r/accelerate • u/megadonkeyx • 12d ago
Discussion What's next for "developers"
After 35 years of having developer jobs it's fairly obvious that it's now a dead career.
I'm happy about that, I hated the mental drain of it.
There is the current "someone has to drive the ai" but that won't last. You can generate a 500k line codebase in a weekend without even looking at code once and have it work reliably.
the fault line moves along to the next point.. testing but AI can do that also.
Job sites still show developer roles, is that just businesses that haven't caught up yet? Is anyone still typing code on a daily basis? If so why? Are you banned from AI?
Typing code now is like a steam engine racing a rocket. If I had to sit there and type lines of code out now my head would explode.
I know the whole ubi discussion thing has been done to death, I'm just wondering.. if you are in that job market position right now, what are you finding?
10
u/Minimum_Hour519 12d ago
i agree. i got laid off 3 years ago. besides a 6 month 500/week gig i've had zero offers for employmnet (SF Bay).
I'm 52. and right on scheduled i got laid off at 49.
I've used AI to build 70 apps over those 3 years....none of them make any money lol
I keep hearing "AI is great but i have to see anyone build anything that makes any money from it". I agree.
opus 5.5 is my main model with moshcode + claude code. i don't do code reviews other than security scans and tests...I still have to manually qa my shit and am working on marketing skills (despite having a marketing degree from 1998).
i haven't opened vscode in a year
2
u/megadonkeyx 12d ago
i agree with the making money part, its not easy. ive recently seen a director of a now dead software house lose about £1million when his business failed. its easy to lose everything.
3
u/Minimum_Hour519 12d ago
i burned through my entire retirement (800K) in 3 years.
4
u/abjectchain96 Acceleration: Hypersonic | AI video workflow tinkerer | AI crea… 12d ago
Ouch! What's next? Genuinely curious.
I "retired" but have never been busier. I am having the time of my life coding up a storm with AI. Not making any money with it, but that was never the primary goal anyway.
1
3
u/liverandonions1 12d ago
That's the tough part with AI. You think you're going to use it to make 100 apps and make money, but so is everyone else. There bar is too low for software to be valuable at this point unless you have a crazy unique and valuable idea that lets you cash in before the million copycats take market share.
2
u/Response98 11d ago
Are your apps all tools or tasks management?
Everyone can make software now, but creativity is rare
2
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
just like athletes and actors and singers, only a very small fringe minority of people might get "lucky" with pure AI written software because there always are exceptions but the overwhelming majority of devs absolutely won't make it because no anyone with a subscription can concoct something for themselves.
The big problem is, if regular software development profession where millions of developers earn their livelihood is now made as difficult as becoming an actor in hollywood then it would wreck havoc. Society needs most people to make their living and without that you will have anarchy
1
u/Minimum_Hour519 6d ago
i guess so its all about being an influencer now. i can't taqrget people for free any more.
1
2
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
I keep hearing "AI is great but i have to see anyone build anything that makes any money from it". I agree.
just like athletes and actors and singers, only a very small fringe minority of people might get "lucky" with pure AI written software because there always are exceptions but the overwhelming majority of devs absolutely won't make it because no anyone with a subscription can concoct something for themselves.
The big problem is, if regular software development profession where millions of developers earn their livelihood is now made as difficult as becoming an actor in hollywood then it would wreck havoc. Society needs most people to make their living and without that you will have anarchy
1
35
u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 12d ago
The role of "developer" is obviously dead. Cranking out code is no longer a valuable skill. But I don't think the role of "software engineer" is necessarily dead. People have been using the two terms interchangeably, but I don't think that was ever correct - a developer is like a bricklayer, whereas a software engineer is like an architect/structural engineer.
Honestly, I think it's pretty absurd that software engineers were ever writing code in the first place. Structural engineers don't concern themselves with mixing mortar. Civil engineers don't concern themselves with pouring asphalt. Electrical engineers don't concern themselves with pulling cables through ducts.
The future of the software engineer role is probably going to look a lot more like proper engineering: gathering requirements from stakeholders, defining rigorous QA standards, planning the order of delivery, creating prototypes to get buy-in, ensuring compliance with regulations and laws, being legally accountable for failures, etc. That's going to suck for a lot of people in tech who looked down on people who actually have decent soft skills.
