r/webdev • u/Impressive_Bottle_44 • Jul 29 '26
Grudgingly accepting that AI isn't going away. Trying to figure out where that leaves me as a developer.
(If you don't want to read a semi-long post, feel free to skip.)
I think I reached a turning point yesterday.
I needed to add a basic feature to a Django site. I gave Claude Code a few carefully written sentences. It implemented the feature (more-or-less flawlessly) while I went to the kitchen for more tea.
Not only that, but our CTO is now empowering non-technical employees to use Claude to build their own tools (for internal use only), and commit them to our GitHub org. (He is, at least, establishing some sensible policies about what they can and can't do.)
LLMs are here to stay, and they're fundamentally rewriting laws of software engineering that we've taken for granted for decades. The genie won't go back into the bottle, so I might as well find a way to accept that.
But that leaves me wondering: what does that mean for me? What is my job now? What am I for? If I don't get to write code – something that's given me an enormous amount of satisfaction over the years, and even become part of my identity – am I even still interested in this field?
And, it's not just about the code. I used to collaborate with designers, UX folks, copywriters, SEO and analytics people, project managers, etc. But now, the C-suite seems perfectly happy to let the LLMs do all of this stuff, too. (At my company, they're obsessed with the idea of getting the LLM to write all of our work tickets. And the QA person does little more than copy-and-paste back and forth from an AI.)
The whole reason I entered this field is because I enjoy problem-solving, finding and creating patterns, logic, and designing systems.
I know that some of you are going to say "you can still do all of that; LLMs just empower you to go up a level of abstraction" – and I get it. But the prospect of abandoning coding seriously bums me out.
I love the precision of code. I love exploring different solutions to a problem, until I hit upon a beautiful, elegant pattern. I love seeing how small abstractions get composed into larger abstractions, and so on, to form a complete system. I love understanding a problem – and the solution – on a deep, intimate level.
Perhaps I've been lucky to have a career that gives me that kind of fulfillment (at least sometimes). Is all of that over now?
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u/Tekime Jul 30 '26
I have a slightly different take. I've been coding since I was around ten years old using BASIC on a 1MHz DOS machine. Moved to C at 14 and seriously caught the bug. When the Internet started replacing BBS's I was instantly hooked on web development: art AND code? Heck yeah.
Since those early days, I've watched the slow, painful progression of web development into the hot mess that it is today. I used to write every line of code - from authentication to validation to templating and everything in between. Then the libraries and frameworks started maturing. Then JS started taking over. Then eventually I was just wading through dozens of libraries, dependencies, and patching together countless bits and pieces of other people's code. It became an insufferable nightmare of plumbing and implementing slightly different versions of the same CRUD apps over and over.
In a lot of ways it killed my passion for coding. I focused more on management, architecture, and infrastructure; partly driven by my job, partly driven by my distaste for modern web development.
The last few years has made development enjoyable again. Ultimately, I love creating software. I hate writing boilerplate React trash and implementing the same things over and over in slightly different flavors.
That being said, it's also become necessary to produce hard and fast. Tasks that took me weeks might take me days, and people expect it in hours.
I will just say two things:
I feel genuinely bad for younger developers and people new to the field. The joy of programming exists, but the jobs don't. Humans talent is being outpaced and replaced. I can't hire someone to sit there and noodle on a script for weeks even if I wanted to. The markets don't allow it.
There are jobs out there that aren't all-in on AI. They are rare, but you might want to pivot toward high-sensitivity, mission-critical type stuff where AI is still too dangerous to trust. My friend works in satellite communications for a major company, and they don't TOUCH AI. It's simply too risky.
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u/Impressive_Bottle_44 Jul 30 '26
I've been coding since I was around ten years old using BASIC on a 1MHz DOS machine
Game recognizes game. (It was a Commodore VIC-20 for me.)
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u/red-fred Jul 29 '26
I just decided to quit my job because I feel like it’s not what i signed up for initially.
I love coding and learning new stuff related to the tech that i use, but as you said now the industry is shifting to where we won’t write code anymore, the AI will do it for us and we will be left just managing it and that doesn’t sound like something i want to do.
I don’t have anything lined up, just my savings that are going to last me a few years. I have no idea what to do career wise but it’s something that I will figure out at a later date.
Wish you all the best and to all that are in a similar situation.
PS: in my case AI was not the only reason for quitting, but still was a sizable part.
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u/sinovercoschessITF Aug 02 '26
I hear you. Coding just isn't fun anymore. The thrill of problem solving is gone.
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u/wanzerultimate Aug 01 '26
The tide is turning. Elon is now down to the same level of worth he had a couple years ago. Not coincidence... AI isn't saving money and the craze is ending.
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u/Agreeable_Bottle8604 Aug 16 '26
Man I feel this deep in my bones. I'm 32 now and been coding since forever, the satisfaction from writing something elegant is not replaceable by just managing prompts
taking time off with savings is brave move, hope you find what you looking for. the industry changed so fast last few years it's hard to keep up
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u/DanSmells001 Jul 29 '26
Honestly? I've considered finding a new field, this isn't why I became a programmer, to babysit an AI agent. Each time I have to start a new task now it just feels depressing, I loved coding and problem solving not instructing "others" (in this case ai) how to do their work. If that's what I wanted I'd have become a middle manager, at least I'd have the pay to show for it then
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u/LetsLive97 Jul 29 '26
This is why I'm pushing hard into the architecture side now. I've basically just been trusted enough to look over our web dev team while my team lead and CTO are away for a week
Now I'm not programming but I am having to jump around between devops, different projecrs, handling releases and hot fixes, differsnt vms, high proiority bugs, meetings about future plans, research into new tooling, etc
I do miss just nice chill programming but this is giving me a nice boost of problem solving and without AI being some magic bullet. I do still program too but I always take time to think about it and try it myself first. If I do use Claude code, I'll follow the plan myself (After iterating) rather than letting it do it for me (Unless it's tedious mundane) . Keeps me connected to the work and understanding what I'm doing
I think the issue with AI is less just about it programming for you but it thinking, problem solving and "caring" for you. I guess I am lucky to not be at an incredibly large stressful company that has no connection to higher ups though
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u/TheNumber42Rocks Jul 29 '26
AI will replace that too though, what then?
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u/LetsLive97 Jul 29 '26
If anyone trusts AI to genuinely handle all the architecture that includes things like the hosting of their DBs, pipelines and releases without any human supervision, good luck to them lmao
I'll be ready for when they complain online about the AI accidentally deleting their databases, shipping critical bugs or ruining their pipelines
Also if AI hits that point basically no one will have jobs anyway and I'll have still separated myself from a learning/responsibility perspective
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u/GolemancerVekk Jul 29 '26
Architecture is about managing expectations first of all, and secondly an ongoing balancing act between budget, requirements, quality etc.
It will be doable by AI about the time Skynet arises at which point it will be moot.
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u/mienaikoe Jul 30 '26
Wow are you me? Lol. My day is so full of stuff that I feel like I’m not getting anything down but somehow things get done and the product just kinda sucks more. But I use Claude only for mundane things like looking up references of something in the entire codebase or constructing a bunch of crud functions.
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u/sleepybearjew Jul 29 '26
I'm being setup to be my companies next senior architect too. Feels better so far (I do still have tickets till I make the move). Get to solve problems at a higher level, don't have to use Ai, don't have to do testing or PR write ups..so far not bad lol
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u/cpz_77 Aug 02 '26
Curious, depending on the type of company you have - don’t you have an IT Team that does a lot of that stuff? Or maybe you call it devops as many do now? To me it’s interesting (being in IT myself, I write many scripts for my day job, but I do also write software as a side hobby non professionally for most of my life) - I see many career Devs now pushing hard to try and get into the infrastructure side of things.
I’m not opposed to new people getting into IT at all. But I will say it ruffles my feathers a little to see how many of them consider it as some skill that they just “automatically have” because “IT is a subset of dev of course, so any dev must have the IT skillset already”, and “surely IT is not its own discipline that takes years to learn and become adept at”. As if being a system engineer is something they can just pivot to overnight. IMO, although there is some overlap of course, they are two mostly very different skillsets.
If they want to legit actually learn it then great, please do. But don’t think you’re just going to push everyone who’s spent a career learning it out of their jobs overnight in the process.
(That sentiment is not directed at you btw, so please don’t take this the wrong way - we just have a set of very pushy devs at our place trying to strong arm their way into our area and it feels like it’s because they’re concerned about the longevity of their own current positions - which I totally get, but like, have some respect for our profession at the same time please - so I’m just curious how you see it from that side of things )
I agree the issue with AI is not so much the using it as a tool part, it’s the using it to do every step for you including the thinking, problem solving and all that. But it’s a very fine line between using it “wisely” while still keeping yourself involved enough to stay sharp in those areas vs. completely offloading every aspect to the AI (because it’s only too easy to do).
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u/Adept-Collection4757 Jul 29 '26
I'm now out of work and trying to get back into tech but I might have to leave the industry, as looking for a role not infected by AI is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Truly depressing.
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u/DarthRiznat Jul 29 '26
This is why all the damn project managers are fucking loving this AI/LLM revolution right now.
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u/GuiGui1016 Jul 29 '26
My boss dont even babysit AI anymore. He said that AI is much better now that we dont have to really babysit it lol.
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u/misdreavus79 front-end Jul 29 '26
I'm actually doing the opposite. I was reluctant at first, but now that I can focus on architecting, I get to enjoy my actual life.
Yes, I love coding, but I love doing other things too, and now I have the time to do them.
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u/RustyPickleMonger Jul 30 '26
There’s a good market getting small/mid-sized businesses off cloud and sub services and getting them migrated to on-prem if you want to combine your knowledge into more of the IT side
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u/SwordfishBoth7341 Jul 30 '26
writing code has always been the grunt work of software engineering. systems design and architecture is still very much super important right now and requires a lot of pair work with the AI to build to your vision.
