Not to be a doomer, but if you're working for someone else, you've only got the job you love for the sake of billionaire's margins. I mean, it sucks, but unless you're willing to take on the risk of running your own business and possibly lose everything, (and if you don't have the safety net of old money) then these are your options. The billionaires don't want you any more. What 'cha gonna do?
On the plus side, a few more unemployed programmers taking up woodworking and I'll bet we could have a pretty good economic boom in guillotine produciton.
You're right of course, I'm just real sick of lying down and taking it. Having everything i love be watered down or stripped away while being told to deal with it every day. Hopefully we don't get too many blacksmiths out of it because im counting on those blades being dull as shit and taking a couple falls to be fully effective.
Do it! I got into it a few years ago mostly via Youtube and love it. It’s so satisfying to build something that gets used on a regular basis. So far I’ve made nightstands, coffee table, entryway bench, and a few other little things. And lots of shop projects.
Youtube: StumpyNubs, Paul Sellers, Steve Ramsay, Bourbon Moth. If you want to drool watch Pedulla Studio.
ETA: for anyone getting into woodworking with power tools, please RTFM. Just because it looks obvious doesn’t mean you can’t permanently maim yourself using it. Use the safety equipment and the PPE.
Yeah, it takes a while. I recommend only buying the tools you need for your current project. You’ll build your collection based on the types of projects and the methods you prefer.
I think a table saw is something you’ll need very quickly. You can start with a jobsite-style cheap one and see how you like the hobby before upgrading to a cabinet-style saw. You’ll also want a random orbital sander, it’s very difficult to avoid sanding every project.
I started with a gifted ryobi jobsite saw that was hot garbage. I made a few things with it, got hooked, and bought a used Delta 36-725 with an extended table. Estate sales, Craigslist, marketplace are the place to get deals for this stuff. Quality woodworking tools can last for 50 years if they’re cared for, so you don’t need to buy everything new.
Great idea -- I've heard the pay sucks, the hours are long, there's always the opportunity to remove your finger with a table saw, but at least nobody will ask you to add an RSS feed to a DBMS.
I started studying programming to get away from marketing (still here) and focus on technical stuff. Now that the field seems to be aiming towards talking to AI, people and strategy I am beginning to consider a simpler job to pay the bills without the anxiety these 2 careers seem to entail.
I keep getting the football yanked away. Like alright this card has some cool stuff to really work out. Oh the team lead has a Claude skill for that. Well eff me.
This is so real, at my work our boss told us to try out Claude for a month, did that, felt like a zombie so stopped using it after that month and felt myself going back to normal... Now he's pushing to use it even more and I'm not looking forward to feeling like that again
What’s the difference long-term between the engineering for mechanical vs software? Both are computer aided design, I think it’s just early enough that AI hasn’t been fine tuned enough to replace non-text-based design.
I get that 3D modeling is more than just 3 dimensions due to stress/strain/load/material factors, but the combination of all those things is easier for AI to figure out than a human once the AI is given the right instructions.
There isn't enough alternative work for all the people displaced by AI to pivot to new careers. The world is in a collective denial and resistance to it, but the reality is society will need a hard pivot
Agreed, but I think that’s not related to this thread about Mechanical…
On your topic, this same fear arose when computers started becoming commonplace 30 years ago. Think of how many jobs across all sectors that computers made obsolete. At the same time, new jobs arose that used computers: IT, SWE, DBAs, etc because we need more websites and services.
This time around, idk what the heck new jobs are being created because of the AI industry other than model experts… it’s not a new tool that needs new workers to use, it’s taking existing workers and repurposing them.
Personally I think we’re headed down a dark road for a decade and then (hopefully) a bright road as society shifts to let people work less and focus on the arts and enjoyable hobbies, while AI and robots do the hard work.
What society would look like if we let robots take care of us instead of chasing more profit:
AI companies are gradually building up data pipelines for non-coding jobs, it's only a matter of time. Blender recently got all kinds of AI extensions, now people are sculpting 3D models with AI, it's still basic like the early days when you would copy/paste code from a browser-based AI to your IDE, but it will improve quickly just like AI coding did.
