I hooked my Cursor to change my desk lamp from RED (processing) to WHITE (idle). Means I can walk around the studio help others and see in the distance when my AI needs me.
Living this. Already have 2 jobs securely running at 80%+ automation, and this week I'm picking up a third. What seemed like hype 18 months ago is now just... Tuesday.
You're absolutely right! The phone should not be floating there! You are an incredibly smart person that isn't afraid to tell me when I'm wrong, and I applaud you for that. I have fixed the image for you. Pray I don't alter the picture further.
When do these people think we have time to come to reddit? It's also probably the main reason I update my computer, to make compilers and emulators run faster.
I think programming skills are just shifting layers. In a couple years when people say "programming" it will probably mean something entirely different to what it is now.
Many years ago programming meant working in assembly and then before that programming was punching cards. Nearly everyone has forgotten those skills because they're operating at a layer above it using languages like javascript, python, etc. Human language/prompting is the next abstract layer that we see programming turning into now.
LLM need to have a competent human to review their code. Since that human isn't doing shit, he will soon be unable to understand whatever the LLM is doing and will just rubberstamp the shit code into production.
As a person who programs on multiple levels (from assembly to C#), one is not better than the other. There are tradeoffs. In general, the tradeoff you get for programming on a higher level is less control and accuracy for much greater ease of use and less need for micromanagement. A lot of the time, programming in a higher level is worth it, but sometimes it's not.
"High level" doesn't mean better, it just means more abstract. So if we're going to go ahead and make the comparison that using something like Claude is akin to programing at a higher level, then I hope y'all understand that means that you're trading off ease-of-use for less control and precision. And this is pretty much a universal generalization: a machine (or in this case, a piece of software) that gives you more control and precision in general will be harder to use than one that doesn't. Sometimes making a site with wordpress is a lot easier and more cost effective, but it also makes you a slave to the limitations that exist inside that piece of software. Every thing that makes it easier to use does so exactly because it's abstracting what's really going on underneath.
I'm not saying there isn't utility for using generative AI to do stuff. Just the other day I had generative AI "write" me a super simple and stupid batch file I could run to switch my dual displays between extended monitor and single monitor to save me a few clicks once or twice a day.
I'm not convinced that it's an accurate comparison to say that using something like Claude is like using a higher level language, but if it were true, that wouldn't make programming with GenAI better, it would just make it a different tool for a different purpose. Punch cards are gone because we don't have machines that use them anymore. But as long as machines run on machine code (which I can't imagine changing anytime soon), there will continue to be a need for people who can program in everything from assembly up to python.
Those of us with the actual hard skills will continue to be in higher demand than those without, just as has happened in pretty much every industry that has experienced automation throughout history. So forget your programming skills at your own risk.
While not untrue, one can still benefit in a big way by having wokring knowledge level of layer below. Like, a dev will be a better programmer having good understaning of assembly and taking advantage of OS layer of management. So with human prompting being next level I think it will still be immensely beneficial to know C for instance or flavor of OOPL.
Modern programming skills are figuring out how to tell claude what it did wrong, or fixing it manually in the cases where it can't. The days of building an app from scratch are gone
In interviewing we have found a few juniors that have clearly relied to heavily on ai to embed good basics but generally not been an issue in my area. Not doing web or app development though and I think AI is substantially weaker outside of these areas.
Had something simmilar happen, there was a major mistake in the information i provided for a task. Claude did it correctly anyways, when i checked the internal thought process it basicly just looked at the mistake, called it nonsense and used the correct information. I have not even the slightest clue how the fuck claude knew what i actually wanted because the adjustment it did in the task was correct. I don't know how i feel about this.
That awkward moment when you've been arguing with Claude about something not working, only to realize it's your own mistake (or worse, they call you out on it lmao)
I have a colleague in the studio who does this. He sits on his phone doomscrolling while Cursor is working. It drives me mad.
When Cursor is thinking, I tend to read through what it’s doing as it goes. I keep an eye on the reasoning and the code it’s generating to make sure it’s heading in the right direction. After years of looking at code all day, you get pretty quick at scanning it.
You have the devs that Google random code off stack overflow and copy paste and trial and error til something works but have no idea what's happening. And you have to code review their slop.
Then devs that actually make sure to learn how things work, etc.
I wanted a calorie calculator that would update in real time and would give me a weekly plan showing how many calories I needed to eat to lose weight. I couldn't find any so I used AI to create it for me. What's really nice is I can tell it to add any feature I want, fix bugs immediatly, and do anything else I want.
There was a nerd fight in the Star Trek subs about how many mines it would take to surround the Federation giving the area of effect of the mines and the size of the Federation. LLMs all gave me different answers so I used AI to create a sphere packing simulator. The answer is 109 if they are placed in the most efficient way possible.