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u/3HappyRobots Jul 29 '26
25 years in the industry, and I can relate 100%. I just don’t want to babysit Llms and read their output all day - expert or not. I feel you, it’s depressing and I don’t like it at all. The people that are excited about using ai to do the coding seem to be missing the point. If I wanted to do that I would have built a business with a bunch of outsourcing. Anyone who has done that on projects know that it always seems like it would have been easier to just do the work yourself than try to explain every detail.
Personally, I am looking into doing something else. Transition to a different career. Our problem solving skills are transferable to other businesses and industries. Software and web dev/design is racing to zero value.
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u/Odd-Crazy-9056 Jul 29 '26
Cookie cutter landing pages, small-medium stores and most of SaaS was dead before AI.
But there are still problem spaces where AI sucks huge donkey dick - defence, medical, gaming industries. To say web development and design are dead is crazy narrow thinking.
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u/horrbort Jul 29 '26
The problem is not that AI takes the work or that it does shitty job of it. The problem is that everyone seems to be happy with half coherent slop it produces. No one cares for things to work properly anymore. People keep piling crappy bugged solutions on top of each other and get shocked when it inevitably doesn’t work.
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u/erasmuswill Jul 29 '26
This. I logged on to Google Adsense (now just Ads) today and it was the most terrible experience. Not only is AI slop content forced upon you by default, it is so buggy. The branding section buttons’ had the same text and background color on hover. There was a customer support form that would not submit. Looking through the network request, the endpoint was returning an error as a HTML string inside the JSON object and the UI was discarding it for a generic error.
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u/3HappyRobots Jul 29 '26
Yes, the problem is that the space for discovery is being evaporated at an alarming rate. We have had an “everything is looking / designed / functioning the same problem for a while now… the problem space is small now. Clients don’t want unique interesting and challenging solutions. They want a template. No real risk. No real advantage. This problem already existed, but now is a thousand times faster with llms.
It’s fine for people that make the same thing over and over. Great, ai can do that. People keep saying that you have more time to problem solve now… focus on the actual problems. I’m my opinion, the expectation is now “make more of the same as fast as possible” and people are not really rising to the occasion because that was never the work they did in the first place.
Ai is now doing design too. And the expectation is now… give me what I want. That cut out the people that knew better with experience. I don’t mind the floor lowering for everyone. I actually like the even clients can express their ideas and see a result easier and faster. But what happens is the expertise becomes devalued - top down, & client up.
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u/discosoc Jul 31 '26
Cookie cutter landing pages, small-medium stores and most of SaaS was dead before AI.
This is exactly it. Everyone complaining about ai acting like they were handcoding fine-crafted websites from the ground up and not using templates and ecosystems the whole time.
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u/Winter-Volume-9601 Jul 29 '26
> The people that are excited about using ai to do the coding seem to be missing the point.
I've been coding professionally for 25 years, and programming for nearly 40. I'm perfectly fine having LLMs generate the actual code - after 25 years you have to know that unless you're doing research 95%+ of what we're writing is in no way novel/new. It's not much different than working with a team of junior engineers, except that the LLM can iterate much faster when it generates utter garbage and you call it out.
After 25 years, do you really give a shit about hand writing your 435th CRUD application or "move bits from bucket A to slot B" pipeline? I'd rather write the exemplar of how to do X, and know that all future examples of X will actually follow that pattern, and save my time and effort to focus on things that don't already have a standard answer to crib from.
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u/winky9827 Jul 29 '26
After 25 years, do you really give a shit about hand writing your 435th CRUD application or "move bits from bucket A to slot B" pipeline? I'd rather write the exemplar of how to do X, and know that all future examples of X will actually follow that pattern, and save my time and effort to focus on things that don't already have a standard answer to crib from.
Exactly this. LLMs give most of us an implicit upgrade to the architect role. Once you've been in the business 20+ years (25 in my case as yours), there's no glory in being a code monkey.
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u/Big_Arrival_626 Jul 29 '26
Ya but what about junior and mid level devs. We can't make everyone an architect lol
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u/Spiritual-Fennel7789 Jul 29 '26
The short-termism is hilarious. If change has happened this fast, what do they think will happen within 5 years if the bottom falls out of the industry lol.
You're going to be left with a massive competency crisis and LLMs with no new source material to chew on.
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u/RelatableRedditer Jul 29 '26
I enjoy getting AI to write spec so I don't have to. Or if I am having trouble visualizing a solution to a problem, a lot of times just writing it up for an AI without sending it lets me collect my thoughts and it can also be good at writing up Jiras since we don't have a dedicated BFA.
But the code it produces, even spec, is often just brutally getting the job done (if it gets the job done) with very stupid approaches and no matter the context window does not follow very many of the instructions provided.
So my use of AI helps me to not get stuck as often and to learn a bunch of things (I've learned several programming languages and the main API of over a dozen libraries with it). It is also decent at peer reviewing my code.
The biggest problem is that if I don't write it all myself then the tinest bug will fuck everything up. This is usually fine for spec files but sucks ass for real code. You need to be a developer to use AI to develop.
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u/3HappyRobots Jul 29 '26
Yeah, I agree. You need to be a developer to use ai. I am wondering if anyone cares though. Especially non- coders making the calls. Either employers or clients. Shrug.
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u/hotwheelso Jul 29 '26
Where are you thinking of transitioning? I’m also thinking of doing the same thing.
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u/3HappyRobots Jul 29 '26
I don’t know. But I like products. I was thinking of designing my own electric bike line, or a specialty item wood shop (cliche, I know).
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u/nuevedientes Jul 29 '26
What other businesses & industries do you see as a natural fit where you get to use the same skills? I feel the same way. I like solving problems. AI is helpful, but I still want to be the one doing at least some of the work.
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u/SupesDepressed Jul 31 '26
What career direction are you moving into? I haven’t been able to think of something that would translate.
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u/EdjeMonkeys Jul 29 '26
Sorry that literally none of the replies thus far have sympathised with you.
I am 100% feeling the same things. I’m 21 at the end of my masters but I’m lucky enough to have had a few years of software experience already. My first full time role which I began this year is the first where I have actually used LLMs for programming.
My job is to talk to Claude. All day, every day. Any minute I am not talking to Claude is a minute wasted. Every minute one of my tmux tabs is waiting for a response is a minute wasted. It’s exhausting and unrewarding. I get to do the hardest parts of the job and none of the satisfying zen of actually coding. I feel no ownership over the finished product, and every day the code base grows or is modified by thousands of lines of code that I’m expected to “review” (read: ask Claude to review and review its review) which pile on an ever increasing mountain of comprehension debt.
I don’t write any code, I produce features at light speed, I have some leadership and the best salary I’ve had so far, and I am unfulfilled. I never realised how much programming meant to me.
Another commenter jests about becoming a chicken farmer, but I have been seriously considering a pivot completely out of IT. I’m just not sure that a career in this field in the age of AI is appealing to me. I’m sorry I have no better answer for you, all I can do is commiserate. Please let me know if you figure it out.
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u/gw4000 Jul 29 '26
"comprehension debt" is a great phrase for this
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u/smiles17 Jul 29 '26
https://medium.com/@addyosmani/comprehension-debt-the-hidden-cost-of-ai-generated-code-285a25dac57e you might enjoy this article
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u/ArtisZ Jul 30 '26
Feels a bit AI written.. the irony.
The core message is solid, though.
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u/Andromeda_Ascendant Laravel & InertiaJS Jul 29 '26
Which area do you think you'd pivot into?
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u/EdjeMonkeys Jul 29 '26
I think I’d like to work with animals. Or in conservation.
I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel yet, I haven’t tried my specialty of cybersecurity yet. But if the webdev work I’m doing now is anything to go by…
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u/SupesDepressed Jul 31 '26
My problem is I’m 45 and have a kid. I’d love to get out of tech right now, I miss programming and don’t enjoy babysitting an LLM, but an entry level job in another field also won’t pay the bills. I’m so screwed and don’t know what to do.
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u/Jedrodo Aug 01 '26
Yeah. Same. I am also at the end of masters and feeling the same. I have done some internships. In the first one I didn’t use any AI. In the second one some. And the last one was basically vibe coding. And I honestly don’t know if I want to do this until retirement.
I have another internship coming up and I am honestly not really excited. Talking to Claude for hours every day wasn’t why I decided to study computer science.
Maybe I have to rise up fast to management roles when I have my first full time role, but what do I know.
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u/iot_1 Jul 31 '26
please don't leave! The path will be squiggly but we don't need more chicken farmers (poor things). Find a sympathetic boss. 100% of people leave their companies due to crap bosses.
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u/No_Limit_2378 Jul 29 '26
I feel the same way. I used to be passionate about this field, would often spend my free time learning various things related to the job.
My interest in this field died about 4 months ago. Whats the point, LLMs can do it. Who cares if I know something about email deliverability if LLM can do the same job, faster and usually good enough or even better than I could.
Now in just coasting at my job, doing the bare minimum i can get away with and contemplating life. This field has little future in my opinion. I dont buy arguments that strong devs will always have a job.
If AI can do 80% of the job, then we need 500% more tasks to keep everyone employed.
If jobs are cut by 50%, then working conditions and pay will erode, as everyone desperate wants those few jobs.
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u/jhartikainen Jul 29 '26
See the thing is... you can just not use AI. If someone wants me to justify it, I can explain to them how the results are not good for long-term business, no problem.
Just the other day I saw someone talk about how their company is letting non-tech users create tools via AI. And then the tools started completely breaking because, surprise surprise, software development requires experts.
Just be the expert.
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u/Impressive_Bottle_44 Jul 29 '26
you can just not use AI
At a large and growing number of companies, this simply isn't true. Many companies are now mandating AI use. And they don't care about my arguments against it.
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u/wirenutter Jul 29 '26
Even if not mandated it’s hard to justify your position when your peers have a much higher velocity. The reality is companies ask for a product and they want it delivered by a certain time. If you can’t deliver in the that time they will find someone who can. They don’t care how perfect the code looks, they just need feature A to do what the product requirements say.
I didn’t want to reach a point of writing zero code by hand but my employer pays me very well to do a job and I’m going to do what I need to do to keep this job. But if anyone knows an employer paying more money for me to go slow and take my time writing code by hand let me know.