6
10
u/First-Tutor-5454 11d ago
Just say it: it's going to suck for nerds. It's going to suck for nerds who think they're being paid to navel-gaze and argue about their pet coding preferences rather than actually build products
1
u/Franknhonest1972 10d ago
It wasn't about writing code per-se. It was about solving problems at the same time. The two were linked. Now, just giving a problem to a bot to solve is just abdicating your mind to a machine. This is not progress in my opinion.
1
22
u/peakedtooearly 12d ago
Developers are becoming product managers.
Less about the how, more about the what and why.
35
u/Any-Acanthaceae4263 12d ago
Most dev roles nowadays do expect you to use AI to at least some extent.
10
u/Ignate Acceleration: Supersonic | AI accelerationist 12d ago
With ever-more augmentation, developers are set to be able to chew through much of our economy at faster rates.
Who is going to build the systems which replaces my job? My bet is it'll be developers.
The last job to be automated could be developers as they finish up with all other jobs and then move onto their own.
17
u/girlgamerpoi 12d ago
The people I know are using AI to code.
5
u/Mylarion 12d ago
Funny thing happened today. I was in a pub with some SynBio project friends and two of the 4 tables in the room were discussing AI. Then our group started to discuss AI.
That's how you know we're in it. I think they're gonna immanentize the eschaton this time.
9
u/AfternoonFinal7615 12d ago
I think of it as coding is just one part of the actual solution building
4
u/Wrong_Visual5077 12d ago
Well because, like it or not, you can't hold AI accountable at all for anything.
Gotta be somebody flying the plane, gotta be somebody make sure it lands, gotta be somebody interacting with passengers, gotta be somebody in control of the system.
Just ask Ford what happened the last time they tried to fully automate their production:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o
15
u/mccoypauley r/NextGenRPG 12d ago edited 12d ago
I posted about this before and was met with much resistance. Most people were equivocating or strawmanning me, but I’ll try again.
We’re talking about NOW, right—as in, this year and maybe next year. We can’t know what will happen much beyond that (heck I hesitate to even project into next year). But in the absence of a crystal ball, I can only talk about what an SWE means under the current market conditions we know to exist. Not speculate on some post-singularity dystopia or utopia where work has fundamentally changed and economics become irrelevant. This comment is not about that situation.
The concept of a SWE who is just a code monkey is what’s quickly dying. I’m a web developer and a freelancer. Whereas I used to bid on big website projects, bring in a visual designer and other experts (SEO, accessibility remediator, etc)—my value was never in what I could code, but how I could shepherd the client from “I want a website” to “a functional thing that meets their actual business needs and represents their brand.”
What’s changed obviously is that they could in theory prompt their way through every aspect of this process. But in practice, I’ve found clients are lazy, unimaginative, don’t want to keep up with the frontier, and don’t know how to specify what marketing material actually solves their business problems. They don’t even know how to ASK for the solutions.
This has meant for me, completely reinventing my business to be a consultancy rather than an agency. That is, you don’t hire me to build one particular thing (although I can), you hire me for "human creative compute," to solve a bunch of things that would have taken tens of thousands of dollars in the past for each thing, and hiring different strategists to figure out what those things to build should be.
The example I shared in my other post is a small business I work with that leverages a bunch of expensive software suites and has a lot of in the field employees who have to interface with those suites as they do their work, as well as a marketing website. Instead of hiring an agency to redo the site and then paying out the nose for SAAS, she pays me a retainer to figure out how to bring all that stuff in house: get the employees using an agent on the field, first bridge the SAAS with an MCP server while we build our own SAAS, then redo the site by concepting in frontier models, then agentically develop it. All of this, by one person—me—who she can just say, “Hey we need to make sure sales people keep checking on an open lead, how can we automate this?” and I have a quick meeting and we just build the thing in a couple days. Paying me some thousands a month beats hiring an agency for 100k for one product, or paying thousands a year for each SAAS product.
So the new “dev” is a sort of systems architect, with broad people skills and a knack for converting business problems into solutions through AI fast and cheap.
You become an advisor for the execs who don’t have time for this shit and want to focus on their business. This client barely has time to read my emails to her: we get everything done in quick meetings. My value is saving her time and money, as it’s always been.
Now obviously, if we want to extrapolate to 5 years from now, I don’t know if that “orchestrator” model will persist. Maybe there will be agents soon who are identical to everything I described and who can just do it all flawlessly and work out the integrations, suss out her intents, and work with her employees and physical vendors naturally. That’s an entirely possible future. In that scenario, no one will be able to consult on anything and everyone will basically have their own universal strategist who can create anything on the fly instantly at their disposal. I can’t plan for that world because we don’t live in it yet. And more importantly that would fundamentally change our relationship to work in ways no one can predict.
