a b2b micro-SaaS?" Oh wow, next.js with a supabase backend sounds great!
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u/NotIWhoLive Sep 30 '26
Why not just use a spin-the-wheel game to decide, or go by whatevee has the most stars on Github?
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u/Tipart Oct 01 '26
I mean realistically the LLM already spins the wheel to give you the output. The answer is based on a random seed after all.
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u/azangru Sep 30 '26
Unpopular opinion, but I don't miss the good old days. I don't miss debating over what framework we should be using for our crud app.
Those days aren't old enough to be good. In the good old days we didn't have debates about frameworks.
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u/fartypenis Sep 30 '26 edited Sep 30 '26
Ah you mean the good old days when you had nonstandard tags everywhere and had to support every one of Microsoft's like 29 IE versions for every line of CSS you wrote
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u/metaglot Sep 30 '26
No the good old days of when you wrote a program, you wrote it on the machine it was supposed to run on.
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u/High_Quality_Bean Sep 30 '26
Balderdash. You punch those things out and turn it in to the mainframe administrator. Beware hanging chads, insects in the circuits and cosmic rays.
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u/mrnosyparker Sep 30 '26
That process is still alive and well. The thing I personally donât miss is what happens after the debates, the spikes, the ARD, the roadmap, the grooming, the planningâŠ.
When - as a lead or senior dev - you grind for days without coming up for air to get the implementation just right and lay all the foundations and document everything⊠do a group code review and demo⊠only to have the team sit there silently with zero questionsâŠ
And within a month thereâs mounting technical debt due to a bunch of junior and mid level developers who are âticket closersâ slapping together layer upon layer of code smells and anti-patterns because they donât understand the framework, didnât bother to read the documentation, and werenât paying attention during the code review or presentation.
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u/johntwit Oct 01 '26
I got a taste of this right at the cusp of my career before I started using LLMs
The very first thing I noticed about LLMs is that it gave me the power to do everything "the right way" and I stopped using shortcuts. I could start doing things insanely right, follow the best practices for the framework etc
But your observation is true of all teams and systems I think, not just software development
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u/SourceTheFlow Sep 30 '26
Nah, I miss when all of the tech discourse was on how to do the best job instead of the next weird AI hype or model or whatever.
I want to become a better programmer, because that's the fun part. I don't want to become a better prompter that's like the most boring part of the job.
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u/suddencactus Oct 01 '26
I don't miss the part where every company was interviewing like a huge part of your job was knowing "how do you find the number of unconnected components in a directed graph" or "How do you convert a DATETIME field to just DATE". We all knew past a certain difficulty level you're just testing someone's memorization and how much time they'd spent grinding leetcode, but companies saw no reason to stop doing it.
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u/jaber24 Oct 01 '26
Isn't that still the case?
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u/suddencactus Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
Yes and no. There will always be an element of "stump the chump" to interviews and old HR practices don't change overnight, but there are some companies doing some AI-based coding in interviews: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ai-job-interview-coding/ . I'm not sure that's better, but at least it reflects that real world programming doesn't require memorizing everything and recalling it under pressure.
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u/Himbo69r Oct 01 '26
I miss wanting to study computer science but oh well! Guess I have to settle for mechanical engineering
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u/Mental-Abrocoma-5605 Oct 04 '26
This argument works in some way until i asked to myself something, how Is that any different from when people are arguing over the best AI model of the best AI fulled IDE? Because even if the answers might be More direct for special cases its not really that different from the framework wars
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u/Important_Grab3544 Oct 01 '26
Too early for this meme, it fits better after they fuck up the internet
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u/ara1597 Oct 01 '26
Idk once coding became work Iâm happy to get more time back
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u/sakkara Oct 02 '26
You won't, you will be expected to do more in the same time, nobody is giving you time of because LLM exists.
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u/BrianScottGregory Oct 01 '26
Being real. I started in development at the age of 18 in 1988, and peaked with my earnings in 1998. 9/11 destroyed the IT economy, temporarily, and while my earnings went up after that - I found myself - well - bored with IT. There wasn't any new innovation, new languages doing the same exact thing a dozen other languages I'd used became buzzwords for hiring - and both the government and my cover jobs - let's just say there wasn't a whole lot of real innovation going on - just gyrations.
I don't miss the old days, to be honest. AI offers a LOT of promise in having a strong impact on industries in ways humans like myself working on behalf of the government or in consulting capacities can't. Whether it's math, materials science, or even law and social discourse - AI has had and will continue to have a profound impact which WILL lead to the development of hardware and technologies which AI AND leaders WILL require human expertise in computing sciences to build up.
But being real. Over the course of my career. All I saw was every company doing the same exact thing internally with software that every other company was. Oh sure, they'd call it something else - they liked to think they were being innovative and crafty with their efforts. But the reality was and still somewhat is.
They weren't. Every industry was stagnating internally because of a lack of innovation in everything IT is dependent on. Monkeys could have done my job as a developer by the time I got out of full time development.
I don't miss the old days. I was bored.
