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.
This year has been interesting. A couple years ago, I dabbled with using LLMs for fill-in-the-middle (FITM) completion before I deciding I was more effective without them. I relegated LLMs to one-off tasks like transforming text. This worked well for a year or so, until I was asked to evaluate agents so we could determine guardrails for other team members. I realized then the models and harnesses had matured substantially. The writing was on the wall, and the business needed us to adapt to keep up with competitors.
Now I’ve become much more accustomed to developing with agents, and I dare say I’m pretty effective at it. I have my ethical concerns like many folks here, but I can also be too idealistic given the chance.
I’ve been developing and working with technology since the 90s, and I have been fortunate to get my hands dirty in many facets. One of the reasons I enjoy technology is the constant change, even though the rate of change is much greater recently.
I haven’t experienced the despair that others have, and I wonder if it is related to the path I’ve taken. I started a computer engineering degree many years ago, but did not finish. I wanted to learn too many things at once and spent too much time working (developing internal software for the university). I’ve blazed a trail over the years instead, so I guess my profession has always been somewhat nebulous.