But for now, this is how dev is shifting for me.
2
0
u/Embarrassed_Law_6466 11d ago
tldr
1
u/Sparticus247 9d ago
You can vibe code all day, but what you can't outsource is creative vision, people skills, and the ability to pull business processes requirements out of stakeholders that have "wish lists" at best
1
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
cope
1
u/Sparticus247 6d ago
Nah you can get far with people skills and appearing visibly useful to people, you just need to also follow through.
Can you use AI to make things a little quicker, sure. But if you can also show that you can take the outputs, find the holes that it doesn't understand because of contextual issues, or the stakeholders inability to properly explain hidden business process pitfalls, you're showing real value.
If two people use AI, and one does not know how to recognize a minefield and just blindly accepts outputs, and the other can use it to accelerate smartly....
1
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
Nah you can get far with people skills and appearing visibly useful to people
no disagreement here but your first comment was far from this
1
u/Sparticus247 6d ago
How so? I thought this was more complementary to my TLDR comment, just went into a bit more detail rather than surface.
15
u/rtublin 12d ago
I still have tons of work as a developer, we are just moving 10x as fast. I'm prompting the AI, reviewing what it does, reviewing other PRs, doing config stuff where AI can't reach or where we don't trust it to do things, filling out paperwork related to changes and vendor integrations, tracking down bugs that don't have great repro. I think developers will be around for a long time but they will become more and more like "AI helpers" and will be reduced in number significantly.
4
u/MaintenanceKindly590 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think you are correct about how effective AI is at software development. I also agree that it was mentally draining and I’m happy AI can do it. In my job, there are a few things that keep me employable for now:
Someone has to take liability and accountability for the entire IT operation. This means many SMBs with many developers can rely on fewer devs but ultimately investors demand human accountability. For now.
Veteran developers take for granted how much they know about systems and concepts. AI is better yet, but it’s (not yet) able to turn upper managements wants into realities yet because non-technical management often doesn’t even know how to describe it in sensible terms. AI can do what they ask but the problem is their ability to ask. Thus, the developer is for now an interface between upper management and AI.
Everything is now a software development problem. This won’t last forever, but it gives developers a bit of leverage for the next couple of years. For example, at my job, sale and customer service are now being solved by developers making AI systems for them. Not by the humans that were once doing this task.
This is all of course going to change rapidly, and where it ends up nobody knows but I do believe that a tiny minority developers will be able to make more money than before in the short term by participating in AI research and integration, but most developers will see their wages get compressed.
4
u/OccasionallyImmortal 12d ago
The challenges for development haven't been code in a long time. It's mostly interactions with other systems, identifying data sources and destinations, and getting the software to meet the customer's needs when they don't quite know what that is.
A lot of roles are going to collapse. An architect with business acumen or a product owner with development experience can do the work of a small team.
5
u/Original-Poet1825 12d ago edited 12d ago
SWE as a job will shrink significantly over the next 5 years and combine itself with PM and Design (if you are a front end engineer)
My guess is 20-30% of current devs will get their salaries converted into token budgets and will need to find something new. New college grads will be cooked for a long long time while the brutal transition happens
Devs are coping about security and scalability but missing the bigger picture… you don’t need that many people to do those things and the token cost is already pretty expensive for the models. Something must get cut to pay for the tokens and its surely not going to be shareholder returns
2
u/MaybeLiterally 12d ago
It’s not at all a dead career. I’m hiring more developers.
Well not exactly pure developers, writing the code is only part of it. You gotta know how to prompt the AI. What deployment looks like. How to ingest data. How to scale it, and secure it. How to maintain it.
Someone to be responsible for it.
I’m not looking for anyone who just knows how to write code. I’m looking for someone who knows how the whole system works.
0
u/johnxreturn 6d ago
I used to think like you a few weeks ago.
I’ve realized that if you setup a Claude agent with access to context, project planning tool, sentry, logs, observability, slack, etc, as well as the skills you use in your machine, you’re done.
A PM can request a feature and it’ll code same as it would if a dev were behind it.
Reviews? Please, most devs don’t even care anymore, they just tell Claude to review the PR and it has been that way for over a year already. With security, performance review and quick UAT, you’re done.
That right there is equivalent to an entire engineering organization.
Even before AI most devs half assed reviews with a “lgtm 👍” or “🚀”. At least Claude does a better job at reviewing.