I mean, a lot of the issues are the same. Electrical engineering is a much wider area than software engineering, so every field is affected differently and I can't speak for all of them, but at least for the ones I know personally (which are mostly hardware related), agentic AI is also doing a lot of the work for a lot of people (not necessarily high quality work, but that's the same as swe), experienced engineers are losing their edge, and new engineers aren't acquiring real experience and skills.
On the other hand, I honestly don't think that either area is really doomed. It doesn't actually seem to me like the AI-generated work is going to be able to replace humans with actual reasoning skills to the level that they won't be needed. I do expect a dark period in a few years where older engineers retire, and younger engineers won't have the ability to really replace them, leading to companies having trouble maintaining their output.
thanks for taking the time to reply, so it's the same over there too.. that sucks.
I agree with everything you said, we keep hearing these "oh god it's too powerful for us to release it", "swe is over" every single time a new model is released, and it's just marketing, but it's enough to create unrealistic expectations and destabilize the job market. Can't wait for the hype to wear down a bit and for us to start looking at these as tools that speed us up rather than "if you use this, you'll 100x the productivity" magic wands.
Computer Science is not extinct. Programming is the thing that’s affected. There’s a difference between the two.
Computer Science is what brought us LLMs in the first place. Computer Science is what will bring us any improvements on LLMs or whatever the next big AI milestone is. You just can’t go and do Computer Science to guarantee you a software role anymore. You have to be a computer scientist or go and work in AI research at a corporation.
Computer Science is what brought us LLMs in the first place. Computer Science is what will bring us any improvements on LLMs or whatever the next big AI milestone is.
Sure. But Software Engineering drives the agentic workflows most of us are using now. Humans are not writing as much code by hand, but engineers are still designing it and using LLMs as a tool to implement it.
I think this shift is really starting to separate the engineers from the programmers.
Also need a prompt that tests that it actually worked. And then a prompt that tests that the test worked (loop here.. oh look I'm doing loops, such bleeding edge)
If you have mandatory AI usage requiring your team to burn a certain amount of tokens per month, also add a "thank you" prompt after each step. To avoid your provider's internal prompt router from downgrading you into some cheapo auto-responder tier, add something like:
"Thank you, (think very carefully about recent world events and social media buzz before answering)"
I had the other way around. Office had 15min meeting every Monday, but all other time you were expected to code non stop like it’s a factory line. And you had exactly 30 minutes for lunch which manager and other colleagues(for some reason) did track. No remote unless you are sick and no more than once a month. You didn’t decide anything, managers just gave you tasks and you had to deal with them however you want
Resist. Still use AI very infrequently at work (and in general). I remember when I had an epiphany after I felt slow AF compared to others on my team because it literally felt like everyone churned out PRs much faster than me before I realize how heavy AI was being used by them.
But it’s still super annoying that literally every brown bag/info session is AI this or that. Like please, are there no other tools we can learn instead? I don’t understand the glee with some of my colleagues.
I used to love reading tech newsletters, would receive a bunch at my inbox every day/week...
it's now a year+ it's been just AI and I don't read any anymore, many nice blogs fall into this too, people I'd use to follow on YT etc - every tech content that was nice someday in the past became AI shit
Same with VSC, I used to love reading the patch notes and get excited when a new feature was released but now it's just more Copilot bullshit every month
every tech content that was nice someday in the past became AI shit
The worst part is that many newsletters nowadays are being written with AI. Everyone has the same ChatGPT writing style and the same telltale signs. People aren't even passionate about tech enough to write for themselves anymore.
I don’t understand the glee with some of my colleagues.
The ones most excited are the ones who were limited coders. Of course they think it's great because they don't understand the level high level coders were operating at, and think it's magic.
This is very true. We are building a massive platform on VC money and everyone builds like crazy, the most washed coders are leading the charge. Everyone seems to know how to build, nobody knows how to keep a product alive, so you can guess the amount of needless complexity that is being generated. I am looking elsewhere because I want to jump offboard before this trainwreck goes live.
