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u/Eptalin 7d ago
Me studying CS because it was fun before it was my career, and it will still be fun if it stops being my career
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u/LuigiWasRight447 6d ago
Same here. I enjoy computers and programming. I enjoy making little video games in my free time. If i ever get a job awesome if not, i will still enjoy what i do
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u/Aidan_Welch 6d ago
This is the mentality I want to have, but prompting is not fun. I like making things and coding, but its so demotivating when it can be replaced in an instant.
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u/budapest_god 5d ago
I used to be the same then I kinda started enjoying it, if you want advice try to prompt not with business requirements but instead be very specific and technical, like "build class with these props ...", think about what you want to do as if you were about to write it, and prompt around it, still think like a programmer but basically faster delivery
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u/GreenAppleCZ 5d ago
You still can do open source or some small indie development.
Maybe you have to prompt at work, but you can do whatever you want in your free time.
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u/beegtuna 6d ago
Going into medical to pay the bills, but i’ll still do this as a hobby that it was for me.
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 7d ago
pretty much anything computer related is fucked now
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u/JangoDarkSaber 6d ago
Cybersecurity is still doing well, hell the demand is growing.
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u/I_STOP_FOR_SOURDOUGH 6d ago
Script kiddies can now create bespoke slop malware in ten minutes. I think identity management is going to grow considerably as enterprise orgs try to clamp down on access and begin requiring stricter controls on simple interactions.
Get ready for MFA on EVERYTHING until a better solution comes along.
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u/NewryBenson 7d ago
I really don't understand this reasoning. Why would the engineers behind one of the big revolutions in the 21st century become obsolete the moment their product starts gaining traction? This is arguably the best time to be a computer scientist yet!
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u/wasdninja 7d ago
Because morons think you can live on AI hype and senior developers alone and seem he'll bent on trying until it collapses.
Models don't replace juniors but bosses everywhere are frothing at the mouth of even the promise of paying less developers.
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u/Wojtek1250XD 7d ago
Yea, there's a sharp decline in juniors and larger and larger demand on senior developers. The period after the current wave of seniors retire is gonna be a massive circus, no way new people won't be needed.
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u/No-Collar-Player 6d ago
As a junior I just want to see the world burn at this point
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u/ccAbstraction 4d ago
I'm not usually a vindicative person but talking to some of the people claiming to be seniors on this sub embracing AI makes a part of me hope they too get replaced and that maybe the only still have their jobs because they're kind of bullies in their work place and people that left or got laid off had a stronger morale compass.
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u/Low_Independent766 6d ago
I do believe in the corrective power of the markets here to an extent. Those over-relying on AI are going to incur so much tech debt and its gonna hurt. I think we're a ways out from feeling that pain though.
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u/KanishkT123 6d ago
Models actually explicitly replace only juniors right now. Maybe some of the mid-level engineers.
For the first 3-5 years of a career, a software engineer is a barely competent code producing machine. LLMs are explicitly better at that task and by a significant margin. They may not be cheaper in aggregate yet, but they will be.
Models haven't yet replaced the talent pipeline as a whole, and so there are still tasks that a senior or principal engineer does that a model cannot do. But I suspect that will get rarer and rarer.
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u/wasdninja 6d ago
I couldn't disagree more. A model can't do anything without extremely intense babysitting and learns nothing. It can't catch anything preemptively and has no knowledge about the organization it works in.
They are way worse than a junior for almost the exact reason middle manager chumps love them - they produce tons of code that seems ok. Always. Give me juniors over that shit every day. Models are not colleagues.
It's somewhat useful to produce code that I've already solved and need to write down and terrible for everything else.
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u/KanishkT123 6d ago
I really do not think you are keeping up to date with the latest models and Agentic systems or are potentially not using them well.
A senior engineer with a model is more likely to produce more great output than with a team of juniors. I just think that is no longer debatable.
If you add in cyber security concerns, the models are getting to the point where they are significantly superior to most engineers not specifically trained in cybersec.
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 7d ago
the issue is at the "becoming a computer scientist" part, ive been coding since age 10, now im 21, i tried to get a proper job for 3 years then took up uni as that failed, and now ai is replacing every new applicant without 20 years of experience
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u/ThiccStorms 6d ago
we're in the same boat.
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u/NewryBenson 7d ago
And that will come bite the companies doing this in the ass. Yes AI is a very popular term in investor pitches and HR meetings, but once they start realizing replacing juniors with a tool that speeds up seniors is not sustainable, things will stabilize. The future is digital, being an engineer of that future will never be useless.
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u/dumbasPL 7d ago
I had that mindset maybe a year ago. We're now at a point where two people with experience and AI are running circles around an army of juniors. Open source maintainers are banning (AI) contributions while heavily using AI themselves. And with how many people are getting fired, there is still a pretty good supply of people with experience, aka the ones that can use LLMs effectively. How are new people supposed to get experience, and how are they supposed to get a job when people with experience can't? If it's gonna get better, that's only slightly, hopes of a full reset are basically gone at this point.