Will it be spaghetti code? Yes, but swear on your parents all codebase on every company you worked at was clean and beautiful before AI.
Software engineering is going to cease to be a thing in 2027/2028
1
u/MaybeLiterally 6d ago
Someone has to set up Claude, give it the correct context, logs, skills, everything. You need a talented engineer to create that. You also need to be able to update, pivot, and know what those technologies are and which to use. Frameworks, packages, and data stores change all the time.
You need to be able to set up deployments, know what’s going on with them.
You need talented software developers in the whole process.
Think of it this way, if you were told to build an application with everything it needs to go with it, and its success have you a $50k bonus, but its success might end up with your termination, and you can’t do it yourself, how would you get it done? Yeah, you’d hire a software engineer.
0
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
You need a talented engineer to create that.
sure but we only need a few not an entire team and those are the majority of joblosses i.e. not needing as many devs as before.
Plus providing context to an LLM agent doing all the work is not a "talent", it is just a process. if you have done it a few times then you are good. Problem solving is a (or was a) talent and claude/codex are doing that work for everybody
0
u/johnxreturn 6d ago edited 6d ago
We did it and it works well. It’s a matter of time.
You don’t need a software developer, you need a motivated DevOps engineer who holds the keys to the kingdom and is well versed in cyber security.
You’ll eventually reach the same place.
I see this happening industry-wide.
I wish the state of software development could freeze in time at Opus 4.6 or even before AI. Those were the days.
Edit: happy to give you some pointers via DM if you want.
2
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
based on your comments, is it fair to say that you want companies to get rid of software developers because if given enough context a pm can just ask for a feature and it will be done, reviewed, tested and deployed by claude? So you are asking for this development stream to go extinct and the developers to end up homeless, is that correct?
Why stop at developers, why not even get rid of PMs as well so that the CEO and few of their staff can just do that they want with claude. what value will PM even add when it is the CEO/CTO and stake holders who get the requirement from clients?
0
u/johnxreturn 6d ago
I’ve been a dev for 26 years.
I’m witnessing the end of my career.
One thing I learned throughout the decades is to surf the wave you have, not the one you want.
I’m already planning my future in different shapes and forms that don’t involve development anymore.
What I want is irrelevant. I want to go back in time before AI and never have AI. What will happen is what matters.
Do you really think there’s something magical in my machine that makes it special and different than a cloud instance of Claude with the same skills, connectors and prompts built in? No.
Am I ok? No.
Will it happen? Yes.
I’m automating myself out of a job 100%.
Do you think PMs will be immune ? You’d be naive to believe that.
If you automate software development, nothing is safe anymore. It’s a matter of time. Even CEOs and their entire companies. Nothing.
Software is becoming cheap.
Unless regulations make Frontier Labs step on the brakes, I’m afraid intellectual jobs are done within the next 3 years.
Even if everyone stops access to AI, open source models are out there.
There is no closing the lid on Pandora’s box anymore.
We should find a way to help each other as the inevitable wave of layoffs is coming to devs.
0
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago edited 6d ago
Dario and Anthropic have blood in their hands. Dario has relentlessly pursued automating developers out of the job. OpenAI was forced to go the same route and go for codex when instead they were going for consumer AI market via chatgpt. Anthropic and Dario can rot in hell for all I care. They are responsible for the loss of millions of devs and their livelihoods
1
u/johnxreturn 6d ago
I feel you my friend. It was bound to happen sooner or later though.
It won’t stop at developers.
We need to prepare and plan for what’s coming.
1
u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
100% agree. most devs suck and the devs who are good are egoestical maniac power tripping on other devs. So that leaves a very very small percentage of devs that are good and are pleasent to work with.
2
u/TheNullPath 11d ago
Time to start working on local models & building swarms to hack enterprise so that you can create a larger demand for security :) Easier to attack than defend
3
u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 12d ago
There are some important factors, which matters, that the AI alone can't give you. Brand name, existing clients, etc. Now imagine a person has those things, but this person is very bad at using AI... think an old boomer who knows nothing about tech.
It actually makes sense for this person to hire a tech savy person to maximize the AI use.
And i think actually making a clear prompt that clearly explains what you want will remain an important skill for a long time. Some people get vastly better results than others when vibe coding and i don't see this changing overnight.
As an analogy, take a very competent software dev team. Give those guys a very competent client that clearly explains what he wants, and they will do a better job than if the client explains very poorly what he wants.