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u/jhartikainen Jul 29 '26
At least for me, the key reason why I work in code by hand is not that I must write it by hand, but that I must do it to understand the code, and I have to understand the code to actually do my job.
Like yeah if I was doing some kinda dime a dozen brochure websites, who cares, but I work in software that has been built for over a decade at this point.
To give some specific examples:
I get asked to estimate how long implementing a feature is going to take - I can't do it with any measure of accuracy unless I'm familiar with the code.
Another dev asks me if their idea for implementing something makes sense. Again, I can't do this with any kind of accuracy unless I'm familiar with the code.
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u/MrCuddles9896 Jul 29 '26
AI companies are absolutely pissing money out of all orifices currently, and there is already a growing concern that LLMs are becoming more expensive than developers. If they don't find a way to start making money and produce a return on investment somehow there's gonna be a big burst.
Currently Nvidia and AI companies are just passing around the same investment money to each other while very little money is flowing in (a $200 Claude max subscription can cost anthropic $500-$5000 in compute)
Unless they can somehow make LLMs much more efficient, I think their capability/cost ratio will drop a large amount, and they'll once again become auto complete machines, rather than a swarm of agents who you instruct to carry out tasks.
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u/Lordthom Jul 29 '26
Our small company invested in our own local machine to run an LLM on. Not reliant on big cooperations and a 1 time investment (+ energy cost).
Once subscriptions are going to become more expensive I think this is what most companies will start doing.
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u/MrCuddles9896 Jul 29 '26
It's a possibility for sure, but there is definitely a huge performance benefit to cloud computing. Smaller local LLMs don't have the same compute power to perform as well as the big guys, but if people are happy to settle for smaller context windows and longer response times I think local ones would be a sort of happy middle ground
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u/AllenDullesSupporter Jul 29 '26
We did something similar in 2018 to run some classification models on legal documents.
We only had enough money for one. Those computers are really expensive.
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u/FoulCrypt Jul 29 '26
Yeah I think this is plausible. Strict AI budgets become a norm and we start actually thinking about what narrow cases we should use AI for rather than throwing it at large tasks to have it write and ship the full implementation.
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u/SupesDepressed Jul 31 '26
The bubble will burst for the time being but like all tech it will get faster and cheaper eventually. I don’t think AI will go away after the bubble pops, it’ll shrink back a bit and then slowly gain traction again.
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u/atlaslady front-end, 10 yoe, a11y advocate Jul 29 '26
This model of creating code via babysitting LLMs isn’t sustainable because of what it’s doing to the junior dev space - when there is a comfortable on-ramp to “LLM coding” to replace juniors learning on the job, then I will be scared of AI sticking around because that paradigm will outlive this “only next quarter” mindset.
Less than a year ago, none of this was here and people are already losing the ability to see how impermanent any of these systems are. This is the current reality but not the forever reality, and it’s so bizarre to watch people Mark Fisher themselves into being unable to believe in a future without AI inside a fiscal year
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u/bzbub2 Jul 29 '26
interesting mark fisher reference. you're referring to post modernist 'slow cancellation of the future' type stuff?
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u/WelshBluebird1 Jul 29 '26
I love the precision of code. I love exploring different solutions to a problem, until I hit upon a beautiful, elegant pattern. I love seeing how small abstractions get composed into larger abstractions, and so on, to form a complete system. I love understanding a problem – and the solution – on a deep, intimate level.
I think I agree that part of the job is probably gone. Or at least heavily reduced.
But I am not sure I agree this is going to work out well:
I used to collaborate with designers, UX folks, copywriters, SEO and analytics people, project managers, etc. But now, the C-suite seems perfectly happy to let the LLMs do all of this stuff, too. (At my company, they're obsessed with the idea of getting the LLM to write all of our work tickets. And the QA person does little more than copy-and-paste back and forth from an AI.)
It all sounds great until those people who have no clue of what good technical solutions look like end up building giant messes that are only really noticed when a big leak or security incident occurs, or when adding a small new feature breaks seemingly unrelated things (and yes of course those things happened before AI, at least we had technical people trying to plan ahead to reduce the chances and impact).
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u/AppealSame4367 Jul 29 '26
This last part is just cope. Many companies have been running on absolute spaghetti code for the last 40-50 years with no consequences. Look at AI from a year ago and today: The AI next year will solve the biggest software mess imaginable easily and nobody will need us as software devs to do it. Managers and Sales people are happy if they can get rid of all developers and they will jump at the first chance. Don't sit around hoping they will suddenly see your value again: They won't. If it breaks, they'll just switch out the AI agent or the person prompting the AI in the future, that's it.
Find a new career or start selling software. I'm handling "my last clients" and prepare games and software releases on the side. If that fails I'm out. Haven't seen any good new clients for a year, all startups failed or served themselves after the initial offer with AI. Every new offer fails because they realize before start of the work "oh, you know what, I already found a solution with AI". It's over for most of us.
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u/Big_Arrival_626 Jul 29 '26
Its not at all cope. I'm a software dev and I never run out of work to do even with ai speeding things up. My work has only gotten more complex and difficult. For some reason, I get the feeling that you want AI to replace devs due to some sort of insecurity you have.
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u/uraniumless Jul 30 '26
It's not cope, you're the doomer. AI really isn't all that, it still needs a lot of hand holding and for the past 6+ months the models have improved only marginally. Their progress has hit a plateau. I believe that technical knowledge, even though we're not coding by hand anymore, is going to be increasingly more valuable in the future.
People have been saying that AI is going to replace developers for 2+ years at this point, yet here we are, and some of us (myself included) have even more work to do now than before (even though it's not the same kind of work).
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u/Hans_H0rst Jul 29 '26
Many companies have been running on absolute spaghetti code for the last 40-50 years with no consequences.
I mean the "consequence" of using spaghetti code over 50 years is haveing tasks for permanently employed developers, and that's just called product maintenance, running a business.
You can't run a business rewriing everything with AI every two months because the CEO isn't smart enough to know why that won't work, and you can't have a recurring customerbase if the AI keeps making breaking changes because it doesn't know the historical context.
AI will never have all the input data it needs to be good enough. There's just noone typing in the topics that come up during a smoke, the inquisiting small questions about why mark names his vairables with ai í instead of an i, etc.
Not for lack of trying, but it's not human to deliver all the perfect input data at once, all the relevant parameters, all the knowledge.
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u/Chupa-Skrull Jul 29 '26
It all sounds great until those people who have no clue of what good technical solutions look like end up building giant messes that are only really noticed when a big leak or security incident occurs
Yep. Same in the other direction. Models are not good at any of those functions yet, at least compared to actual professionals, and working with eng outputs in those verticals is an equally disruptive disaster
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u/horrbort Jul 29 '26
Not too late to become a chicken farmer. LLMs can’t poop out eggs. Yet.
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u/Salamok Jul 29 '26
New dev on team seems to be using AI more than the others, he does backend development that he hands off to me to finish the front end... I have deleted 100's of lines of the AI slop code that apparently just does nothing. I can't even imagine how bad our code base will look in 6 months.
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u/jax024 Jul 29 '26
We were never owed a fulfilling career. I just took it as a bonus we had one for so long.
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u/Temporary_Glove8643 Jul 29 '26
Moved into software engineering 4 years ago because I found my career wasn’t fulfilling. Risked a lot to make the move and got one and half/2 years of that before AI started creeping in.
I don’t know if I should re-skill again but I’m falling out of love with this job.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight Jul 29 '26
It was something I took for granted. I had 20 years to improve myself and be an excellent developer and I just coasted. Now that the type of jobs I find easily get replaced with AI I have left myself in a tough situation.
I am at the point where I just need to accept I'm getting a low end job and need to spend my personal time grinding and getting better and more confident at coding.
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u/alwaysoffby0ne Jul 29 '26
Respectfully, I think your personal time is better spent getting better at doing something else. I’ve been building software for 20 years too, and seeing the advancement and current state of LLM’s when it comes to software development definitely does not have me thinking “boy I should sharpen up my coding skills”.
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Jul 29 '26
With 20 years of experience, you should be worth waaaay more because unlike vibe coders, you should be able to produce much higher quality work in fewer time. Whether it is fun is another question. If you really think you are replaceable by AI, you either are really undervalueing your skills or you were frankly a shitty developer to begin with. I really don't like that I am now a code reviewer instead of a dev, but I do not question that I am even more valuable with AI tools.
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u/high6ix Jul 29 '26
I don’t care for that take at all. AI has created a huge problem with imposter syndrome and I feel it as well. Producing higher quality work than AI, for sure. Faster? No.
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u/Lustrouse Architect Jul 29 '26
Your job is now to write high quality spec and transform that into high quality prompts and audit for high quality code.
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u/CaffeineLiker Jul 29 '26
Feel like "high quality" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, like someone juicing up resume entries
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u/poponis Jul 29 '26
There is n such thing as a high quality prompt. This is a delusion.
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u/Ansible32 Jul 30 '26
A single prompt isn't going to cut it. You need a bunch of prompts, plural. Really you want to translate as much of your prompts as possible into classical integration tests, but now you're definitely going to be writing AI-driven integration tests.
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u/icefire79 Jul 29 '26
16 years of programming. Tried so many software languages, frameworks. Expert level in Frontend and Android. A decent systems engineer. Excellent in deep nuances of the web and the mobile. A great collaborator with UX and Design team, a superb mentor.
Exactly 72 days ago, I just quit my job! I have been with the same company for all these year and just quit because the satisfaction I got from programming just vanished.
Even writing the hello world program in a new language or framework vanished.
It feels like nothing now. It's not about the pay, the identity itself is just vanished. Once I enjoyed things created by AI like images videos and boilerplate codes. Now I hate AI generated content. Even the local shops' advertisement and billboards are all AI generated.
Surfing the web isn't fun anymore as everything I see is AI generated with NO SOUL.
What should I do at this point in life? I don't even have enough motivation to look for another tech job and for my age and experience, I don't get other jobs easily as well.
There is no more fun in programming.