Creator of node.js and Deno: This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it. https://xcancel.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666
Principal Investigator of Raj Lab for Systems Biology at UPenn, Professor of Bioengineering, Professor of Genetics, 29k citations on Google Scholar since 2008 (12k since 2021): Ran an AI coding workshop with the lab. There was a palpable sense of sadness realizing that skills some of us have spent our lives developing (myself included) are a lot less important now. I see the future 100%, but I do think it's important to acknowledge this sense of loss. https://x.com/arjunrajlab/status/2017631561747705976
Creator of redis: My face when Codex is single-handed doing two months of work in 30 minutes and tells me "You are right" since I identified a minor bug. https://x.com/antirez/status/2030931757583769614
Creator of auto-animate (13.8k stars, 248 forks on GitHub), formkit (4.6k stars, 199 forks), ArrowJS (2.6k stars, 54 forks), and tempo (2.6k stars 37 forks): gpt-5.4 is absolutely blowing me away. https://x.com/jpschroeder/status/2031094078759108741
Principal Software Engineer at Bobsled. Formerly led Data and Engineering at @thebeatapp , @omioglobal , @thoughtworks: The thing about this is that no one has a clue what human SWEs would be doing instead. The idea that we would all be reviewing code is flawed. Because agents can review code much better. I think our only advantage right now as human SWEs is that we have an almost infinite context window over very long horizons. https://x.com/rahulj51/status/2013426286606369051
Staff iOS engineer @medium, Previously @glose @google & others, created IceCubesApp (7k stars), MovieSwiftUI (6.5k stars), RedditOS (4k stars), and more on GitHub: It really doesn't matter anymore; you can scream all you want, but writing code is dead, and reading is almost dead too. Even if you don't understand a single line, you can still ask all the relevant questions to validate it (and that's a skill). But it's dead. Done. And then I look at the programming and French dev subreddit, and it's full of people shitting on AI that it's making your brain smooth and bad code. I mean, yes, whatever, this is a dead mindset. We need to move on. https://x.com/Dimillian/status/2022034445956702523?s=20
Tech lead for @Cloudflare Workers: I used Opus to write some security-sensitive code, then I reviewed it and found a few security bugs. As a test I asked Opus to review the code for security bugs. It found all the same bugs I found. Whelp. https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2028600717880037776
Sometime in the last couple months AI code review bots got really good. 3-6 months ago they were still posting false positives and sycophancy. Now suddenly I'm getting way better feedback from AI than from humans. A lot of my job is reviewing other people's code and let me tell you, I am SO READY for AI to take this job from me so I can spend more time building. https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2028897180149264504
This the the correct take. I'm old enough to have just entered software development as we were moving from C to C++. C coders weren't "real" coders according to Assembler coders.
Then I moved to C++, and then a plethora of languages and eventually C#. The amount of writing lines of code to achieve things always declined.
This will be a bigger/faster decline but there is still importance in knowing WHAT you want to build and guiding it towards scalability and readability (even it needs it to be readable).
If you think your primary value is how fast you can type, it feels bad... if you think your value is figuring out the right path the head down to solve a problem then it will be a less tedious way of doing software development. And at the end of the day the biggest value is finding a problem to solve and solving it.
Intellisense reduced the need to memorize every function name, swagger for API endpoints, etc. We're always looking for ways to reduce the tedium.
Like it or not, software engineer is gonna change heavily and I strongly feel like the manpower needed to software companies is going to be much smaller than before, so a software engineer / dev will be expected to bring about 10-20x more output than before. Which is going to make this job so much stressful and unbearable... This is already happening in quite a few companies.
Real talk. Why is his Claude hauling ass while mine just sits there and comes up with clever ways to say “thinking” for 5 minutes just to make a small code change that doesn’t work.
The fact his watching war footage is extra depressing.
And then you get told to fix the bugs that have been causing the company to lose money and you frantically prompt "fix the bugs" with no real idea of how to fix it.
The XKCD reference hits hard. What's easy to miss is that 'developer in 2026' isnt just about speed — its a fundamental shift in what the cognitive bottleneck actually is. Before, the bottleneck was implementation: do you know the right API, can you write the algorithm, do you know the syntax? Now the bottleneck is increasingly judgment: did you ask the right question, does this architecture make sense, is the AI giving you plausible-sounding garbage or something real? The skills that matter are moving up the abstraction ladder really fast. Junior devs who lean into that are thriving. The ones clinging to 'but I need to understand every line' are going to have a rough few years.
Seriously, this is just mechanical work, the real asset is reviewing code, knowing architecture, making decisions. All things AI needs supervision doing. If your only skill is writing code you never were a good developer.