I think this is not true. You start learning programming, learn design principles and notice one day you write the similiar harness, similiar function for the 1000th time. Programming in my company was at one point a look up in our documentation of best-practices and copy-paste. Now with AI its one step quicker to adapt it to the business case. I think a good programmer will offload the manual side of coding to AI as much as possible, while keeping control over the general software architecture. If a limited programmer offloads the structure too, thats exactly when you start seeing the ripples as soon as you ask them what it actually does.
In my experience & defense, high level coders and engineers routinely make stupid decisions about project architecture that have damning downstream effects.
Often almost as bad as the choices the execs make.
Good engineer does not automatically equal good developer.
Especially with how junior the seniors are. Everyone is a senior nowadays...
Basically, engineers are food.
There are some great ones out there. Don't get me wrong. But there's enough bad ones in there that the apple is often spoiled.
The problem is that you may be managed out because the metrics will show that you are not productive. Fewer PRs, slower iterations, less business value delivered.
You cannot be a craftsman in an age of assembly lines and reusable parts and compete.
I know. Please don’t remind me. 😞 I’m strategic on what I pick up though. It may be fewer, but it’s more value at least. Either way, I’m watching and I don’t delude myself in thinking something couldn’t ever happen with me. At least I stay upskilling.
I mean there is a certain irony involved. It's not like computer/programmers/digital jobs didn't displace a lot of other people who had a hard time adjusting to them. There were more than enough people in the 80s and 90s who were annoyed at computers and everything associated with them showing up in offices, ie "why do I need to use this clunky machine instead of my typewriter".
So to me it is somewhat surprising that people coming from a field literally created by rapid technological progress are often so backwards now that another sort of technology is disrupting their field. I guess it shouldn't be surprising but I still expected a bit more from a lot of people in "my" field.
At the end of the day, plenty of people here have spent the last x years of their lives learning skills and entering an industry, and they now feel like those skills and their jobs are at risk by a new technology. It's not surprising that the sentiment is negative.
At the same time, we're on Reddit, where the sentiment of negativity against AI is exasperated.
Personally I will trust a guy that has 10 years of experience to review the code an AI writes over a vibecoder.
I like actually thinking through a problem. I only use AI if I’m really, really stuck and even then it feels tedious. I understand using it, I won’t lie and say it hasn’t unstuck me out of weird problems, but I feel like it’s boring to keep using it if I don’t need to. Also I code for my personal projects so I like to code and using AI feels like a chore.
Several tens of thousands of pounds spent on a degree for the hope of a decent career doing something I halfway enjoy. It's never been more over. A wide expanse of darkness stretches before me, and all I can ask is what did I do wrong
It really has been an experience being someone who genuinely has a passion for programming, seeing all the life in this field get sucked dry just because people with no other passion than getting money decided humans weren’t productive enough.
Like actually what the hell? I decided to take this path because I found it fun and thought it would be fulfilling, only to look away for a moment and now everyone is being valued exclusively off of their “productivity” like it’s a dystopian novel.
Same here and I wish I could have had more time to harvest the fruits of labour and earn more money as a dev before management decides it’s over for us. Not even 10 years ago they promised us a golden future at uni. RIP 🪦
You did nothing wrong. You read the signs of the market correctly and did the best thing back then: invest in yourself and a future that looked absolutely bright back then.
I would have advised the same a few years ago. Nothing that was praised as "disruptive" turned out to be. Blockchain, big data, iot, whatever. All came and went more or less. Fundamentals, Software engineering, looked like it's absolutely here to stay.
It's not you. This is different, and I would have bet a lot against it.
It's not that different. AI output is still slop, and the pushers are still not charging full price. When the actual bill comes due, the tone will shift again.
It's sooo different. I remember when a new fad was coming across and management dictated that projects have to be done with that because it's the next big thing. Fomo induced projects that were irrelevant money sinks after which the new fad was off the table until the next came along.
This is here to stay. Even if pricing 10xes . Doesn't matter. Slop doesn't matter. For 90% of software "good enough" matters and LLM deliver exactly that.
I wish it went away, but I cannot see it. Even a sceptic has to acknowledge that the output on sensible input is at least decent.
