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 is the exact same thing that happened with luddites, which today we know as ‘idiots who oppose technological progress’ thanks to capitalist propaganda.
It was never about efficiency, quality, quantity, or accessibility. It’s almost exclusively about getting people to stop doing things for themselves, and instead rely on expensive machinery owned exclusively by the capitalist class for everything.
Most average people used to make and fix their own clothing, which meant they had little need for corporations that produce the same clothing, but lower quality. So capitalists forced everyone to use machines, until nobody remembered how to make clothes without them.
Same with software, languages, and a lot of other skills and office jobs right now. Educated people who know how to do stuff are not only unprofitable, but also dangerous. Make them all use AI until they forget everything and have to rely on megacorporations for the tiniest thing.
This is all the more reason to keep reading books, learning, DIY as much as possible, coding your own software, and even learning stuff like woodworking, sewing, farming, etc.
Being educated, informed, knowledgeable, and skilled is among the easiest, but at the same time most effective acts of resistance.
Do not let them turn you into mindless slaves.
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.
OP, im really quit sympathetic to you here. I’m among the knowledge workers who haven’t been fully replaced yet, but I’ve done some of the training meant to replace me. It’ll be a little while, but not that long, before I’m nearly unemployable.
The only solice here is the gift of limited forewarning. We can see the writing on the wall. Cobblers, per an example in another comment, didn’t see it coming. We have precedent set, including manufacturing sector jobs outsourced to counties with cheap labor, to look at, only 30 years ago! You can fight it and hope to be within a small group of privileged few who knew the right people, or you can tell your kid to pivot now and get ahead of the decade of tragic and sad “wha-wha-whaaaat?” that will inevitably follow. It’s not an easy choice.
I’m not sure what records and stories exist from these past eras that we can read and apply to now. Maybe a book of those tales is an opportunity for catharsis and reflection in the current moment.
All I can do is wish you luck and good judgement as this brave new world forms around us.
It will cause a massive loss of human knowledge, nobody would learn how because it’s just a prompt
And it’s not only for coding. Yesterday I was shown that because they probably stole a lot of parametric designs Claude can even do 3d files from photos and quotes, it spits out an openscad file and compiles it. I was shocked, it added chamfering and small details, from a rough sketch photo. Who’s going to learn how to use a cad program if it can be done in 3 minutes from a prompt? And the process of learning taught you all the quirks , but in the future who’s going to be a pro?
Keep holding on. LLMs are still in the operate-at-a-loss-to-control-the-market stage. Once they start charging the real cost, human software engineers will be more in demand. That and refocus. All of human history is careers reinventing themselves as new tools become available.
This is how I feel too. I’m in several work chats where everyone seems to be pretending that Claude doesn’t have its arm shoved up their ass, wielding them like a puppet.
Several of the projects I am working with are just AI generated. In fact, if I need to suggest any fixes, they will be denied unless it’s AI generated.
I’m tired. I’m depressed. I used to take so much pride in solving problems, but all of that is gone now.
I’m going to try to ride it out and see where it takes me, but the work is mind numbingly boring and the trades look better and better every day.
In my experience that’s only been the case for functionally non-unique software.
At my job we write software that’s effectively unique. There isn’t a pattern to fall back on.
It makes a lot more mistakes very frequently, since the nature of it keeps trying to guide it to the known path. It’s great for debugging since the manner that some check failed is chasing through known logic, and it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t see the existing code as probable or fitting a known pattern if the shape of a switch statement is still the same.In my personal projects I’ve even run into issues getting it to do stuff like vulkan synchronization barriers in a way that doesn’t continuously devolve into what you see in tutorials, with an ultimately unstructured pile of adhoc resource allocation and barriers.
Well, just today I had 3 meetings with different AWS techs about why a policy wasn’t working or why users couldnt use certain services. Turns out all of them used AI to generate the aws policy they tried to use and the policies were wrong. The techs were rookies and lacked the understanding needed to correct the code. I was able to fix each and rewrite policies by hand.
Now when I and the rest of my greybeard generation start to retire, the rookies coming in will not have the exposure to code, policies, etc that we had. The knowledge gained from trial and error will disappear with the retirees. That’s when the crisis will really begin. When we in the know will not be around to correct the rookie mistakes.
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
A shovel stuck in the ground does not move earth until it is used to move ground.
We are currently stuck in being amazed that the shovel goes so quickly and deep, now we must reckon how to make it move what it wrought.
I feel like I see one of these posts every three months or so, and it’s just beginning to feel like meaningless doomposting, like the boy who cried LLM.
I don’t care how carefully the code gets reviewed, you don’t know it as well as if you had actually written it, and that will make all the difference three months from now when someone discovers a bug in your code (there’s always a bug in the code), or when the customer comes out of left field with a feature request that you didn’t forsee and isn’t easy to just add in (the customer always wants what you haven’t accounted for).
Don’t give up hope. Don’t let the clankers win. Continue to hone your craft. We will need senior devs more than ever after the AI bubble pops.
here i am in the game industry watching practically the entire industry move overseas. I’ve given up.
Here is a new mission for all the Post-LLM-Depression existential crises developers:
Community Computing.
Use your skills to build a network with big tech alternatives for your community! Federate your network with other likeminded people’s networks. Restart the internet with real people without bots, ai agents, or advertisers.
Don’t quit your passion! Use it as fuel to motivate yourself and help others move away from big tech!
The hard part is getting paid to do it.
That’s a volunteering organisation, no?
It looks like a non profit structure with membership dues
Maybe you aren’t talking about this but I think we software folks have to get used to the idea that the big huge paycheques are not coming back our way.
You don’t get paid that kind of money in this economy unless someone is getting screwed over.
Man I love this comment so much. I’ve dreamed about doing this kind of thing
Tbh I legitimately do not buy this. I use the best models, top of the line harness and the code still sucks it sucks less granted, but it’s still just not good lol.
If I’m ever in the situation that “typing the code” was a bottle neck instead of figuring out what to type then I know I’ve fucked up somewhere.
I just don’t understand why any programmer would let go of the fun stuff. The problem solving, the language learning… It’s all just sad. I’ll never use LLM to code simply because I enjoy coding.