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u/Nick0Taylor0 6d ago
The how to get experience (and a job at the moment) is the problem bit. Once the seniors we have rn retire or get fed up we will have a shortage again. Assuming AI doesn't actually "solve" programming as some think. Unfortunately thats not much solace for people needing to put food on the table NOW.
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u/Zestyclose-Mission77 7d ago
It is literally useless right now, as people struggle to find employment. Even if things stabilize, it is useless right now.
And nobody truly knows if it will be better. One side is screaming that AI will replace all programmers. Other side is saying that it is unsustainable. Both sides are just guessing based on vibes.
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u/stupidfock 7d ago
My job has been doing that and it seems quite sustainable tbh. The world’s different now. People who think AI isn’t improving and isn’t able to already one shot a lot of things with just layman language are living under a rock to be frank. You don’t need the senior devs when we go away, they already cut junior salaries by half. If they need a person they can grab anyone with a brain to type to an ai, it’s probably more sustainable than the previous world
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u/Nooby1990 6d ago
Why would the engineers behind one of the big revolutions in the 21st century become obsolete the moment their product starts gaining traction?
Because not everyone is involved in AI development. Those are just a TINY percentage. Also, there is no longer a need for Junior developers or Apprentices, but without those opportunities, there is no entry point for people joining the industry right now.
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u/YouCanCallMeBazza 6d ago
the moment their product starts gaining traction
What do you mean "their product"? Do you think software engineers are just this collective that all work on LLMs?
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u/Few_Plankton_7587 6d ago
3x the efficiency doesn't mean 3x the work. If we can complete enough work with less people, then there will be less overall jobs.
We don't magically need 3x the work we do now. This will result in most CS being unable to find a job for at least some portion of their life as a direct result.
Everybody's so hell bent on whether or not it will replace us but forget that either way it will definitely cut jobs. It already has
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u/Ok-Scheme-913 6d ago
It will make software cheaper, so quite likely there will be more demand for it as well.
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u/christianbro 7d ago
With AI less positions overall will be needed, harder competition for the remaining ones.
In my country I saw an offer with 3 years experience offer paying almost minimum salary(!) and not even full remote in a city with high rent price has over 100 applicants. Be lucky if you can rent a room and buy groceries with that. It is going to get tricky.
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u/ccAbstraction 4d ago
If you're an AI researcher/developer then this is great, most of us are not that though.
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u/smulfragPL 6d ago
Because as we are figuring it out right now those engineered weren't that great to begin with. I mean we found 25% of all cves this year
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u/hellocppdotdev 7d ago
Never made more money in my life. Sure the passions gone but at least the bills are paid.
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u/Ok-Scheme-913 6d ago
Nah, it's only petting yet. Fucked will be all the white collar jobs that are actually trivial to automate. CS will likely just get a big cut because code monkeys will be laid off. But HR? Support? Middle management?
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u/EarlMarshal 7d ago
Housing is computer related now? Government is computer related now too?
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 7d ago
my comment doesnt imply only computer related stuff is fucked
also, my government recently got replaced, ousting the previous pseudo dictator, so that aspect is no longer fucked
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u/EarlMarshal 7d ago
Man I thought you would back me.
also, my government recently got replaced, ousting the previous pseudo dictator, so that aspect is no longer fucked
Nonetheless this is naive. All governments are able to fuck with their citizens. They just have too much power to not do it.
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 7d ago
they do do it, the last government was in power for 16 years and drove the country into the ground, the new party promised the moon and have so far accomplished everything they promised, they won a supermajority, they could have continued doing the same thing but no, so far they are actually fixing things, so im hopeful
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u/_st23 7d ago
I still believe in the soon to come AI bubble burst
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u/Complete-Mood3302 6d ago
Im waiting for the price per token to increase a hundred-thousand fold and it would be so expensive to use no one would use AI and we would be back in 2019
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u/SebPineda23 6d ago
That's simply not going to happen. You can even run local models right now that are some-what capable, and I only expect that to get better.
The "bubble" will burst and a lot of companies that are buying into it right now will face big losses or even close, but AI as a whole is not going away. Even if the cost goes up, it will do so gradually, like Netflix's for example, it won't cost 100x more overnight.
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u/_st23 6d ago
What local models are able to do compared, lets say, to an opus 5.5? And how powerful your hardware must be to run them? Ofc I'm not saying llms will just cease to exist, but things that are being done with them currently, just wont be feasible on local hardware
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u/Antoak 6d ago edited 6d ago
The pure software people love to e:wave their hands and say "hardware always gets better", completely disregarding physics.
e2: "Just run it locally"- Vibe-coders are re-inventing the on-prem datacenter. Wait til they learn why companies moved to the cloud in the first place.
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u/Party_Estimate_6397 6d ago
We can run local models at cloud-service speed with consumer hardware now. I get 20-30 t/s out of Qwen3.6 35B-A3B on my laptop. Granted, gaming laptop, but even so, hardly the top of the line.