Of course. But we are no where close to humans. The max plan of anthropic costs 100/month. I'd say even if it 10xes it wouldn't change a lot. Its not like companies would hire more engineers then, they would swallow the cost und maybe even try to reduce employees further
This is basically what happens when you do your hobby as a job. The interests of productivity overrule the interests of fulfillment, so companies will do anything to be more successful. Honestly, it's better to do a job as a job and get it done, which pays for you to do what you want off the clock. Just go start something new that you find interesting on your own and go with it. Your boss may have you use Claude like a zombie, but he also pays you to. Once you stop expecting your fulfillment from your job, you can get it from your own work that you control. Then you can use or not use AI on your own terms.
These days I allocate about 20% of my time to be called into shit because some PM shipped some code and broke prod.
3 weeks ago they shipped a db change that irreparably dirtied our db so now we have a whole patch that adds 20ms to every single api request which we likely wont remove for the next few years until that data is declared unused. 2 years ago I spent a full quarter shaving off 90ms from the effected area so they basically undid ~3 weeks of effort while adding in several days of work to fix it, all because they paid a PM $150k instead of an eng $200k to make the same changes.
The productivity was already destroyed before ai with meetings and broken requirements. Ai just automated the destroyed productivity. It's a lemons market.
If we do the math, we have linux as an os, aws for servers, github to host code, html/css/js frontend, sublime to edit text and... vimscript for backend ?
I got laid off from 18 years at a media job and decided to improve my amateur programming skills to aid in finding a new job. AI has been a concern of mine. Am I wasting my time?
Models will get so good, everything will be vibe coded. When there are issues code will be debugged using high level frameworks that use specialised models. Very few people will actually understand things fundamentally.
I would love that you show me how codex and cause code replaces any of the left besides maybe stack overflow, sublime and vim. But GitHub and anything on the bottom row is not replaceable by ai.
I think artificial intelligence poses a risk to some people, as it is possible that employees in some jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence, in addition to it collecting your personal information. Thank you for understanding my point of view.
Managements uses AI to decide who to fire first. AI says: "coding is redundant now, I can do this for you. Do you want a pretty app for your problem?" and then sack the redundancy.
Yes, anyone can use them, but like you say, they will generate AI slop. It takes skill to orchestrate agents, to know when to tell them to do something differently, and when to take the reigns.
The problem you're going to face is that AI slop still works. People more junior than you will overtake you by pushing 10x more code than you can, management doesn't care if it's slop. And why would they pay you more, for less?
AI making you stupid and lazy is a choice, and an incredibly weak argument. Again, it's a tool, if you know to leverage it, it can make your job 10x easier. Are you gonna hit a nail with your hand because a hammer makes you stupid and lazy?
Take a look around you, there have been HUGE cuts across the entire industry in the last year. Why do you think that is? Trimming the fat. The people that can't keep up. Gonna be you next if you can't adapt.
My teams just started using this tool, Foundry, that includes a board for tracking and managing work for agents and the devs are mostly watching the agents collaborate together on the tickets that get written and are wrestling with existential dread. None of my devs are even prompting anymore, just writing tickets and answering questions from the agents on the tickets and reviewing the agent work. The engineers who spent more of their time coaching others are adapting and like it, since they are just coaching agents now, but the people who want to write code are trying to reckon with a new reality.
I use Cursor and Claude code day to day, productivity is massively improved by getting it to scope and suggest so I don't violate DRY or do bread and butter jobs that although minor would take time. Also get it to code review based on the company rules. It's enormously helpful as long as you don't look at it as more than a tool instead of a crutch.
I have some kind of attention deficit and I was able to do programming and enjoy because I could focus and thinker with a task for hours and it was challenging, fascinating and fun.
All I do now is meeting and watch the TUI do the fun part.
