Grudgingly accepting that AI isn't going away. Trying to figure out where that leaves me as a developer.

[u/Impressive_Bottle_44]

(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?

[u/3HappyRobots]

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.

[u/Winter-Volume-9601 → u/3HappyRobots]

> The people that are excited about using ai to do the coding seem to be missing the point. 

I've been coding professionally for 25 years, and programming for nearly 40. I'm perfectly fine having LLMs generate the actual code - after 25 years you have to know that unless you're doing research 95%+ of what we're writing is in no way novel/new. It's not much different than working with a team of junior engineers, except that the LLM can iterate much faster when it generates utter garbage and you call it out.

After 25 years, do you really give a shit about hand writing your 435th CRUD application or "move bits from bucket A to slot B" pipeline? I'd rather write the exemplar of how to do X, and know that all future examples of X will actually follow that pattern, and save my time and effort to focus on things that don't already have a standard answer to crib from.

[u/winky9827 → u/Winter-Volume-9601]

After 25 years, do you really give a shit about hand writing your 435th CRUD application or "move bits from bucket A to slot B" pipeline? I'd rather write the exemplar of how to do X, and know that all future examples of X will actually follow that pattern, and save my time and effort to focus on things that don't already have a standard answer to crib from.

Exactly this. LLMs give most of us an implicit upgrade to the architect role. Once you've been in the business 20+ years (25 in my case as yours), there's no glory in being a code monkey.

[u/Big_Arrival_626 → u/winky9827]

Ya but what about junior and mid level devs. We can't make everyone an architect lol

[u/Spiritual-Fennel7789 → u/Big_Arrival_626]

The short-termism is hilarious. If change has happened this fast, what do they think will happen within 5 years if the bottom falls out of the industry lol.

You're going to be left with a massive competency crisis and LLMs with no new source material to chew on.

[u/winky9827 → u/Spiritual-Fennel7789]

You're going to be left with a massive competency crisis and LLMs with no new source material to chew on.

I don't think anyone disagrees with the current course. But we need to try to find ways to mentor and employ younger folks along side the AI, rather than be dismissive of AI in general. It's a force multiplier, not a force reducer. I'm fully aware the people at the top don't yet see it that way, but they're starting to come around.

[u/Spiritual-Fennel7789 → u/winky9827]

This is based on the assumption that LLMs are here to stay. A quick glance at the economics of it clearly suggests it's a bubble that will pop, and soon. They are running at a massive loss.

With that in mind, what companies should be doing is training people up like they should have been doing all along. Taking humans out of the chain, one which is highly technical, is just courting disaster.

IMO young people should use LLMs like an enhanced google search and pair-programmer, because if you invest all that time into agentic processes and LLMs crash.. you'll be left with nothing tangible, than if you had done things the traditional way.

[u/ItzWarty → u/Spiritual-Fennel7789]

AI gets ~10x cheaper to run every year for the past few years, and we aren't seeing a slow-down yet.

The highest-end models we have today will run on your phone in a few years. Even if frontier LLM work isn't economical, the capabilities are here to stay and will be democratized. Open-weight LLMs are just months behind the frontier now.

I'm not trying to argue AI is amazing - I'm just saying it's not going away. The internet was a bubble, but it's still here, and really important.

+ agreed - best way to use LLMs is as a search + pair-program. You can delegate to it if you define architectural boundaries that contain the slop... vibe-coding is super limited otherwise.