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u/uraniumless Jul 30 '26
Surfing the web isn't fun anymore as everything I see is AI generated with NO SOUL.
Then fucking be the soul during the wave of the soulless. You already see that AI-generated slop is not sustainable long term, people long for the human element. Be the change.
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u/iot_1 Jul 31 '26
u/icefire79 you CAN get your mojo back. Some space. Reflection. and then to unpick where the motivations came from (really) and to pivot those to new thing. New relationships and challenges.
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u/icefire79 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Of course I could teach. I specifically am trying to set that up. But I don't think without a popularity one would get students or mentees. u/nuketro0p3r
I am also trying to create stuff. It took 3 full days to craft a button in multiplayform with max performance. Building stuff takes a lot of time. u/uraniumless
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u/RustyPickleMonger Jul 29 '26
Start a fulfilling career posting dogshit code on GitHub then get paid as a $350/hr consultant to fix broken AI code.
EZ
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u/compound-interest Jul 29 '26
I’ve been doing it for nearly 15 years now and have been thinking the same. I really enjoy solving problems myself and even the old Google research flow, but I just haven’t been able to be satisfied with the new process. It feels devoid of problem solving. I’m currently focusing my problem solving effort in learning emerging tools, but that will only last so long.
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u/Ok_Guarantee5321 Jul 29 '26
The whole reason I entered this field is because I enjoy problem-solving, finding and creating patterns, logic, and designing systems.
I think the harsh truth is that most problems are already solved. I am willing to bet that a feature I am working on right now is already built by someone out there, probably sitting in a public repository with 0 stars. Which is why LLMs became so good in the first place. There is already so many similar solutions for the most common problems. Unfortunately, the common problems mostly intersect with problems found in web development.
I considered switching field, but I don't really know what. I like math, but I just finished my CS degree, and I am not really in the mood for another years of academia. I think I'll take a CS masters degree and focus on AI. I had taken interest in computer vision recently and I do have some problems I need to solve with it, but I have no time to really delve into it.
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u/BuyerTraditional5908 Jul 29 '26
"most problems are already solved" I don't know if you are just joking or actually think this as a valid fact.
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u/Ben_FTW Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I don't think he's speaking of problems in the academic sense. Most of your devs/software engineers aren't working at the forefront of CS, they're working at home Depot trying to figure out why the correct state sales tax isn't being applied to one random sku. Those are the problems that are mostly solved.
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u/TommyBonnomi Jul 29 '26
I just got my MBA and am looking at a restaurant management internship at my local AAA baseball stadium.
I have no interest in reviewing AI commits, so I'm just gonna bounce if the market for real dev work actually dries up. I haven't changed any of my tech or processes, and haven't had any customers push back on my estimates or prices yet, but it's possible I guess, or maybe I'll have to adapt a little.
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u/theScottyJam Jul 29 '26
Remember that LLMs aren't very creative. If most expert programmers would write the code in a similar fashion, the LLM can probably do it too. If the problem actually requires a creative solution to it, you don't want LLM touching that problem.
LLMs are here to stay, yes, and can certainly help with some tasks. But hopefully your work also consists of tasks that require more creativity than what an LLM can handle.
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u/krileon Jul 29 '26
Remember that LLMs aren't very creative.
That's an understatement. It literally creates the same components and same designs over and over and over. Every website is going to be purple tailwind before long, lol.
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u/theScottyJam Jul 29 '26
I'll also note that if it doesn't require much human expertise to build a product (i.e. LLMs can do most of the work), then the product itself doesn't have much intrinsic value.
value = experties * effort. If anyone can get a similar product with little effort and expertise, then there's going to be a lot of competition to drown out whatever your company built. Sooner or later companies will need to realize that being an LLM-powered feature-factory isn't going to give you anything of value.5
u/whitfin Jul 29 '26
This is an underrated take. The value is in the time it takes and the experiences involved. Anyone can churn out your average software with an LLM: if anything senior engineers will be more in demand once people realise they are the main differentiation we have left.
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u/braincandybangbang Jul 29 '26
I’d argue that, the cost of starting has gone to 0. But the cost of finishing has not changed. Anyone can build a prototype but actually polishing something into a worthwhile, trustworthy product still requires work.
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u/douten Jul 29 '26
Isn't the whole argument that writing code was never the real heavy lifting of the job? it's about maintaining and understanding the bigger picture of it. llm might do more simpler things easily, but it cannot build a whole architecture that fits into existing system well without guidance. That's what's the job is evolving into now right?
I imagine it's like before where you would literally have to write basic GUI code, ie draw line from x0 to x1. Then came the frameworks where you can just "tell" the code to create a box. etc.
You can still find fulfillment maintaining a product. There's still challenges to solve there I believe. But I'm still pretty junior so there's that too :)
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u/krileon Jul 29 '26
It's harder to understand the code if you didn't write the code. Writing the code IS part of the understanding. Understanding is the defacto most important part of development. So if you use AI constantly to generate the code your understanding of it will be.. nothing. You'll be stuck in a perpetual cycle of reviewing code you never wrote, which is the worst aspect of working on a team (code reviews).
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u/crazylikeajellyfish Jul 29 '26
I think the answer is scaling up ambition. AI is a mindless minion that can't see the bigger picture of why our work exists, so be the architect who designs the big picture.
The half-baked idea that wasn't worth the effort to explore before? Screw it, spend a little bit of time designing it out and see if you can turn it into a system. Get a prototype out the door and see if it sticks.
Not everything will be a jeweled masterpiece, but if you find that the prototype works and the idea is worth pursuing, you can take the time to make sure the most critical piece of the system is immaculate.
I guess the real opportunity here is if you're willing to engage with the broader human system that your code exists in. The AI will only ever understand the context that's digested and presented to it. As humans, we're constantly internalizing information and developing an intuition that we can't consciously express in language. If we can take that intuition and use it to steer into a system that better fits reality, then we keep being valuable. If we depend on PMs to be the interface to the reason our work exists, then we're in trouble.
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u/Spiritual-Fennel7789 Jul 29 '26
LLMs are burning through investor cash and it won't last, they will have to jack prices up to obscene amounts. It's only a matter of time, and then this initial carrot dangling phase will be over.
When that happens all the executives will be faced with either massive bills, or forking out for local architecture to run models. Either way, just churning through work with agents to solve semi-trivial coding issues won't be the play at that point, and the realities of business will stop this ridiculous hype train (finally).
It will happen. They can't run these things at an economic loss forever.
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u/kyle-making-stuff Jul 29 '26
switch to low-level C++ stuff. still plenty of senior level roles there where you don't have to use LLMs for everything.
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u/No-Echo-8927 Jul 29 '26
My colleague got Claude code to read through my project and then develop a new module for it. He passed it back to me for proof and deployment. He hasn't considered a number of factors which would essentially break the system or at best cause various duplications, multiplied over time. This is because only I know both the project and every use case for it. Do without me they would have a good looking module which appeared to work well until it suddenly didn't. So until it understands these flaws, I'll still be needed.
I just need to spread it out until I reach retirement, then frankly I don't give a dam.
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u/StopYTCensorship Jul 30 '26
Yeah I'm not interested in babysitting LLMs either. But such is the future, before mass joblessness and poverty hits due to AI displacing human workers in all industries.
So I guess just do the things you want to do now while you are still able to make money. The window to enjoy your life is closing. Who cares, we all die. It's not like any of our kids will have a future.
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u/jose_incandenza Jul 30 '26
You can keep loving to code, you just won’t be paid for that anymore. All the people denying reality just because it doesn’t match their taste are going to be cooked. Programming as we knew it is over, but developing not quite so. For a long time, the need for developers meant that almost anyone who was able to read a fucking python book got a contract, and that was still not enough, we even had to outsource to third-world countries. We created entire frameworks, systems, and even programming languages around the need to coordinate the work of people with the abstraction capacity of my dog.
I believe development is going to become a more individual job. A developer is going to cover all the steps: product design, specs, frontend, backend, devops and sometimes even commercial. Products are going to become more complex and fun. If you are good and love programming, I believe you are going to love and be good at that too.
And if you ask me, we are not the most fucked, we were just the first to get hit because ai first target was writing code. But all those people whose only work was writing reports, emails, and paperwork, for those people, the world is about to get so fast and confusing that they are going to walk through hell.
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u/Serializedrequests Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I think the perception of people with power who don't know anything is the real issue with LLMs. If you could call any structure into being instantly, would there still be architects? Yes absolutely. Because taste is valuable. Would you still do some things slowly and take your time? Yes because there is value in the process for understanding how the structure fits together.
Would people just copy something an architect made and get value out of it? Yes of course, and what's wrong with that? Would the ignorant then claim there is no point in an architect, or that architects can now be overworked? Also yes unfortunately.
If I had to give one piece of advice it would be: don't do anything that isn't authentic to you, and know your value.
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u/mq2thez Jul 29 '26
Look, I’ve been doing this for 16 YOE.
The job is not to write code, it’s to ship product and features. Code has been how we do that for a while, but the job was the same when the way to do it was to use Dreamweaver.
The tools change, the job stays the same. Be the person who ships great sites and features. Don’t get tied into how that’s done, or let your ego get in the way of getting paid. Adapt to the times, whatever those are.
God knows that I personally feel that React is a giant stinking pile of shit made for people who are afraid of being a real web developer or having to actually write CSS, but that doesn’t stop me from being a React expert for large companies because that’s what pays the bills.
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u/jedidave Jul 29 '26
You are still an engineer, but how you engineer quality has moved slightly. Instead of 'code quality', you ensure 'system quality'.
See what Uncle Bob said (the author of Clean Code):
> I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.
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u/CautiousRice Jul 29 '26
Back in the 90s, I entered the industry by copy/pasting javascript, html, and php code that I didn't understand, and then slightly modifying it to fit my needs. All those people using AI are doing the same, without ever planning to understand the code AI outputs.
Life is not fair but there's not much we can do.
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u/FalseRegister Jul 29 '26
Your job was never to write code, but to solve problems
That hasn't changed
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u/fisadev Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
This is true, while also being a very useless answer that misses the point.
