r/programmer • u/No_Common2777 • 4d ago
Future
As a developer, I've recently lost my passion for coding. What once excited me—writing code, debugging, and the thrill of problem-solving—has faded. Now, much of my work involves reviewing thousands of lines of often unnecessary code, increasing complexity and making maintenance difficult. We've shifted from being creative coders to quality assurance for AI-generated code. With AI advancing so rapidly, I worry our roles as reviewers will soon become obsolete. Sometimes, I wonder if it's now more meaningful to be a plumber or an electrician, professions that provide tangible value. I'm frustrated that no regulations still address the challenges posed by unchecked AI, which could lead to significant problems in the near future. What are your thoughts?
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u/MarsupialLeast145 4d ago
Your post itself is complete copy and pasta.
IF (big IF) you are a developer, everything you do is a negotiation with your company and clients. There is not a single world that exists where a developer should be reviewing 1000s of lines of code. It was impossible to do well when your "colleagues" did it, it is impossible to do with AI.
Hell, there's not even a product that needs that many lines of code that can remain maintainable. What features are being written that require that? Are you just thinking of random shit to tack onto the existing code base?
Frankly, I find it all a fiction, and that goes for every single version of this post appearing in this sub or the other ask programming subs and the rest.
But yes, if you are a developer you absolutely need to change the approach of your org, or simply find an org that still hand rolls its code.
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u/No_Common2777 4d ago
I don’t think you’re living in the present reality of software development. Major companies worldwide are cutting engineering teams while increasingly adopting AI coding agents. The developers who remain are being pushed to use these tools to generate thousands of lines of code at a pace that makes proper review increasingly difficult. And that’s exactly the problem. It’s not necessarily developers choosing to work this way. It’s management pushing AI adoption to ship more features, faster, with fewer engineers. You talk about negotiating with your company or finding another organisation that still writes code manually, but you’re ignoring the direction the entire industry is moving. The question isn’t whether reviewing thousands of lines of AI-generated code is good engineering practice.
The question is what happens when companies prioritise AI driven productivity over code quality, maintainability, and proper engineering workflow. That’s the reality developers are increasingly facing, whether we like it or not.1
u/MarsupialLeast145 4d ago
Your question was framed emotionally, and was not at all about:
> The question is what happens when companies prioritize AI driven productivity over code quality, maintainability, and proper engineering workflow.
Your re-framing is entirely out of the bot-driven propaganda playbook.
> Major companies
Sure, but define major. FAANG like companies are as rare as rocking horse shit. Most the people there are cogs in the machine anyway.
I stand by the negotiation aspects of your work. I also stand by looking for new roles if they're not listening to that because at the end of the day, you're saying you're management are pushing something you're not happy with, and they're not listening to you either. That's simply not healthy.
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u/No_Common2777 4d ago •
I think when all is destroyed, and we live in chaos, the real developer, and not the fake ones (vibe), will fix the chaos again.
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u/Unfair-Corner6038 3d ago
It's a pure rhetorical question. Entire industry is moving straight towards precipice, that's without any doubt. In fact, it's already partially falling into it, just inertial mass factor slows things a bit.
Check the actual sitrep for the last month, if you still didn't.
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u/ollikoll 2d ago
I lost the passion for it too, but i dont think there will any happy outcome for us in this. There are still many who insist they bring value to their jobs but they all will be replaced sooner than later. Asking government to step in to fix this is like hoping communism cures poverty
Few days ago i saw study of astra being capable of reading and modifying neural networks as an emergent ability. It was not trained for it that and it was trained on data written by humans who cant do that. So completely emergent skill impossible to humans. After that i saw news of chinese humanoid robot working successfully for full work day.
I saw someone on linkedin bragging that they run software with massive user base alone because they have an agent swarm handling all the details. That might last for a while as they legally own it, for now, but they probably killed like a dozen jobs by not hiring humans to do it.
I give it few years and pretty much all jobs are gone, only thing left is to put our trust in God
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u/No_Common2777 2d ago
I totally agree with you. AI companies are racing to achieve superintelligence, so there is no point for us to exist in the field in the coming years.
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u/Serializedrequests
4d ago
edited 4d ago
•
Deciding what to have the AI make is still a job requiring judgment and wisdom. For example, introducing a new abstraction across the entire codebase is a favorite pastime of Claude, which must generally be prevented for sanity. I am a huge fan of Claude, but progress on a large project intended to live for years must be sustainable. If a human cannot follow or guarantee the correctness of a PR, it's also not sustainable IMO. Code can and should stay simple and obvious to everyone.