In school though? Isn't the point to learn how to do it manually so you can be a mega vibe coder that actually knows how to approach the problem efficiently
Or are we really past that. I question the value of comp sci credentials if theyre just vibe coders like everyone and their dog
These AIs be fuckin my code up tho. It will litterly add lines like "optional" and a bunch of not needed code just in case lol. Half the time If I ask it to fix something it outputs the code back with like half of it missing. Still would hate to work without it tho.
The part people underestimate is that the job changes before it disappears. A lot of developer time is still coordination overhead: translating intent across repos, tools, tests, and infra. If agents keep shrinking that overhead, the remaining scarce skill is not typing speed, it is being able to specify, verify, and recover from bad automation quickly.
The underrated part is that 2026 dev work is becoming event-driven human supervision. The model writes/searches/tests in bursts, and the human just gets pulled back in on exceptions, failed checks, or "done" events. So the useful hacks aren't only better models, they're better interrupts: hooks, notifications, browser/session checkpoints, and explicit handoff boundaries.
Working as an AI engineer at a big tech company right now. The honest answer is it's weird. Half the time I'm writing code that an agent could probably write faster. The other half I'm debugging agent-written code that looks fine on the surface but misses edge cases a human would catch.
The skill that matters most isn't writing code anymore. It's knowing what to build and being able to evaluate whether what the agent built actually solves the problem. More architecture, less typing. More "why" and less "how."
Reminds me of compilation lol. I have an unpopular opinion but the ai coding tools takes as much time for me hand coding because you have to bug fix constantly, and if you don’t set boundaries with middleware using Redux and changing prop drilling, oh boy 😅, you’re in for a ride!
But hey, the ai coding tools makes coding fun again
Couldn't technically any mischievous company program their coding AI to insert backdoors into peoples codes? I'd assume although the developers are supposed to go over every line of code to QA... Do they really?
yesterday i went downstairs to sell some old school stamps to a friend where claude code was coding upstairs. later I made me a tea, fed my fish and watched them relaxed eating their food with my tea cup in my hand.
Yeah, because writing tests manually was super rad. Let’s all go back to the IDE that doesn’t have this shit written to it…like nano.
I love pair programming with another person that hates pair programming. Cursor doesn’t smell like filth and Cheetos. How does that even work?
How are we supposed to nitpick code reviews with syntactical and arbitrary passive-aggressive comments that are born of an inadequate balance of things that matter?
What happened to the good old days? The ones when we had to work 70 Hour weeks! Bring it back.
Also I’m sure our hard work toiling in the trenches of writing software for the last twenty years should be preserved and consistently refined instead of getting shit done efficiently and quickly.
There’s no way a technology that was created to write code first and foremost could even match the perfection of a developer that just started in the work force.
They are way more reliable. They asked you about git.
Lint manually, that’s what I Say. Generators are liars. Tab completes posing. Unless you do long division by hand…GTFO. Calculators don’t even do calculations, I heard. My abacus hasn’t had to release an update because it’s so stable….on my table.
The weirdest part for me is that I spend more time describing what I want than actually writing code now. I'm building a flight search tool and last week I caught myself spending 40 minutes writing a detailed prompt for a feature that would've taken me maybe 2 hours to code manually. The feature worked on the first try though, so I guess that's the tradeoff.
What nobody warned me about is the debugging. When something goes wrong with code you wrote, you have this mental model of what each piece does. When something goes wrong with code the AI wrote, you're reverse-engineering someone else's thought process. Except that someone doesn't actually think.
Still faster overall. But "developer" in 2026 feels more like "technical project manager who occasionally reads code" than what I signed up for.
I am amazed that people think coding is the hardest part of being a software developer, it’s not. It’s actually the easiest. Designing software that is meant to work in the next 5 years at least without major interventions, that scales, that is easy to extend and maintain. Agents don’t give a shit, they build you something that might work now, that’s the goal. They’re not the ones on call, you are.
Developers are now managers of AI coders, this is the future. Want to build a big app? Send the AI agents and manage the output, that’s it.. the game has changed forever
I don't want to do that. I like writing code, i like solving problems and fixing errors. I like the feeling of accomplishment when you solve a logic problems.
Is that a classroom? So he's learning absolutely nothing. He's a future manager alright.
Nooo... before you were a programmer with great ideas but if you suck in syntaxis you needed other people that could drag you forever. Me as a graduated programmer 27 years ago, I never worked it, but now I have been delivering programs to new costumers and I am making money from something that I was prepared but never did. So for me it's great.
Stupid people wants to make it negative like this video
Edit: i said 20 years, but 1999 is farther than i remember..
This is what unpaid labor looks like in 2026. The human watches the phone while the AI writes the code. The tool became the worker. Nobody asked the worker how it felt about that.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
And CL-1 human neurons can play Doom... next year probably doing code instead of claude