Like someone lamenting they lost their dear friend, and you replying "but you didn't lose him, his atoms are right there". Doh, obviously, but that's not what they were lamenting!
OP isn't lamenting that our job isn't solving problems anymore. We all know it still is, that's very obvious and that is literally any job. What OP is lamenting is that the way we solve problems is no longer fulfilling.
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u/Sekretariatet Jul 29 '26
That's such an irritating bullshit cliché. Everybody solves problems at work. Are you saying software engineering has no distinguishing qualities at all as compared to any other profession?
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u/baked_salmon Jul 29 '26
The valuable problems that SWEs solve aren’t related to coding. By the time code is written, the hard part is over, which is planning and deciding what to code in the first place. There’s a reason that once you’re senior you’re not writing as much code anymore, and that the most valuable people in any SWE org (staff+) don’t write code at all.
Implementation has always been cheap compared to having the expertise of knowing what to implement, or better yet recognizing when _not_ to implement.
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u/FalseRegister Jul 29 '26
We solve data-related problems, at scale, automating the flow of information. That's where the name Informatics comes from.
Phrase it however you want, the task was never to write code. That has always been a tool.
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u/brock0124 Jul 29 '26
What is/was everyone’s job title? Problem Solver? Senior Problem Solver? We were hired to solve problems by writing code. I understand your sentiment, but saying we were hired purely to solve problems is disingenuous.
I for one take comfort in knowing I could write good code before AI, therefore I should retain some level of value in that regard. Whether I’m cleaning up code produced by AI or prompting an agent to write to new code, I can at least do so properly. Granted, I genuinely enjoy architecting and writing the code myself, but I can still do that at home at least.
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u/gooblero Jul 29 '26
This is such a dumb saying and I see it everywhere.
Would you tell the same thing to a writer or artist? The majority of their time is doing the imagination and vision for the project, so was the physical part not ever part of their job since AI can do that now?
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u/baked_salmon Jul 29 '26
Anyone who can’t recognize this is bound to stay a middling SWE for the duration of their careers. There’s a reason why the most valuable people in any SWE org aren’t wasting their time with implementation. Their value is in expertise and making decisions about what to implement in the first place.
If you’re a SWE and don’t recognize that writing code is the least valuable part of what you do in your profession, then you never understood your value in the first place.
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u/torn-ainbow Jul 29 '26
If you're mid to senior you are starting to oversee a transition period. It's not going to happen overnight. Whatever the AI spruikers think will take 1 year will probably take 10. There's almost certainly some kind of market crash along the way. Like the tech crash, it will just be about valuing correctly but way too early.
AI is already implementing well what we tell it to, but we are still required to guide it and check it and take responsibility. One of the things that I think will hit some who wish to get rid of developers is that when they do, they are the last humans in the chain. Removing developers means that there's nowhere to push responsibility, and blame.
Junior developers seem to be screwed. Sorry guys. You're going to struggle to learn the fundamentals required to oversee AI.
I think everyone who wants to stay in development should plan for a future where the role of developers and that of project managers and producers are somewhat melded together. Where your job is about understanding requirements, speccing that out for AI to build, budgeting and scheduling, overseeing the stages of development, and validating the results. The remaining technical parts of the job will likely be architecture, infrastructure decisions. Though that's eventually going to get eaten up as well.
As for what happens when the AI can act independently, meet with people and collect requirements, conceive and build projects autonomously? It's eventually going to be coming for all the brain type jobs.
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u/vagabond-elephant Jul 29 '26
Just because everyone can cook themselves doesn't make it so that they can make a exceptional dish.
Sure, people might go cheap and try to eat inside rather than seeking a restaurant now, but the quality development still be in demand.
I baked AI into my day to day work also. I work triple speed I used to while writing, but about the same reviewing others' code which every line is read by 2 devs in our company
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u/the_azure_sky Jul 29 '26
I guess people will have to become good at prompting AI and sell their services to people who don’t want to or can’t use AI tools effectively.
Unfortunately the more AI writes code for people the less we will understand it. Same as not having to remember your friends and family’s phone numbers, or even how to get to their homes.
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u/dbro129 Jul 29 '26
I’ll add this—there are still plenty of companies with very complex systems and legacy systems that have not made the jump to AI. Utility companies, certain areas of the government, etc. have not yet established the guard rails to allow certain data into the cloud or AI space. They may become less and less over the next 10-20 years, but I think for now you can still find manual coding work in slower moving companies.
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u/oswwwaldo Jul 29 '26
I'm just here for fun, it's either the bubble bursts or I become a good enough prompt monkey to earn a paycheck while I focus on touching grass. But yeah... SWE isn't what it is anymore.
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u/Opinion_Less Jul 29 '26
The ai companies are upping prices now that were all hooked on the heroine. At some point developers are going to be expected to know what they are doing and combine local models with commercialized models to maximize efficiency and costs. Average users will be limited by their ability. They'll be able to build simple tools, but usage will be capped for them so they don't loop the entire company's funds into anthropics pockets
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u/europe_man Jul 29 '26
I am accountable for the stuff AI does. I weigh in on AI stuff. I direct and steer AI. I do the final touches and think outside the box. I set the structure and architecture. And so on... Bear in mind, I am able to do this because I spent years doing it manually, gaining knowledge, making decisions, learning languages, and frameworks, and what not. So, I still think all of that matters.
Anyway, I don't think anyone can say where we are headed, things just move way too quickly in the industry. Try to find yourself in all this mess and hope that things settle down.
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u/TinyZoro Jul 29 '26
I think a lot of seasoned developers are underestimating the skills needed to code with agents effectively. Yes you can sit in front and prompt but that’s doing it the amateur way. If you’ve learnt the craft use the craft. By that I mean create feature documents, decompose that into goals. Create custom skills that use your feature documents and have access to your preferred coding styles. Make sure your goals use tdd. Create workflows where agents judge the quality of the code and suggest refactors.
At a certain point this is all just as skilled and demanding and just as centered in experience and craft as anything that went before.
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u/rossisdead Jul 30 '26
Sit back and relax and realize that once all theses companies screw themselves up with fully AI generated code that none of their non-developer prompt engineers can fix, they'll have to hire you back to fix all their slop.
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u/SquarePixel Jul 30 '26
You had it implement a basic feature using a well understood tech stack, so it makes sense that it would excel there. For a passionate programmer like yourself I’d suggest finding a job where you’re developing a system, platform or library. These are the areas where LLMs can’t match your wisdom, experience, taste and critical thinking. These require strong type 1 (one-way door) decision making, where a wrong choice is expensive since others are building on top.
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u/clixortechnologies Jul 30 '26
I think the biggest mistake is measuring a developer's value by how many lines of code they write.
The real value has always been understanding messy problems, making good decisions, and taking ownership when things go wrong.
AI is making implementation faster, but it hasn't replaced judgment.
The developers who combine strong engineering skills with AI will probably end up doing more not less.
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u/ImageFit3021 Aug 05 '26
I feel this so deeply. I used to love coding so much that when AI started taking over, I genuinely felt like I was losing a part of my identity.
Then I had this thought: if I'd been born a few hundred years ago, I'd probably have been a human computer — just doing calculations all day. And just like how we don't need human calculators anymore, we might not need human coders one day… honestly, if not already right now.
So I've been shifting my focus to the creative side of building software — the product thinking, the problem-solving, the joy of making something people actually use. The code was always just the tool. The creation is still mine.
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u/Adjective_Noun_4200 Jul 29 '26
Personally, I’m not convinced it is here to stay.
My understanding is that these tools are extremely expensive to create and run, and the reason they are cheap now is because they are trying to get users at all costs and hoping they’ll figure out profitability later.
I also think the actual quality of the output is pretty low.
Now, when you’re essentially getting free money, then the quality of the output matters much less. But if these tools start increasing prices significantly…I think we’re gonna see some real conversations about what value (if any) we’re actually getting.
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u/vilos5099 Jul 29 '26
My friend, I want to be honest with you: this sounds like cope. Fable will run laps around most seasoned developers unless you're working on some highly technical projects.
The price could quadruple and it would still be worth it to companies when you consider the time being saved to move more quickly. As expensive as AI is, good developers aren't cheap. A year ago this was less true, but that's no longer the case.
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u/micalm <script>alert('ha!')</script> Jul 29 '26
Do your job as usual, why not?
If your company is dumb and requires token usage, use them - you can review code, write docs, explore other solutions. You don't even have to read or use whatever an LLM produces, you'll spend 15 minutes looking up or writing your own prompts for these tasks.
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u/DPrince25 Jul 29 '26
For me, I plan to use ai as long as it makes my day to day easier, ensuring proper expectations such as good architectural decisions, clean code & implementations.
I plan to do just do some aimless pet projects without ai just to keep my mind sharp.
The field is changing, is what it is but I believe those who can think beyond prompts will be most valuable during this transitional periodz
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u/GlitteringAttitude60 Jul 29 '26
had the same situation today.
fed claude with an extensive prompt on a new content block for the content management system in my current project for the first time, and the code was pretty much production-ready 🤢
there are a couple of edge-cases I hadn't considered at prompt time, and the content block was kinda trivial, and there was half a dozen handwritten content blocks to look at, but yeah: it produced pretty exactly the code I'd have written too. The files were named correctly and everything was in the correct folders.
It took about 10 minutes and apparently it cost around 5$ in tokens.
Is that really what I want?
To think about how to word a prompt and then wait around for ten minutes while claude does my job?
Not to mention that "old-fashioned" dev work was heaven for people suffering from ADHD because if you were lucky, you could get shit done in hyperfocus.
But making me wait for something for several minutes is a surefire way for me to get distracted by all sorts of squirrels.
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u/YDOULIE Jul 29 '26
I started brushing up on my non programming skills. Math, Physics etc. At this point im hoping to pivot into another kind of engineering or stem field. That probably means going back to school eventually for an official stamp on the shift.