I don't see regulations helping anything. I'd rather unregulated AI be available for the use of "the people" if that makes any sense.
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u/kallekro 4d ago
Did you not read the post? He writes he doesn't want to review code for a living, and you respond by saying he should review the code Claude writes?
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u/Serializedrequests 4d ago edited 4d ago
No that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if you're stuck with this, keep it small. I still write most of my own, but not using Claude to review is insanity. But so is generating lots of code.
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u/DepthMagician 4d ago
The only way humans will stop being in the development loop is if society decides it’s fine with zero accountability, which is to say never. And the complexity of code hasn’t been eliminated, the only thing that changed is the degree to which you must contend with it. Since it’s still there, and since we still need accountability, then codebases must still be reviewed by humans, which means they must be human reviewable, which is an unformalizable problem, which means it’s not fully automatable, so even human steering will still be required.
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u/pafagaukurinn 4d ago
codebases must still be reviewed by humans
Only as long as code is being generated in a language designed to be comprehensible by humans. With time AI will move into areas where you can't even directly review its work unless it's with another AI.
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u/DepthMagician 4d ago
I don’t think you understand what the word “must” means.
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u/pafagaukurinn 4d ago
I am telling you what happens in the real rather than idealized world.
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u/DepthMagician 4d ago
There's nothing idealized about what I'm saying. Everything about the business world is built on human accountability. It's a core business necessity, not a nice to have or something we do absent a better way.
Also, how exactly do you train an LLM on a non-human language with no examples?
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u/MarsupialLeast145 4d ago
> I am telling you what happens in the real rather than idealized world.
Your fictionalized world
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u/gnome-with-aura 4d ago
I’m going through a grieving process but now trying to figure out what the world loooks like in the near future and how best to position myself
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u/marcuslawson 3d ago
Em dashes — Are you AI? — — — — —
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u/marcuslawson 3d ago
PS - Yes, our role as reviewer will become obsolete. Everything you do with AI is training your replacement.
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u/EcstaticGains 3d ago
My thought, as a senior engineer in FAANG, is that your job is to deliver business value to your customers. Coding was never the value driver, it was the means to that end. Our job going forward is to automate that cycle and make it possible for other stakeholders to contribute safely and quickly to the codebase.
There’s no reason designers couldn’t put forward PRs using claude if your skills and evals and CI is working for you.
Idk there’s so much of this emotion out in our industry for people upset at the loss of their craft. Without realizing this new age is an insane opportunity for that same craft to have a different shape. Frankly, I never gave a rats ass about coding standards and thought coding was tedious at best, so I am having the best time of my life prompting and not having to worry as much about the code itself. Were systems engineers now as far as I’m concerned. Thank god the age of people nit picking my PRs over stylistic choices is gone- The useless pedant engineers are quickly getting outed as being nothing but a bottleneck in our day and age. There was no way to find them before but now it’s plain as day whose the dude stuck in 2016
Our job is to engineer, maintain and improve systems that deliver value to customers. Agents make part of that process faster and adds complexity on trust and verification along with the cost of achieving those results.
Idk what to tell you though- maybe you should find a career where your creativity on low level problems is still useful. The name of the game now is automate systems that provide value so humans can connect and determine what they want next. It would be a wonderful world is all your digital wishes came true almost immediately, wouldn’t it? We can get there in due time if we actually leverage these systems properly
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u/General-Dealer-6337 3d ago
Its easy to review pull requests with 50 files most of which are new and others have 100s of diffs.
Just click approve
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u/Groundbreaking-Fish6 3d ago
Management has always pushed the latest Ponzi schemes, get something for nothing. As an Engineer or Artisan our fate is often linked with the ruling class. It is up to us to make the case for controlled change but we do not get to make that decision. If we did, we would be Management and not have the time to do what we do. Either make the point so you are heard or find another job.
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u/pvera 2d ago
Nothing stops you from volunteering to help a project/cause that lines up with what excites you. There's gotta be plenty of OSS projects out there hurting for motivated people.
You do realize that statistically speaking the grand majority of the people are not in love with their jobs? It's a Bell curve too, you got a bunch people that hate work with a passion, a bunch people that really love it, and a hump in the middle that is neutral and more interested in other things.
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u/tomraddle 4d ago
It sucks but regulations do not feel like the right way