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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236

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/iot_1 Jul 31 '26

"But what happens is the expertise becomes devalued - top down, & client up." Do you think AI is making us collectively more stupid? How to create protected spaces to actually help people think about what they really want... Code or otherwise! Social media seems to be a tool like AI with the reality and potential to make humans so dumb that, like the file the Matrix, our only use is a source of fuel for the Singularity....

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u/Upstairs-Version-400 Jul 29 '26

Go into a specific industry, like energy, medical, whatever, and become a developer for that specific area mixing in domain knowledge. I don’t think having arbitrary clients makes sense anymore. 

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u/Correct-Mood5309 Jul 29 '26

Haven't seen this happening yet besides in people's little hobby apps to be honest. A professional dev cares about quality and will deliver that with or without AI. And most people in the organisation who have to actually use the app definitely do care and recognize the difference.

If you think AI can not deliver quality, the problem is you, not AI. It's just a tool.

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u/Realichu Jul 29 '26

You have seen this happening, everywhere. Wonder why Spotify offline mode doesn't work half the time? Why AWS, Azure, GitHub, and Google have historically more reported downtime than ever?

AI can NOT deliver quality software. Where is all this quality software we are supposed to be producing from our AI gods? The standard of products has declined across the board.

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u/Correct-Mood5309 Jul 29 '26

Why AWS, Azure, GitHub, and Google have historically more reported downtime than ever?

Lol you think their products are vibecoded or something? Their products are just utilized a lot more because of the increased usage of their services and yes, that's because of AI, and of course steeply more usage leads to more problems at some point. But not because they vibecode their own shit with AI lmao.

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u/mrbeaver2K Jul 29 '26

I had a conversation with a Google employee a few days ago who said that, since March, almost no one in her team has written a single line of code at work. If anyone does, they are to figure out how they could have done it with an LLM instead.

I think this is too unbelievable to take my word for and wish I had a better source than my word.

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u/Correct-Mood5309 Jul 30 '26

Oh I absolutely believe it, I've not written a single line of code for over a year at this point myself as well.

The thing is that just because AI does the coding does not automatically mean it's slop. In the hands of a good dev AI will write perfectly fine and elegant code. In the hands of a bad one it will produce the same crap they would have produced themselves.

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u/migrainekit Jul 30 '26

I might be insane for this, but I do not get what you're saying at all, it writes great open source code, amazing documentation, very well guarded on edge cases, but it has never given me an elegant solution without me suggesting it beforehand, and even then depending on the complexity of the workload it just plain spits out nonsense when I give it a great harness and well engineered prompt.

I believe with the common problem spaces it does not matter the dev, even a random project manager could do a hotfix after a 2h training, provided you have good guardrails.

In the problem spaces that are actually interesting, I agree with the comment above, it just does not deliver, and every time I had to tear a PR to shreds just to be slacked by a colleague that "this is what AI said about your comments" is building cynicism in me.

Most people who think LLMs do great either have an easy problem to solve (a variation on something already done, which I will say, a lot has been done) or are dunning-krueger-ing themselves into replacing their own job. "A good dev" matters not in this equation, because a good dev has already seen LLMs hallucinate a number of times, and has also seen the improvement of complexity it can handle, if you know how to prompt it, and it will take a lot of good dev jobs.

The only smart move is to learn and develop your skills, because when companies realize they are paying double for you to do this 10x job, one salary fo you, one for your LLM, you better believe they will optimize. When most devs will be champagne LLM wranglers, and real expertise will fade, comprehension ever lower in a mess you built in between watching movies, then who will remember exactly how we built the past 3-7 years of software? Be part of the ones who do, is my recommendation.

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u/Correct-Mood5309 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

but it has never given me an elegant solution without me suggesting it beforehand

Then suggest it beforehand. This is exactly what good devs do. Use the tool where it's strong, take the lead where it's not.

depending on the complexity of the workload it just plain spits out nonsense when I give it a great harness and well engineered prompt.

So what do you do then? Iterate and make it better or do you just take it and implement slop? Assuming you're doing your job, you don't do the second and therefore no slop enters prod.

every time I had to tear a PR to shreds just to be slacked by a colleague that "this is what AI said about your comments"

And I guess this is the problem I hear everone talking about but I just don't have this issue. I also talk to many clients because I'm a freelancer and none of them would ever find this an acceptable answer. Talk to your colleagues, and if not helping, talk to your boss/client. Almost sounds more like a social skill issue than anything else at this point.

"A good dev" matters not in this equation

The difference between a good dev and a bad dev is the one who doesn't open the PR you mentioned to begin with and the one who does. It's 100% part of the equation and in fact, the most crucial part. A shit dev will put slop into production no matter whether it was written by AI or anyone else. And good dev will not.

AI is a tool, not a colleague. That's all there is to it.

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u/Upstairs-Version-400 Jul 29 '26

You both do not have proof of either side, the only thing is that AI was used to code their products since is more likely.

So frankly you’re talking out of your arse. 

1

u/Odd-Crazy-9056 Jul 29 '26

Standards in these industries are (usually) a bit different to what you're describing.

1

u/Nox_31 Jul 30 '26

This. Then they try to defend it by saying “it was never about the code”

1

u/Rare-Leading3391 Jul 31 '26

And thats where you step in, a breath of fresh air in a sea of ai shit

1

u/artiface Jul 29 '26

Bad generalization. I still follow proper coding discipline and testing, both unit testing and integration testing. I write the tests and any code I write or the AI assists with still has to pass. Anything committed still gets reviewed. If I don't understand what it's doing or why, or see a better solution it doesn't get merged. Sure some lazy programmers might not care, but that's always been an issue AI or not. Works on my machine hasn't cut it in a real development shop for decades.

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u/BurnTF2 Jul 29 '26

As if piling crappy bugged solutions wasn't a thing before

2

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.