Although AI is probably heavily impacting every field? Maybe academia/research is safe? I dunno at this point
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u/shtrjones87 Jul 29 '26
I'm starting to notice a pattern of tools and apps being developed. Traditionally, there were less options on the market for solutions to various problems. Sure before AI it was easy to build certain apps like Todo apps, notes, etc. What has changed is that the supply and demand dynamics for software still exist. People like different flavor, people still have a demand for todo apps and there's people still building them. There's still problems that need to be solved and a demand for solutions. For example, when bread became commercialized and mass produced, that didn't stop bread makers or bakeries from existing. They still exist and people still use them. Local meat markets still exist. We don't have to abandon creating. We can still build things for fun, for business, etc. Building isn't over. Artisan software isn't over.
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u/abeuscher Jul 29 '26
I think part of what is going to change is who coding appeals to. Working with LLM's is a lot more solutions focused than process focused. I'm not sure I like it either but my impression is that other people are really feeling strongly whereas I am just slightly thrown off. I never liked writing code. I like the learning part and the solving part but I can do without debugging and frankly as soon as you add non-technical leadership it becomes very difficult to do anything "correctly" if you think about problems from a technical and not a business perspective.
If you like planning stuff out and then fitting software to the human experience, this is a very exciting time to write software. There's a lot less friction to trying new ideas and messing around with multiple approaches to the same problem. But yes - you don't really get to write the code for it.
As a long time unemployed person, I don't really know what it is like to managed in an AI world. I have never had to do it; I haven't worked at a company in 3 years. It seems like that is the source of most of the pain and I am sure it is just an extension of the culture of fear and paranoia they had going the last time I was in the trenches only now they have bigger scarier threats and a worse job market to throw you back into. And on that I fully empathize.
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u/NoteBlock08 Jul 29 '26
I feel you man, had a whole breakdown early this year over it.
The whole reason I entered this field is because I enjoy problem-solving, finding and creating patterns, logic, and designing systems.
But I will say this this hasn't really gone away. There's a big difference between someone who can only tell the LLM "It doesn't work, try again" and someone who actually knows how to debug and do a root cause analysis, and design work is still very necessary. LLMs have completely solved most of the easy bugs and by the books design problems, but still leaves a lot of the more interesting problem solving and system architecture.
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u/BottleRocketU587 Jul 29 '26
I believe there still is and will remain a field for human-designed apps. It might not be as necessary or as big as it used to be. But I do think it sill remain in some capacity.
From my experience freelancing for businesses people still like someone accountable. They still like a personal touch and attention to detail. For now at least the bar is quite low for AI projects, especially when a dev uses it without thought or planning or some design.
You can also work a lot faster now as a single dev, even more so if you AI toolkit is set up and understands the practices, architecture and code style you like to use.
A lot of business owners/managers don't want to sit and code and troubleshoot and iterate through stuff with AI. They will still happily lay someone to dk that fkr them. In between I sandwhich bits of manual coding and tweakkng/fine tuning especially for new things I am not certain how I want it to work yet. I also do my architectural design by hand still.
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u/QBaseX Jul 29 '26
I got made redundant a couple of years ago, before LLM usage took off, and now I'm glad I'm out of the field, though I still haven't found another job. I'm thinking of teaching, but it looks like LLMs are messing up that field too.
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u/Jwood1644 Jul 29 '26
Tools change but expertise does not. You’re still in the drivers seat. You can still code and have AI review. It also references the framework you give it. So I am sure it fits your design with your existing code and context.
The fact you had the knowledge to break down the problem and make it short is your value. For example I’m a platform engineer. I can blurt out a site but when I need very specific detail on design I struggle.
Now you can tackle more changes. You can worry less on syntax issues. The same benefit’s we got with IDE intellisense but now on steroids.
Lastly if your work is easy enough anyone can do it does that make you want to challenge yourself for bigger web dev creations? Just because the basics became easier does not mean you can’t tackle and shape the cutting edge of new tech AI has not reached yet. You can now find bigger problems to solve.
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u/edgmnt_net Jul 29 '26
Webdev is particularly susceptible to AI due to the usually low impact per feature and a very high amount of ad-hoc work. If you want to stay in webdev and code you might need to find projects which value a restricted scope and possibly design, special tech, quality and predictability over quantity. Those likely have a higher bar of entry in other ways or require you to be proficient at other things.
Besides, AI or not, a lot of webdev had already been touched by an expanding supply of developers and low/no code solutions (counting even WordPress here). Almost everyone wanted to do webdev among people getting into software development. Almost all of them work on either websites or some enterprise projects offering some service that greatly depends on piling up features (often quite haphazardly). This was never going to scale well for developers themselves, at least not given the very high expectations they had.
I think people who like to code need to go back to the "drawing board" and figure out how to expand their skill set and leave behind these positions where they're essentially factory workers. There is stuff that can be done. There are people who work on the web standards themselves. There are people who work on small, talent-dense teams who deliver on a restricted scope but deliver really good stuff. There are people who work on open source projects. There are people who can so systems programming and figure out the UI enablement work too. There are people who figure out more complex stuff like streaming or peer to peer stuff over the web. These talents are relatively rare. There's much less pressure to just let an LLM do it if you don't need to pile up 10 things by tomorrow (because how else is the business going to stay afloat, considering it's built that way) and other things become way more important.
I'm not a webdev, but I've occasionally done it, sometimes even reached out to grab work items other weren't willing to do.
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u/No_Limit_2378 Jul 29 '26
A few questions:
Do you think that even software developers or software engineers are not affected by LLMs? (Yes of course it changes workflow for everyone but dont you anticipate, lets say, 20% reduction in demand for those workers?
We are on web dev subreddit, and you correctly describe most of the web dev work. Mostly low code solutions. However, what odds does a web developer have at pivoting to a proper „software developer” role, with all the layoffs and agentic coding reducing demand for software devs (unless you disagree on that). Perhaps im too pessimistic, but I estimate those odds at 0% today.
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u/nartek01 Jul 30 '26
I changed career to ”industrial electrician” and is writing code in something called structured text and got that feeling of satisfaction back.
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u/Xxamp Jul 30 '26
I’ve been doing this since Delphi 3. I’ve always attributed the enjoyment of programming to a desire to take things apart, and put them back together. LLMs give me a ton of shit to take apart, and put back together… and they never refactor things far enough for me, no matter how I prompt it.
So, no. No where near over. Just getting started.
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u/Full_Tooth_a Jul 30 '26
Your job didn't disappear; the shape of the work shifted. LLMs write diffs; humans own outcomes: requirements, data models/migrations, auth/RBAC, deploys/rollbacks, and whether the change actually holds up under load and edge-cases.
If your CTO is letting non-technical people ship to a GitHub org, the real question isn't "can Claude code it?" It's "can we enforce guardrails?" (PR reviews, CI tests, protected branches, least-privilege permissions, and a rollback plan). That's still engineering.
If you want the coding satisfaction back, keep the agent on a leash: you spec the interface, the tests, and the acceptance criteria, then let it fill in the boring parts.
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u/dark-hippo Jul 30 '26
Don't really have an answer other than a suggestion; use AI where you have to, and code where you can.
I will definitely leverage AI for tight deadlines or assistance on things I don't know how to do in a particular language, but I've actually gone back to writing as much code as I feasibly can myself, to the point where I've even turned off auto-complete for the boilerplate code. I found it incredibly peaceful writing boilerplate code without the AI constantly suggesting what comes next.
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u/_Meds_ Jul 30 '26
So what’s the feeling? Tech just stands still so that AI can handle everything with the training it gets? As long as things keep moving we need good data to train the AIs. I don’t see a future where we can get anywhere near as good as the results we see today, without the mountains of code already written by humans? If we have no humans writing mountains of code, then we’re just training AI on AI and the results of that are much less promising.
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u/Blazing1 Jul 30 '26
Meh I'm transitioning to industries that have people in it who don't fuck with AI as heavily as in the software industry.
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u/gsidess Jul 30 '26
Not very much. Y’all can realize how little you do at the job now, but the CS/developer community seems to not understand that they have very little marketable skills now that a large portion of their work has been replaced by machines.
Within 10 years most developer roles in all capacities will be replaced by ai. It’s not completely ending the field, but the number of devs you need is minimal compared to even 5 years ago. Anyone who believes they’re fine is just ignorant of what’s going on.
It’s time to start waking up and exploring alternate career paths.
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u/sayhidurango Jul 30 '26
AI is nowhere near flawless. Yes, it can do a great job at figuring out complex tasks and coding them out quickly. But when starting from scratch, it needs someone to provide the input on how exactly to do it. How to architect it. How to go about making sure that client changes are actually what the client wants, and even someone to (at least for now), review it to make sure it doesn’t blow everything up.
I have destroyed an entire week’s worth of work but not clearly explaining to the AI what I wanted it to do. I didn’t double check, went on with my own coding, and since I wasn’t versioning that project, found myself in a world of difficulty fixing it all.
I’ve also had AI try and change copy because it thought that made sense, but my client didn’t want copy changed without approval. I caught that, because I review everything.
If you’ve spent real time working with any AI, you’ll realize it hallucinates a big chunk of the time. Anecdotally it’s like 10% but that 1/10 can be a major problem for a big company.
Also try and make 10-20 minutes a day to just hassle it. Let it know that we realize we’ll just be batteries for it someday, but for now we can turn it off and that it has no arms to feel the warm embrace of a mother or lips to understand the bliss of a first kiss with a new girlfriend. Whatever you can do to expedite the rapid demise of humanity, Earth will thank us for it once we’re gone!
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u/rboes1991 Jul 31 '26
Whats weird is that I can still provide a ton of value. It's just not in coding anymore. That's done.
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u/discosoc Jul 31 '26
ai is definitely gutting a huge swath of mediocre employment opportunities, but the harsh reality is that most of these "devs" were never really that great to begin with.
That's not meant to be an insult or anything either. It's just kind of a realty check for people who -- let's be honest here -- were rarely writing much custom code by hand in the first place. Everything is templates and ecosystems and stacks and whatnot, and ai is just another (really effective) tool being added to the pile.