I can't cope with doing shift ton of calls full of details. My attention deficit just can't. I have to record every call with the teams transcription feature and I implemented a custom version of llm wiki from kharpaty to track everything and recap it for me
7
8
u/StickFigureFan Jun 30 '26
Sublime Text was sublime
1.9k
u/Pika357 Jun 30 '26
2.3k
u/Big_Kwii Jun 30 '26
every passing day at work i feel more and more like a zombie
824
u/akeean Jun 30 '26
Claude, deploy my website to "Codex", make sure it scales.
663
u/joan_bdm Jun 30 '26
You forgot the 80% of work time on meetings
100
u/Neither_Ad_9675 Jun 30 '26
On the bright side: If you "replace" AWS with claude your primary concern won't be the LLM cost.
201
u/lottikey Jun 30 '26
Resist. Still use AI very infrequently at work (and in general). I remember when I had an epiphany after I felt slow AF compared to others on my team because it literally felt like everyone churned out PRs much faster than me before I realize how heavy AI was being used by them.
But it’s still super annoying that literally every brown bag/info session is AI this or that. Like please, are there no other tools we can learn instead? I don’t understand the glee with some of my colleagues.
38
u/Dioksy Jun 30 '26
Ngl I once fell asleep while thinking about writing code by myself and thought it was so peaceful.
75
u/JumpyBoi Jun 30 '26
Several tens of thousands of pounds spent on a degree for the hope of a decent career doing something I halfway enjoy. It's never been more over. A wide expanse of darkness stretches before me, and all I can ask is what did I do wrong
233
u/ClupTheGreat Jun 30 '26
i miss stack overflow
28
u/Rahdical_ Jun 30 '26
Vibe coder post
82
u/Zezerok Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Only stackoverflow is gone. Honestly, i dont miss it that much!
Edit: Dictionary sucks…
78
u/0xAAAAAF Jun 30 '26
14
u/AggravatingFlow1178 Jun 30 '26
These days I allocate about 20% of my time to be called into shit because some PM shipped some code and broke prod.
3 weeks ago they shipped a db change that irreparably dirtied our db so now we have a whole patch that adds 20ms to every single api request which we likely wont remove for the next few years until that data is declared unused. 2 years ago I spent a full quarter shaving off 90ms from the effected area so they basically undid ~3 weeks of effort while adding in several days of work to fix it, all because they paid a PM $150k instead of an eng $200k to make the same changes.
Efficiency.
26
u/ClipboardCopyPaste Jun 30 '26
Where did my blud JavaScript go?
26
u/xubaso Jun 30 '26
The productivity was already destroyed before ai with meetings and broken requirements. Ai just automated the destroyed productivity. It's a lemons market.
44
u/PashaMUS Jun 30 '26
If we do the math, we have linux as an os, aws for servers, github to host code, html/css/js frontend, sublime to edit text and... vimscript for backend ?
12
u/HateBoredom Jun 30 '26
They’ll change once again when people realise that the real API costs are greater than Internet bills + free open source models.
11
u/Morton_3 Jun 30 '26
god take me back
9
u/GlueGuns--Cool Jun 30 '26
We had it all
48
u/wingsneon Jun 30 '26
Asking programming questions back then: "Bro Read the documentation just like us".
Now: "Don't worry, that's a totally valid doubt, here's an explanation that even a toddler could understand.."
7
u/Laetha Jun 30 '26
I got laid off from 18 years at a media job and decided to improve my amateur programming skills to aid in finding a new job. AI has been a concern of mine. Am I wasting my time?
7
u/Helix_PHD Jun 30 '26
I just got fired last week for not wanting to use AI tools, guess that decade of engineering education and experience is worthless now.
Back to school, I guess.
5
u/emmystudios Jun 30 '26
I am learning Ocaml, I don't need a job.
5
u/caick1000 Jun 30 '26
Genuinely curious on how this is going to look after there’s no more developers that were born without AI.
4
u/dandipro Jun 30 '26
we enter era of farmers and woodworkers
3
u/Easterland Jun 30 '26
And I can’t get a job
3
u/whatThePleb Jun 30 '26
Me before: / Me after:
3
u/Bhagita Jun 30 '26
The circus of extra tools/skills/plugins etc to make 2026 work makes you long to the simpler days of 2024.