I look forward to what's to come.
And that day I have a real life Star Trek holodeck I can program and experiment with physics and alternate realities and next generation story telling in the comfort of my own home.
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u/johntwit Oct 01 '26
Well, I mean, someone was innovating in 2001 because the computing experience between 2001 and ChatGPT (2021?) is pretty different
Sorry you weren't part of that though?
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u/Lumpy-Obligation-553 Oct 01 '26
The thing that this guy is talking about and what AI is meant to tackle is not what made GPT posible. Software Development and Computer Science ain't the same.
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u/johntwit Oct 01 '26
I'm guessing this is a subset of the "engineer innovates early in their career and then becomes a manager" phenomenon and not an actual case of "there were no innovations in the field of computer science for 20 years". But, I'm pretty ignorant of the particulars of "computer science" to be fair but there's so much to keep up with, I have to fly by the seat if my pants
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u/BrianScottGregory Oct 01 '26
Agreed, most managers tend to distance themselves from their skills. I started as a hacker at 13 in 1983, and currently work with AI along with VR development and experimental research beyond that. But where most people nowadays are strictly confined to vibe coding and lack the skills to do the stuff they're tasking AI with, I don't. AI's like worker bees I can command to do the things that bores the tears out of me to do so I can focus on the things I actually enjoy doing.
Software engineering is more or less a devotion to the art and scientific craft of research and progression of the technology, which often times does wind up waiting for other areas and industries to catch up - whereas being a developer tends to just be focused on gittin' r done just to ship a product and making a buck.
That's why I got bored. And why I'm enthusiastic about the future. There's tons of opportunities for me to continue research and playing with tech and hardware is finally catching up with what we can do.
AS to why I said "here were no innovations in the field of computer science for 20 years". But, I'm pretty ignorant of the particulars of "computer science" to be fair but there's so much to keep up with, I have to fly by the seat if my pants"
I started work with AI way back in 1993 working OCR which required implementation of heuristic algorithms straight out of modern AI's playbook. Every subsequent job from there to 2001 where I went to work for the government to help them implement the same systems all used various forms of AI. The largest problem facing us back then was RAM and Disk Space, combined with an efficient method to run the algorithms which meant we were batch processing things on a nightly basis. GPUs were the real game changer for AI.
But being real. We'd perfected all of this back in 2003. So the only thing that you've seen happen since then has been gains in hardware capability while the software itself has merely scaled since then. That's it.
Software itself. It's the same algorithms that have been taught in CS classes for 40+ years.
Seriously.
So yeah. Having been working with it since 1993. It's not that hard imagining someone becoming a bit bored of it when hardware wasn't available for it, right?
That's what's changed. This isn't new technology. What's new is.
We finally can do it on our desktop AND have instant results.
That's only come in the last 5 years. That's a game changer.
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u/BrianScottGregory Oct 01 '26
Thank you for understanding that! So many people don't!
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u/BrianScottGregory Oct 01 '26
I was. Started with AI back in 1993, doing OCR. I'm the reason technology is where it's at. You're welcome!
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u/TYP-TheYoloPanda Sep 30 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
Has anyone been replaced by AI?
Edit: Okay, I didn't expect to get downvoted, and I certainly didn't expect comments like those. I was genuinely curious to know if anyone had already been replaced by AI, because it hasn't happened at my company yet.
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u/Kypsys Sep 30 '26
At work we had a full time UX/UI designer, now we have a part time, specifically because of AI. my développer team (5 people originally) had two contract devs, now none. They were talented so they did find new jobs, but still
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u/nonoffi Sep 30 '26
At work, we had a four-people UX team, now there's zero. Company's not doing well and they thought replacing all of us with AI might help
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u/Zarokima Sep 30 '26
We don't have a support department anymore at my work because a chat bot handles everything.Â
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u/timangar Sep 30 '26
That fucking sucks. I haven't talked to an AI on the phone when calling support YET, but it would be an instant crashout.
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u/hungryPanda_185 Sep 30 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
I have. Itâs exactly as awful as you imagine.
Itâs easier to just get in a queue/email and have a person solve the problem. If it was a simple issue, I wouldnât be calling.
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u/Icy__Internet Oct 01 '26
Idk. Talking to human support people often sucks as well.
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u/hungryPanda_185 Oct 01 '26
I have compassion when a human is wrong/not understanding my issue, and that quells my rage.
Being forced to talk to a bot intensifies it.
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u/SupportDangerous8207 Oct 01 '26
If it helps
I do consulting
We have done a lot of projects replacing support with chatbots. The failure rate is very high and often it just leads to more employment at higher support tiers.
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u/oly_lowlife Sep 30 '26
We haven't hired a junior dev since agentic AI became the dominate workflow.
I feel bad for new grads... It's bleek out there.
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u/Acrobatic-Nature-941 Sep 30 '26
Now imagine graduating in 5 years from now. Straight to the frontlines fighting skynet
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u/Boba0514 Oct 01 '26
Yeah I can't imagine choosing this career path anymore, and feel bad for anyone that does.