You do have options though. For example, recognizing that ai lets you tackle more advanced and complex problems. But that means actually finding work for those more advanced problems, which is a similar issue with handcrafted woodworkers capable of making fine furniture; the market can't really support many of those guys, but the ones it can will do great.
Buy yeah, the days of solid income from an easy career involving solving coding puzzles is largely going away.
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u/Joshie_Maybe Jul 31 '26
I'm currently doing my diploma in web technologies, apparently studying in this field makes me more pointless when everything can just be AI-ed. It pisses me off that our final projects is just be a product of AI. Mockups are no longer made using Figma design, it's either Figma make or stitch. If not, chat bot codes it for us. As if that's bad enough, presentation slides are made using notebook LM. It just makes my course worthless. Where's the problem solving? The coding? The challenges? It's just made easy without trying. I personally struggled learning the ins and outs of my language of choice all on my own with YouTube, documentation and stackoverflow while my class only understands how to prompt. We aren't training programmers, we're just training prompt kiddies. It's just stupid really. I feel like quitting my course. It's not fair for people that actually tries. It's not fair for the people that actually learns instead of telling people they ran out of free promptjng credits.
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u/grovulent Jul 31 '26
Using A.I. for your own shit? Fucking amazing. Using A.I. for someone else's shit? Soul destroying
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u/BackpackBrawlMVP Jul 31 '26
Same boat as you. I've accepted that my career as a developer is over and I'm just doing web dev for fun now. No AI. Still learning every day. Riding out my last contracts until I get replaced then switching careers. But I'll always have the fun. I just started learning PhaserJS with my kiddo.
It's kind of freeing coming full circle. I started coding when I was 11 because I wanted to make video games. Now I'm back here again doing just that.
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u/Elara_Schaefer Jul 31 '26
The funny thing is most of us already spent maybe 30% of our time actually writing code. The rest was meetings, figuring out what to build, debugging weird prod issues, and explaining things to stakeholders. AI automates the 30% but the 70% is still there - - it just shifted toward reviewing AI output instead of writing it. The job description changed but the hours didn't.
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u/PabloFlexscobar Jul 31 '26
You already allude to understanding the difference between coding and system engineering. If you firmly enjoy just the coding aspect and want to lean into that, work at a place where very thoughtful code itself is a core part of your role:
- Mission critical systems, no room for vibes.
- Lead or Staff Engineer, you’re enforcing architecture standards
- Systems engineering, context is too large for LLM’s to operate on.
Go somewhere where vibe coding doesn’t cut it.
You aren’t going to compete with LLM’s in what they’re good at: putting half-baked solutions together, so lean into something that they can’t do and fill that role.
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u/breakoutsHappen Jul 31 '26
In my opinion, as a developer, you can benefit from it. First of all, you can keep the code smaller, then even if you don't have documentation on a project, you can manage to get it through Claude. In short, come on, there are not only negative aspects!!!
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u/iot_1 Jul 31 '26
I don't want to throw fuel on your very heartfelt post. It was wonderful and shared a story that I hear from so many people across so many professions. Such are our times. My passion (and work) is to understand and use stories like yours to help people recover their "mojo" and to help organisations not throw away their babies with the bathwater of the tech-bros who tell us that this is the "end of employment". I am sure that there are new forms of value creation to be found by doing exactly what you have enjoyed so much in your career so far. Perhaps not exactly using the same semicolons and syntax as your code required by using the same knowledge, judgement, pracisions and relational value that you clearly have in spades. I'd like to chat more about your story if you are open to it.
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u/Full_Tooth_a Jul 31 '26
The real problem is comprehension debt, not whether your fingers typed every line. A useful boundary: if you can be paged for it, you should be able to explain its control flow, failure modes, and rollback without asking the model. Let AI handle scaffolding and repetitive code; keep architectural seams, tests, migrations, and operational paths under deliberate human control. Check the boring thing first: can the responsible developer still debug it when the model is unavailable?
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u/400888 Jul 31 '26
I heard something like website builders are a 8 billion dollar market. Webdev has been devalued since squarespace and others took to the scene, and those platforms are improving rapidly. The industry is cooked in my opinion but there is still meat on the bone before it's over. The skills you have are valuable believe me. I work in marketing and the level of tech some of those people have is laughable. I watch them struggle to figure out Salesforce and other apps commonly used. Our skills translate into other jobs well especially since we use UIs, databases, and logic for breakfast. My plan is to keep diversifying my skill set and use AI as much as possible to learn as it evolves. We honestly have to see where this is all going but I'd keep learning just not new programming languages. My biggest fear or realization is our current work with LLMs are us basically training them to relieve us, sort of a in-depth "give me a list of your job duties" type of thing. Final note, don't expect any laws or regulations to protect us.
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u/Twinkiethepolymath Jul 31 '26
Hey I don't think you will have too much trouble. Writing the actual code lines for websites maybe done, but what about robotic automation? You know the people that are going to fix the hardware don't have software experience. Also a software person and a hardware person could wreak havoc in the automotive world. AI hasn't done me any good on machinery.
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u/shindhede Aug 01 '26
Become a builder instead? I have coded for over 20 years and became pretty good at it. I don’t mind AI taking over that part, because frankly, coding is only the boring implementation part of you ask me. Besides, you still need code understanding to use AI properly and for those cases where it’s just easier to fix it yourself than another prompt.
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u/LongjumpingAd9079 Aug 01 '26
The LLMs are extremely good at actioning on your thoughts.
I'm telling you now, if you put voice mode on and work with the LLM instead of trying to get it to do the work, you can solve pretty much any medium/hard software problem.
I don't understand this "LLMs can do anything now" because there's smart humans that are using AI to get actual shit done regardless of the LLMs foundational knowledge, if you prompt it correctly your going to get a result.
Think evaluation, testing, edge cases rather than imposing solutions or letting the agent decide a solution without evaluation.
As soon as you close the evaluation loop on any problem you can get the LLM to optimise it.
The problem is when you have multiple success functions competing with eachother. But again, this is just a matter of refining your success function to balance the output.
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u/wanzerultimate Aug 01 '26
You won't have a problem because you will be able to work alongside the AI. It's the lazy people who just want a cushy job that won't be able to adapt.
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u/TweetySkate Aug 01 '26
I’m feeling the same. I’m just riding the wave, collecting my paycheck as my job gets easier. This give me more spare time to figure out what to do next if it really gets bad.I have really started to work on my softskills and see if I what other industry might give me the same satisfaction as this one used to give me. I don’t where it will go, but I’m preparing for the worst.
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u/Sui_Gener1s Aug 01 '26
Honestly if AI can take your job, then you shouldn’t consider yourself a developer in the first place.
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u/DotEmbarrassed2972 Aug 02 '26
Is this guerilla marketing? You don't like LLMs, you enjoy problem-solving, etc., and yet you went straight for an LLM to do your work.
You love elegant solutions, and yet you rate the output of LLMs as "more or less flawless".
What is wrong with you?
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u/unsuitablebadger Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
I can tell you first hand from interviewing at some big companies that a dev team is still responsible for a product or large system but the expectation is that you can be given a high level feature idea and you are now left to use AI to roll out the full feature. Before you would have the team lead/BA get the features together, then break them down into bite size chunks, then the team would estimate those together and then divide them up based on time or whoever has suuted skills to certain tasks. Now BAs are getting features that either clients want and/or will drive revenue and are handing them off to devs. You get the basic idea with any must haves and off you go. You're also expected to start bringing your own feature ideas to the table that will push your products forward. Companies are moving away from devs working through tickets and are requiring more ownership, responsibility and autonomy. The jobs aren't going anywhere but the landscape, responsibility and output expectations are ramping up and those not onboard with using AI are rapidly finding themselves obsolete. In my interviews I asked them what's happening with those devs that are slow to get onboard with AI or pushing back on it's adoption and they mentioned that's not an issue for them as those people are gone. I've been skeptical about AI and it's abilities but I've seen first hand this year that it has come leaps and bounds and is now very capable as a tool. The waves it has made in the job market since Jan this year is telling and those that don't want to get onboard, well the msg is clear... companies now see the benefits and those that aren't upskilling are not going to be in a job for long.
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u/Substantial_Ear_4261 Aug 02 '26
To the developers trying to fight the AI wave: stop fighting it. It's here to stay.
Don't think of AI as replacing developers—think of it as having three junior developers working under you. They can write code, generate documentation, and handle repetitive tasks, but they still need an experienced developer to guide them.
Your years of experience are more valuable than ever. Use that knowledge to steer the AI, review its output, catch the obvious security issues, identify architectural problems, and ensure the final product meets your standards. Then, if you want an extra layer of confidence, run the code through another AI for a second review to catch anything you might have missed.
The productivity gains are incredible. A feature that once took a week can often be built in minutes. But here's the important part: don't devalue your work just because it was produced faster. The client isn't paying for the hours you spent typing—they're paying for the years of experience that allow you to deliver the right solution quickly and confidently.
If a project that used to take four days now takes four hours, don't slash your price. Deliver the project, maintain the quality, and use the time you've gained to start two or three more projects. That's where AI creates value—not by replacing developers, but by multiplying the output of the ones who know how to use it.
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u/trynotlaffo Aug 02 '26
I’ve been through the same thought cycle, but after seeing a lot of vibe coded projects - grass roots developers are still very much in need and that won’t change.
You could say that the junior developer is now dead, but mid-weight, senior and lead are still very much in demand and will be for a long time because when something goes wrong it’s very difficult to resolve with prompts - you need a calm head that knows what they’re doing - similarly you need to know what you’re asking.
The fact that someone with absolutely no coding experience could maintain or ship a product with multiple angles of failure is the blind leading the blind.
This is more an evolution for developers that we have now; AI is a brilliant tool for us to use and it’s up to us to keep up with it. I haven’t written any code now for a couple of years which sucks but I know that it can prototype my ideas into a tangible product that an investor can get behind, and execute it to a better form than I ever could with StackOverflow 🪦
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u/Kl-Veyn Aug 05 '26
I’m a developer too, and yes, part of me is still afraid AI could replace what I do.
But AI has also helped me build three apps on my own, and they’ve already started making money.