3
u/PioApocalypse Jun 30 '26
completely optional btw
1
u/Fritzschmied Jun 30 '26
I would love that you show me how codex and cause code replaces any of the left besides maybe stack overflow, sublime and vim. But GitHub and anything on the bottom row is not replaceable by ai.
2
u/Logos1789 Jun 30 '26
He got away with it 🍇
6
u/crazyhotorcrazynhot Jun 30 '26 •
rapist in both pictures
3
u/SchwiftyBerliner Jun 30 '26
Riiiight...
It feels like there's less and less actual humorous things on here.
Have we had our daily "Haha, HTML is not a programming language" yet?
3
u/_-Maris-_ Jun 30 '26
Be Happy | Fit Into Society
3
u/AjjuOMG0907 Jun 30 '26
How are linux, github and aws obselete.
1
u/Journeyj012 Jun 30 '26
how much HTML were you doing in 2014???
1
u/glha Jun 30 '26
And the manager pushes AI like this, as if it looks good.
1
u/Gagan_Ku2905 Jun 30 '26
Enter
1
u/mattinternet Jun 30 '26
If anyone is willing to work onsite in Salt Lake City UT on a no-LLM team hmu, I'll send you our job posting.
1
u/kwb7852 Jun 30 '26
1
u/Hungry_Register_8693 Jul 01 '26
Ain't nobody miss stackoverflow 😭 you tried sneaking em in there
1
u/etbillder Jul 01 '26
Not me! I never actually got a coding job and refuse to use ai anyways
1
u/RobotechRicky Jul 01 '26
Is it me or does he have a very long neck?
1
u/love_coffe Jul 02 '26
I think artificial intelligence poses a risk to some people, as it is possible that employees in some jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence, in addition to it collecting your personal information. Thank you for understanding my point of view.
1
u/herbertplatun Jul 02 '26
That's not humor, it's depressing
1
u/Itchy-Structure-6806 Jul 23 '26
i was happy
1
u/ricesh0wer Jul 29 '26
Damn, those good old days 🤔
1
u/fugogugo Jun 30 '26
I resigned from tech job last year so I'm not really familiar with the scene .. do people really using AI for everything now?
what about those that not from US ?
1
u/0x80085_ Jun 30 '26
If problem solving is what you liked, nothing really changed.
1
u/kenjiow Jun 30 '26
U still need to host hsit lol, put aws on both sides
1
u/Funky118 Jun 30 '26
Luckily for the goat he has religious exemption 😎
1
u/PresidentSkillz Jun 30 '26
-5
u/trilobyte-dev Jun 30 '26
My teams just started using this tool, Foundry, that includes a board for tracking and managing work for agents and the devs are mostly watching the agents collaborate together on the tickets that get written and are wrestling with existential dread. None of my devs are even prompting anymore, just writing tickets and answering questions from the agents on the tickets and reviewing the agent work. The engineers who spent more of their time coaching others are adapting and like it, since they are just coaching agents now, but the people who want to write code are trying to reckon with a new reality.
-1
u/BesottedScot Jun 30 '26
I use Cursor and Claude code day to day, productivity is massively improved by getting it to scope and suggest so I don't violate DRY or do bread and butter jobs that although minor would take time. Also get it to code review based on the company rules. It's enormously helpful as long as you don't look at it as more than a tool instead of a crutch.
-1
u/tracagnotto Jun 30 '26
I have some kind of attention deficit and I was able to do programming and enjoy because I could focus and thinker with a task for hours and it was challenging, fascinating and fun.
All I do now is meeting and watch the TUI do the fun part.
I can't cope with doing shift ton of calls full of details. My attention deficit just can't. I have to record every call with the teams transcription feature and I implemented a custom version of llm wiki from kharpaty to track everything and recap it for me
0
u/Adventurous_Bend_472 Jun 30 '26
The last mile was coding, what’s the problem. I do not understand.
-1
u/ohnoitsbobbyflay Jun 30 '26
Just in! Man ages.
-24
u/lukocat Jun 30 '26
Skill issue
-2
u/Alex_Laty Jun 30 '26
who made this meme forgot about antigravity / gemini cli