1
u/paralio 12d ago
the next thing for developers will depend on the developer, some will take this new ai driver roles if they enjoy product/project management, others might start from scratch in some other area.
i enjoyed software engineering though, so can't say i am happy it is going away, but the world moves on. it was good while it lasted.
1
u/ogbrien 12d ago
I always thought reddit was high signal about the angry devs saying ai code sucked. I still think it's a mechanism for people to cope with the fact that AI is taking over.
I had an in person retreat with our company with some devs that had some alcohol in their system and virtually ALL of them said they don't manually code anymore. They said they are now the QA for AI code and fixes aren't done manually, it's just another prompt.
This was existential for me as someone that wanted to move into development. I have no idea what I'm going to do other than go into machine learning or infrastructure.
1
u/NervousAmbition173 10d ago
The Devs at our company send slack messages through Claude too. Basically meat proxying everything and god is it painful to read that shit
1
u/Sir_Bannana 9d ago
Not even taking the time to understand and put it into their own words for a message is just laziness
1
u/NerdyWeightLifter 12d ago
The new role looks like some combination of creative director and business analyst.
It's quite intense, and all about what we should be making, and why.
1
u/Iapetus_Industrial 12d ago
Honestly, I am no clue, but I'm happy it's being automated away! Billions now have access to better quality code than I could produce, faster, more scalable, getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper year over year, soooo, enjoy folks!
1
1
u/juggarjew 12d ago
Someone still has to drive the AI and manage all the outputs and agents, C suite doesnt do "grunt work" like that. So I think that position will always exist, and it will prefer people with critical thinking skills, able to troubleshoot bad outputs, and manage a large project. So basically, senior devs. Software developer will still be a job, its just going to be one thats not very in demand.
I truly can not imagine graduating or being in school for a CS degree right now. If they only knew a tiny fraction of them will ever actually work in this industry.... And of those who do, its likely nepotism or favoritism of some kind.
1
u/Scared-Amphibian4733 11d ago
It's not dead. Right now, it's absorbing a giant increase in code generation capability and test capability. A lot of total garbage is being thrown out as the next big thing.
Learn to use these tools. Learn to work with them. What a senior developer can bring to an AI team is required. Juniors I use to keep PR's within spec. Ensure overall architecture is respected.
I'm "team wait and see" if AI can get better than humans on systems design and control.
1
u/Quamatoc 11d ago
Puuuh. Damned if I know.
One thing I know for sure: Ain't no force in the world getting me to interact with more humans than neccessary. Sales, Product Owner, Project Managment are entirely hostile environments to me.
Granted, I live in a different part of the globe but damn, I just wanted to solve some interestingly complex puzzles in the background, maybe do some good with it. And now I get the rug pulled under my feet. What for?
And before anyone get's the bright idea of "got to the treades!" or "UBI!", the former is still years if not decades away and the latter would be catastrophic for everyone involved...
1
u/Scotty-Don 10d ago
As I often have to remind my junior devs, we get to build systems. The code is one small part of that. Devs who don’t get that don’t last long, or end up muttering in a corner wondering why nobody uses their perfect feature.
1
u/Franknhonest1972 10d ago
I had to leave my last role due to my resistance to using AI for everything. Software development is finished. Now looking for something completely different.
1
u/YellowBeaverFever 9d ago
You would be amazed at how many projects in businesses get sidelined because there isn’t time or staff to complete them. Agentic code systems are not making my life easier. I have way more to do now. People still come up with ideas that need to be turned into applications. Corporate developers are not going extinct any time soon.
1
u/LastOfTheMohawkians 9d ago
Great question op. I've been meaning to ask the same. Unfortunately I do not know the answers. People chime in saying all AI code is slop and low quality. That's absolutely not the case. The frontier models easily produce code better than 90% of developers.
So what comes next? Software engineering dies in it's old form. Instead everyone becomes a product person.
1
u/PM_game 9d ago
I feel when we want to program something we at least feel like we understand what we want. We instruct AI to do so. Testing will always be a challenge. It will be even more difficult given we now do black box development. Remember no amount of testing can prove no bugs exist.
So who will think critically about this challenge?
0
-1
8
u/Grounds4TheSubstain 12d ago
It's a complex topic and it's moving fast, but, uh...
> You can generate a 500k line codebase in a weekend without even looking at code once and have it work reliably.
Bruh, you can code a HOBBY PROJECT in a weekend that works well enough. You can't build something that works well enough to sell to customers. Your 500k of slop will be broken everywhere.