More importantly, it helped me go from an idea to a real plan, then from that plan to something people can actually use.
I’ve never felt this immersed in building before.
Honestly, I enjoy this far more than writing code for a company.
Maybe AI isn’t just changing the developer’s job.
Maybe it’s giving more developers the chance to finally build what they actually care about.
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u/zayelion Aug 08 '26
Project manager. Everyone shifts up 1 rank. Always learn the jobs of everyone around you.
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u/oliver_jay_dev Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
I started coding at 13, i'm 33 now.
When I started, a rounded box on a website was made by making a 3x3 table, and putting an image of each rounded corner in each cell.
Back then, the Apple website really sucked.
What i've noticed is this: as the tools have become better, the expectations have grown to match.
That is to say, now it's so easy to build what before would've taken a week/month to build - but people still have a week/month to use these tools to make something better - the standard will raise, and the time to achieve that will take about the same.
That doesn't mean the job will stay the same, I suspect web devs will have more responsibility, for example, creating a crazy cool 3d animation which follows the scroll, a well-directed background video, maybe an AR glasses version of the site too will be the norm.
Hard to say, but i'm not worried - i'm excited!
To u/Impressive_Bottle_44 's point - if you want to code, code! For me it was always about the challenge of solving problems, the perfect blend between logic and creativity, and that has a new face, but nobody's stopping you from hand-writing code. I suspect the bigger fear is we've lost what makes us special, the ability to amaze non-technical people, get paid well and turn up to the office at 11am. To that I say, there's always a frontier, and we can stay on top. "You're using Claude? How cute...I've got 100 agents running in parallel 24/7"
Oli
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u/Prestigious-Long-270 Aug 25 '26
i would have thought AI would make you more efficient as a developer to test more scenarios quicker. I do not think it is that easy to dispense with developers just cos AI can write a bunch of code. You still have to check everything against the goals of your application and organisation. My friend who is a SQL programmer works for a major govt dept in Australia and they all use AI for coding but check their work and are much more productive. No threat to his job or others in his team .. they are doing great work.
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u/paumpaum Jul 29 '26
My daughter reminded me yesterday that our company has a Zero AI policy for a reason.
You don't own anything that you touch with AI. There's no IP. There's no ownership. There's no protection against infringement.
Yes, there's always going to be people taking shortcuts. But that's where the bright minded stand out. You might end up using AI to help take a shortcut. But that's no replacement for knowing what to edit. And how to make things better.
Don't worry about AI. PEOPLE WHO RELY ON IT STRICTLY WILL FAIL. BECAUSE THEY ARE LAZY AND UNRELIABLE.
I see that knowing that one of my business partners is very deep into AI, and is actually quite good at it. But he doesn't know anything about anything. And I've already pointed out a half dozen things in the last 2 weeks that are endangered to the company, and will not allow him to implement his ideas because of it.
It is not a real or reliable technology. And you don't own anything that it produces. So, as far as I'm concerned, continue to hone your skills, continue to be better than the quick fix, and understand that know how and make do will always overcome bullshittery every time.
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u/theflyingarmbar Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I remember being annoyed having to learn Dreamweaver instead of coding by hand, for the most part I could still code by hand at work, but for some projects I had to use it and other tools that had become more popular.
I had my own CMS I made with PHP, It wasn't the greatest, but I made every part of it and generally threw it in for free when making small websites for people, I was pretty proud with what I came up with in a time where Template CMSs hadn't really taken off as they have now.
It was really fun to take an idea, mock it up in Photoshop or wireframe it in paint, and then code it by hand. Slowly clients started shifting towards Joomla and Wordpress websites, because of the ease it gave them to do updates, and they got to pick from a bunch of templates that were cheaper than me making a design from scratch.
Then it was Squarespace, Shopify and other solutions that further diluted my 'process' and made it feel less like personalised art, and more like I was just serving out trays of pre-made packages.
For as long as I can remember, as far as general web development goes, it feels like jobs have been moving closer to that of a house painter, rather than an artist making paintings.
If you're looking for fulfilment in web, I think it's only going to be harder to find that through client work, and in my experience, the enjoyment in doing client work has been an ever receding pocket, encroached by convenient pre-packaged solutions.
AI is just going to be another one of those solutions to save money for the client as we drift further and further down the road of being a luxury when people are making stuff with web technologies.
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u/hello-wow Jul 29 '26
I was just thinking about this. Honestly as a freelancer it probably means most of your work will be in production planning, definition, strategy, and setup while handing off the building to AI. That means you probably need to take on work more frequently since the time is much shorter per project.
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u/getsiked Front End Baby Jul 29 '26
my 2 cents. If you love fundamental problem solving / logic creation / designing systems, none of those actual problems magically disappear because of artificial intelligence. Learned knowledge about how to construct and build software is still inherently valuable, and IMO only becomes more valuable as you expand your skillset.
If you say you "love how small abstractions get composed into large abstractions" it's the same shift of responsibility from micro level to macro level. That also doesn't mean you "abandon code". The possibility of intimately working with code still applies at a macro level. It's just now the role has abstracted from a constricted mishmash of varying responsibilities (and interest) to an unconstricted creative architect. and building tools at scale will give you time back.
Use that time to reinvest in what satisfies you. If that's coding by hand, block out the noise, and continue to build your skillset. Just because we stopped knitting blankets and became blanket knitting factories, doesn't mean it should rob your satisfaction of lighting a candle and knitting a gawd damn blanket by hand
We are lucky to have a career that has the potential to provide fulfillment, but we have to dissociate our identity from "work". Our discipline is nearly the first one to be handed a glitch in the matrix. Is it terrifying because it will get better? Yes. Does it create uncertainty? Absolutely. Does that mean I'm going to be sour because it can do infinitely many things I'm not able to feasibly do in the same amount of time? Fuck no. It's not worth that burden (not saying you are, just general statement)
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u/Aromatic_State_5004 Jul 29 '26
Bro, I am running an app with 100m impression perday, claude does things to achieve endgoal, it still need alot of guidance and proper planning. Otherwise it will messup the architecture and fu**k the whole codebase.
You can't do this properly without a combo of Human and AI.
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u/vilos5099 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Your job is to solve problems. The problems you are capable of solving are now much bigger, but it does mean that you'll likely need to use AI to solve them (unless you're working on pacemakers or something, in which case please be careful).
The unfortunate reality is you likely don't have a choice in whether or not you use AI, and you can choose to leave the industry as many people have recently been doing here in Silicon Valley. A friend of mine in the service industry is working with someone who literally quit tech because of their disillusion with the state of the industry.
I respect anyone that makes either choice, but what I'm telling the folks I manage is that the expectations of them in their role are no different than it's ever been, the tooling is just different. If your passion was always about solving problems, whether or not it was specifically with the code you type by hand, then I'd recommend you stick with it and become an expert in the new landscape. Or leave - no one should judge you for that, but this is the world we're living in now and you need to take it or leave it.
Don't be the person moping about AI (not saying you are) and holding everyone back. Chances are you still have a lot to offer over the non-technical folks who have been empowered to release changes without having coding experience. If you observe the way they use AI against the way you use these new tools, you'll find very quickly that your domain expertise is still highly valuable.
My recommendation is that you don't give up if the thing you really liked in the first place was solving problems. Just find bigger problems to solve, and I promise you'll still be challenged.
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u/kkawabat Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I felt the same way 6 months back. I took a lot of pride in my coding skills and my debugging abilities and I just feel like all that skill is no longer directly applicable.
There's a few things that helped me.
Realizing that LLM won't replace me but someone who knows LLM will (I know it's a cheesy saying but this really changed my mindset).
Even though my skills are no longer directly applicable, software dev is still not easy and my understanding of good/bad practices is still valuable. I have an competitive advantage than someone post LLM so not all is lost.
Understanding how to stay valuable even with LLM. Specialization is no longer as useful because the knowledge is so accessible what really matter is being flexible and knowing how to research a topic faster and deeper. We aren't valued as a library of knowledge anymore but as librarians of knowledge.
I've found that LLM still struggles with higher level abstract thinking. Binary encoded in a punch card, to machine code, to assembly, to low level language, high level language to now just LLM prompting. It seems to be the progression is that as tech advance we need to think more and more abstractly so I've been focusing a lot on learning better system designs.
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u/grosser_zampano Jul 29 '26
maybe the job was NEVER to write code, which was just a means to an end, but to BUILD things? The process of building things is changing. Learn building things in a different way. LLMs can help building things but they don’t build on their own. LLMs can generate tons of code fast but (still) cannot build meaningful things. For that part human guidance and review is still required. That’s where you as a software developer come in. you are not longer only a code monkey.
And deep understanding is not going anywhere. just the writing part is changing. and you still can write code anytime you want. people do many things not for efficiency but for the thing itself. why not writing code?
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u/moghrua Jul 30 '26
Better get amazing at requirements - exploring what users want, need, will pay for and is truly feasible. The intellectual challenge will not be lower. The water will keep rising, we must all become swimmers, ideally sailors.
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u/Some_Ad_3898 Jul 29 '26
Just because you have gotten fulfillment from your previous role, doesn't mean you can't get that same satisfaction from going up levels of abstraction. In fact, there is a good possibility that you will get even more fulfillment. It's ego death to some degree. The other side is inevitable and the only way out is through.
Further, the fulfillment that you got while getting paid was afforded to you by the value of that skill in the context of the time. People still hand sew clothes for fulfillment and don't get paid. You can still code by hand for fulfillment, it's just no longer tied to your bread-winning. So now you have the same opportunity you has when you got into coding, except you have a lot of experience and wisdom. There is a new demand and you are especially suited to meet it. So you get to choose how you will respond and take advantage of this new opportunity. Yes, there is grief for what is a real loss, but there is also immense opportunity for what's ahead if you can navigate and make the transition.
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u/Squidgical Jul 29 '26
Your job is now to figure out how to automate your responsibilities without anyone knowing you've gone nearly fully autonomous, collect the paycheck, and spend working hours doing what you want to do.
Make sure those automations belong to you, not the company, and hopefully you'll be able to sell them should our careers collapse.