Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
I’m finishing my thesis in software engineering and at this point it’s hard to justify it. 6 years of my life pretty much wasted. At least I don’t have any debt
My friend, that amount of education, your diligence, fortitude, intelligence, and determination to see it through was NOT wasted. You learned how to think, reason, analyze, perform. Those are invaluable skills that will forever set you apart from anyone who didn’t follow that path.
You will always find gainful employment, because your studies shows that you are a force to be reckoned with, and a serious person.
In fact I think that you may be precisely on time to make the best use of your studies that you could ever imagine.
You’ll be fine, kid.
LLMs are an algorithm. There will be times it should be used and times it shouldn’t be used because it’s to inefficient and/or to expensive. Then there’s the whole field of decidability… lots of halting problems that have no solution. Who will decide when to make the call that enough tokens have been used and should stop the agent because there’s probably no solution?
Who will decide when to use LLM (and which model) and when it makes more sense use another algorithm instead?
Deciding which algorithms to use sounds an awful lot like the job of a software engineer.