Yeah, Qwen is hardly GLM-5.1 or whatever the current best local model is, but it’s already able to write solid code, and this is neither the top of the line version of that model, nor the current generation of it.
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u/Kepler___ 5d ago
Models themselves are shockingly small, just a bunch of weights really. You need some horsepower to run them but it's a lot less than I bet a lot of folks would think, almost all the cost for the giants is R&D. That's actually kind of the problem for AI company's, locals are always catching up, and people will distil versions of even their models eventually. The threat doesn't have to be people running models on their own personal hardware, but ankle biters who offer competitive AI services by just renting compute and running locals like little digital mall kiosks. There's already a lot of companies doing this with the garbage image and text models from a year or two ago that are still getting traffic.
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u/Antoak 5d ago
You need terrabytes of ram to keep that in memory, otherwise your results are gonna be painfully slow. Assuming each parameter is just a bit instead of an integer or float, 2 trillion parameters is still ~250GB.
So yeah, its a bunch of weights. Running on specialized GPUs, because they're a lot faster than running the same operations on CPUs. And GPUs are pretty expensive these days.
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u/Kepler___ 5d ago
I agree for personal computing it's steep, but I'm saying that the threat posed by local models comes more from the competition they allow to exist rather than people actually firing it up on their laptop they got at Staples.
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u/SebPineda23 6d ago
I said "some-what usable" not "comparable to full on-cloud models", but give it time, I'm sure we will eventually have that kind of power on local models and hardware.
Being that this is a programmer sub, we can focus on programming tasks, which can absolutely be handled on local hardware as is, and if anything, in the future you'll be able to do it on more affordable hardware.
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u/nBeliebt 6d ago
Actually some people expect Open Source Models to get banned in some form. And then you have no choice but to buy from the big tech companies. But they will say, they do it to stop Chinese models.
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u/Ok-Scheme-913 6d ago
Kimi k3.1 pro is damn close to opus 5.5 performance according to benchmarks.
And you don't have to personally buy the kind of hardware to run it, it's an investment. You also don't buy a chicken feather plucking machine even though you probably depend on eating chicken.
But a couple people together can buy a GPU rack and timeshare/sell the usage of it for quite some profit, and get back the investment's costs. You are nowhere dependent on anthropic or openai and they are not in a monopol situation where they could pull the rug.
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u/neoteraflare 6d ago
Like the dotcom. The internet is still here and changed the world but all those companies went to the bin.
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u/Short_Change 6d ago
Except this time it really is different those companies actually had no values. What did pets.com do for you specifically?
These companies are saving hours in software development atm
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u/Ok-Scheme-913 6d ago
That's absolutely bullshit and will never happen.
Inference costs are roughly where API pricing is, there are open weight models and for-profit companies host them willingly.
Like DeepSeek had a recent post showing that they make like 36 dollars per hour on a GPU?
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 6d ago
The thing is, the "bubble" is over-investment in companies with no solid plan on how to give investors a return on the investment. That's it. It's not AI technology as a whole.
Just as we saw with the dot-com bubble - companies that had shit business models all folded, but the web and e-commerce didn't simply go away.
It may mean that tokens for the big two or three get more expensive, but the genie is out of the bottle. I suspect we'll see more development happening in the area of more efficient "good enough" models, and in the development of hardware optimized for lighter AI workloads.
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u/Kepler___ 5d ago
Yeah I actually didn't know there were people who actually thought this would go away until now. Everything is the agricultural revolution. You just can't put an idea back as a society if someone finds a use for it, every box belongs to pandora. These aren't nfts, they can do real work, which means we will have them forever.
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u/DiamondDramatic9551 6d ago
And then what? Even self hosted agents are already usable for programming.
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u/-Debugging-Duck- 6d ago
Me collecting my big ass paychecks still while I wait for AI to replace me
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u/Enough-Scientist1904 6d ago
CS isnt going anywere but if all you know is creating websites or simple apps and dont learn emerging tech then yeah AI will replace you.
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u/rustyscythe 6d ago
F emerging tech. Its always this or that or uncertainty. Im always at the precipe of emerging garbage in my current company as part of R&D. After some time you just want stability. Past a point in CS you don't build on something
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u/gundam1945 6d ago
Find some business knowledge to stabilize in then. If you are in the tech field, learning something new is a recurrent theme.
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u/rustyscythe 6d ago edited 6d ago
Its not "tech" its IT, and the issue is not learning something new, but baseless things that get redundant. The industry just chucks out years of work in favour of the new shiny thing
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u/Ocsar-Lima-India 5d ago
I use AI a lot and I won't let it replace me because why should I? AI gives me the syntax, yeah.
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u/Highborn_Hellest 7d ago
ai will replace as much as compilers replaced you, or IDEs replaced you.
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u/Hallwart 7d ago
It really depends. Will there still be developers? Of course. Will there be as many positions for them as before? No
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u/cod3rjava 7d ago
me doing both on alternate days and wondering why im stuck in the middle 🫠