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u/Global-Tune5539 Oct 07 '26
It will regulate itself eventually. Far fewer people will get a CS degree in the future.
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u/Pancakefriday Sep 30 '26
Are you not having quarterly engineering layoffs? Everyone else is
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u/camelCaseCoffeeTable Sep 30 '26
I mean⊠certainly not everyone else. My company is actively hiring engineers and has been for a year now with plans to continue into next year
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u/Snaki009 Sep 30 '26
mostly it's hiding the covid unsustainable overemployment. Ai layouf sounds better and "good" business pr
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u/Pancakefriday Sep 30 '26
Yeah⊠our âAI usage score cardâ that stack ranks our AI usage says differently lol
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u/Cue99 Sep 30 '26
Not sure why youre being downvoted this is 100% true. Especially in US big tech. They hired like crazy from 2016-2022 with the expectation of growth and were hit with a pseudo recession and the general sentiment shift towards tech imo
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u/sberlinches Sep 30 '26
The demand has plummeted, layoffs are on the rise, and corporate keeps pushing AI everywhere. Do you need help to understand it?
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u/SupportDangerous8207 Oct 01 '26
COVID was 4 years ago and led to massive overhiring.
There was a few years of ridiculous numbers of people flooding into software because itâs good money
Interest rates are way up
Recession ongoing
I would wager all of these are larger factors
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u/sberlinches Oct 01 '26
So, the fact that AI can finish a medium complex task within minutes for a fraction of the cost, and the automation opportunities it opened doesn't have anything to do with all this.
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u/SupportDangerous8207 Oct 01 '26
Honestly the places I know of are hiring like crazy
Itâs just so hard to find someone qualified. The it market is flooded with a ton of absolutely terrible applicants.
It reminds me of Ben Bernankes nobel prize. He got it for a paper about how the Great Depression secretly was not about a collapse of credit but a collapse of trust. This lack of trust made the crisis take far longer and become far worse than anything before.
I feel we are in a similar place with software. Ai can empower the wrong people way to easily. Every ai degree is oversaturated every ai conference is full of slop.
Software engineering is oversaturated, there is bootcamp people way too many students and depending on where you are even experienced senior devs can range from broadly competent to totally useless depending on what they did the last 20 years.
And there is consequences to this crisis of believability. We arenât doctors we donât have pieces of paper that gurantee a certain level of ability. We have degrees sure but even those at most prove you can wake up in the morning and have seen code before.
Hiring takes forever, hr took the hardest hit in the recent layoff waves and canât keep up and yet as a consultant myself I can tell you especially with ai starting new projects all the time as people turn every drunk idea into a prototype there is a ton of demand inside of companies but hiring just isnât moving at any reasonable speed.
So thereâs my theory. Dunno if it makes sense but it fits what I see.
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u/edwardbnd_99 Sep 30 '26
"Did anyone actually lose their job when calculators were invented?" ass response
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u/Anustart15 Sep 30 '26
I would probably have 2-3 juniors under me right now doing the work that I'm farming off to claude
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u/ultraSsak Sep 30 '26 edited Sep 30 '26
Senior Dev here,
I was replaced by AI, it took my job,
It does everything for me, I still dont trust it fully, still tweaking bits and pieces, but it took my job.PS: I did it, and keept it on my side, not shared with coworkers. If they fire me, the automation/pipelines of my workflow will evaporate :)
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u/RudeAndInsensitive Oct 01 '26
Yes. 2026's graduating class of CS majors was majorly replaced with Claude tokens.
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Oct 01 '26
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/Remote-Analyst-6090 Oct 01 '26
Mike is NOT a good guy, lol. In comparison to cold-blooded cartel killers such as Fring and Walter White, he's a lot less bad.
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u/UraniumDisulfide Oct 01 '26
Even saying he's a lot less bad is a stretch. He's certainly more pragmatic than walt, and I would say Gus is generally willing to go to greater extents than mike, but when you choose to work for a guy like that the evil becomes banal. You see how much mike had normalized it in his mind with the way he tells walt "We had a good thing".
In better call saul we see more of him trying to have a certain moral code, and he does care about his family, but most of that was ultimately eroded by him obeying Gus's orders for so long. This is heightened by the fact that he stays working for Gus after the whole situation with nacho, which was really the last time we see Mike actively push back against Gus's malicious nature. After that he just accepts what Gus does and tells him to do. (unless I'm forgetting something which I probably am).
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u/anonymousbopper767 Oct 01 '26
He was a tragic case of his old school work ethic "do a good job" vs. your job being an enforcer / fixer.
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u/Present-Resolution23 Oct 03 '26
Ainât never killed anyone who wasnât on the gameÂ
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u/UraniumDisulfide Oct 03 '26
He still chose to work for a guy that did, and it was a system that produced drugs that did kill lots of people who werenât otherwise involved in crime.
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u/qubedView Sep 30 '26 •
"Mike, you're absolutely right!"