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 in the exact same boat. I’ve been thinking a lot about how it’s changed the landscape of tech, and ive come to an interesting conclusion so far. It feels kind of like the switch from horse and buggy to motorized vehicles.
But, what’s going to happen after these companies bankrupt? Will AWS still host old Anthropic models at an increased price? It feels like when Walmart moved into small towns and sold their products at a loss in order to kill mom and pop stores.
Massive enterprises will cut deals to keep using frontier models, everyone else will have to go back to using their atrophied brains. Those who have the compute will be running local models.
Similar to how employers today ask if you have a vehicle to get to work, they will ask if you have local inference. It hurt, but, I bought an AMD Halo the other day. They turned the information super highway into a stroad and the Halo is my vehicle.
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.
There is no chargeable “real cost”. Chinese companies are making highly effective distilled models that can run on any decent hardware. The second the AI companies start cranking up the cost, methods of using the free models will come forward.
So basically we have a technology that puts everyone out of a job and doesn’t even make any money for the producers. Stunning.
Huh? Both the “decent hardware” and electricity to run the models are chargeable costs. I sincerely don’t understand your argument.
The hardware to run them on an individual level is relatively cheap, the required passthrough for anthropic/openAI is that they reclaim their training costs.
Cheap hardware? Where?
There are already industries balking at having to pay for the chatbot tokens even while the chatbot companies are still hemorrhaging money. It will quickly become non-viable for almost every industry.
The only ones that should continue to worry are the entertainment industry. If companies can get the copyright laws changed to be able to own chatbot content, they will go hard into making it impossible for actual people to make money in the arts.
The worrying part for me is how the fuck do we keep people knowing good code and architecture and able to review the output without practicing the art for a couple — or three — decades, first? It just won’t happen, and then the new generations of “devs” won’t have done any coding, basically, and they won’t have learned anything the hard way. Security issues are going to be a nightmare in the future, no?
This is where Idiocracy becomes real. People won’t know how to do the things to make sure they’re done right. I’d say it’s like history where jobs that used to exist no longer do because they were replaced by something better, faster, and cheaper…but those were individual jobs and not what LLMs are being shoehorned into essentially overnight - the programming framework that runs civilization.
Definitely been getting Idiocracy vibes the last decade or so, holy shit is it tangible right now.
It’s interesting to hear this side. It sounds like you’re experiencing one of the better outcomes, even if it is still depressing.
My experience has been rather different with people being given AI, particularly in larger teams (I work with a few different companies as a contractor). Some people who were already good remained good but now put in less work (which is IMO the healthiest way), some deliver more but I get the sense they’re burning out because of the amount of reviewing, arguably one of the least fun parts of development - not to mention the cognitive strain of a rapidly changing system.
But the biggest group by far is the average to straight up bad devs being given the magic wishing hat and pouring out shit like there’s no tomorrow with no concept of what is even in their PRs. Especially great when they can just approve each others’ slop code. Think UI being marked ready for release when it doesn’t actually connect to the backend, just returns hard coded mock responses.
The amount of QA’s needed has quadrupled in a team I work with, and they’re still overwhelmed (whilst still having more regressions than ever).
The worst one is the “Claude said…” experience. When someone picks up an issue to troubleshoot and the result is just whatever came out of the AI, with the person putting in zero effort to even try to understand it, but then expecting a response/review from someone else, who is likely going to hate their life.
The interesting part is that we’re both describing the death of the industry, but yours is death by success and mine is death by failure - both caused by LLMs.
Personally, I’m planning a career change into cabinetry because my job has gone from fun to mind numbing, and I don’t think I’d be willing to do the “I’ll unfuck your AI developed codebase” career path for any amount of money.
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.
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.
Or AWS will fix their ass policy system.
…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…
My good man, that is when you offer your services at extortionate consultant’s rates to fix the problem, and make crazy bank a few days a month.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with all of this is that nobody understands how the code actually works anymore. Yeah the focus has shifted more toward design which may not be a bad thing but the underlying functionality is just totally not understood.
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?
And in the future you will depend on a handful of companies to give you access to this knowledge, which they stole off the internet.
Here’s the thing, though. Give it a generation (and in this industry, a “generation” is basically the amount of time it takes one class of grads to get through college, or possibly at the outside maybe two) and there will be no one left with the skillset required to effectively babysit the LLMs anymore. Everyone who used to have those skills but leaned on AI and stopped coding themselves will have let them atrophy, and the upcoming crop of junior developers won’t know how to do anything but prompt the chatbot.
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.
It’s this right here. Nobody will be able to look intently, because no one will have the knowledge of what to look for anymore. You are able to effectively manage the stupid machine’s output because you actually know more or less what functional code looks like and how it works. Once that skill has been squeezed out of the industry it’s going to be utter chaos.
Yes, that’s pretty obvious to anyone in the industry. But like many catastrophies mankind can see decades ahead, nothing will be done about until the consequence bite hard. I’ll be old by then.
I’m sort of surprised there’s no conscious effort to counter that. In other areas where automation has taken over they will ensure that people can still do the work manually. I visited an automated metro system a while ago, and they explained that even though certain lines are GoA 4 (in other words so highly automated they don’t need staff on board anymore), they still have people operating the trains manually every once in a while, specifically so that they don’t forget how to do it if need be, and that the new recruits can learn as well.
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.
Most of us haven’t let go of it; for our own projects, we still write them. But businesses will increasingly no longer settle for paying us for 6 months to release a project or a couple of years for a platform.
Someone will come right up and spend 10k crapping something marginally not horrible out and coax it into the company’s vision over a couple of weeks.
I’m sorry you have to deal with this. I’m sure it’s a real shock to have your well-honed craft pulled out from under you like this. My only advice is to stay in your industry as long as you can, even if it means being a full-time code reviewer. My gut tells me that there will be an over-reliance on LLMs followed by a crisis a few years from now when nobody can find experienced devs to either replace those retiring, or to fix whatever slop our infrastructure is running on by then. If you’re still in the business when that happens, you’ll be in a good spot.
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.
Same, I don’t find “vibe-coding” very useful. It just produces slop. With enough back and forth with an LLM I can usually get something that “works,” but works poorly. I don’t have the motivation to read the slop it produces, so I don’t know if it’s doing things correctly or not (when I do investigate, it often is not). I often feel like the time I spent prompting the LLM in English would’ve been better spent “prompting” the compiler or interpreter in a language designed for software development.
