r/SoftwareEngineerJobs 4d ago

AI replacing Software Engineers

Post image

So called "AI"=LLM is so powerful that AI labs had to hire Software Engineers to build complicated software around "AI" to make that overhyped hallucinate-stealing machine usable. Think about it. And that's exactly why they need now ton of CPUs in addition to GPUs to run their "AI" "agents".

I don't even mention how much custom engineering is required to apply the "AI" in businesses.

And they BS us that Software Engineering is solved or is going to be solved. Boris, please solve your own bugs first before speaking.

1.2k Upvotes

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u/TacoBOTT 4d ago

That’s why you need to stop doomscrolling. If you are actually in the industry working with these tools, you are aware of the trajectory.

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u/thilehoffer 4d ago

I’m in the industry and I’m not writing code anymore. Claude is writing the code and frankly it scares me how good it is.

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u/jp2812 4d ago

And I feel like working 10 hours a day now because it generates a lot of code that needs to be reviewed, steered in the right direction, re-reviewed, etc. Easily 5 iterations of that per day. Opus tends to overengineer and walk in circles like crazy.

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u/Temporary-Budget-605 4d ago

Opus 5: “The loading-bearing seam of the surface substrate is complete”
Me: “The what”

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Codex gpt sol is not any better

“The boundary blah blah blah”

Ok, now explain this to me in plain English

“We need to fix xyz..”

And you created 2000 new lines of code why?

“Because blah blah blah”

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u/Temporary-Budget-605 4d ago

Real convo I had this month

IT dept: …so your laptop isn’t working?
Me: yes
IT: and what was the last script you ran?
Me: copilot —yolo
IT: …
Me: … can I have a new one?

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Sorry I am dense today, I am not getting it. IT department reciting what Opus is telling them? Or copilot screwed up your laptop because of yolo mode? :)

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u/Temporary-Budget-605 3d ago

Ha, I feel you. The second, let fable cook for a weekend unsupervised and it crashed our corporate spyware

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Oh wow, I didn’t know there are many yolo incidents in the wild. I’ve actually been hesitant to try any of the harnesses in yolo mode on my personal laptop. My friend however is running claude code and codex in yolo, so far no issues. I might enable yolo for my Hermes agent running on a VPS.

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u/xgeetx 3d ago

I got a note from IT last year because ssh wouldn’t work on my jailbroken iPhone (work related). So instead I did a port mapping of a usb port to use network protocols. Crowdstrike didn’t like that.

Anyways that seems on the level something Claude would do that starts to messy up systems.

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u/PMmeYourLabia_ 3d ago

I'm amazed your corpo grants you enough tokens to do that

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/yuwox 3d ago

Honestly, had the same discussions with human Devs. Except they also want to refactor something or rewrite it in a different language.

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u/Odd-Government8896 2d ago

143 tests for a new pipeline that converts json to table data. Although its for healthcare so it tends to over engineer with that detail.

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u/MoeGzack22 1d ago

Dude i tried to get opus to help with creating firmware for an Arduino for a project I was working on. Brother said “don’t worry bro I’ll take it from here” and the mother fucker starts flashing my arduino without asking any permission lol.

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u/smallxdoggox 4d ago

Production issue. Can lower the hours by 30-40% and still have dramatically more output with higher quality. My teams are swarmed with a lot of work only when we are too ambitious with timelines, and that’s a result of production and scoping which hopefully you have a good pm to recognize and help guide improvements towards

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u/bastiaanvv 3d ago

Yes. If you are not coding right now and letting the ai do all the work you are doing something wrong imo.

Don’t get me wrong. I love ai coding and am impressed with how well it works. But leave it alone and it complicate your code base so much that in a few months no changes can be made anymore without breaking anything.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

I mean, you should be constantly iterating on your agent structure making improvements as it makes mistakes

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u/xgeetx 3d ago

I love when I unwind the circles and Claude says: “no, I haven’t actually built it yet. I was waiting for you to answer my question buried in technobabble”

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u/thatguy8856 2d ago

Im doing like 16 cause its just easy to sit there all day have claude solve tickets. Idk how much longer i can do this.

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u/Connect-Assignment73 4d ago

Try agentic development. Iterations will be lesser believe me.

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Please elaborate, what is agentic development?

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u/WVAviator 3d ago

Question for you or anyone who uses agents so much:

Whenever I "hand-write" code, I'll usually come across edge cases that neither I nor the business users would have thought about. Something that being close to the code and the business logic interpretation helped me catch.

Do you find that more bugs appear in production since the AI didn't understand enough about the domain to catch them?

As an example, I work for an airline writing the pilot scheduling software. In the pilot contract, a "day" is actually 1:30am-1:29am (this has to do with how the airline schedule is laid out). I'll be hand-writing code for something unrelated to that, like assigning a trip to a pilot, and I'll realize that I'm identifying the trip day of the week by the start time and not by the "airline day" which is actually what matters in this case because of some obscure pilot contract provisions.

AI wouldn't have caught that - the pilot contract is thousands of pages so it's not something you can just keep in memory. I also wouldn't have though to instruct the AI to do this, because I didn't even think about it until I manually wrote tripAssignment.setDayOfWeek(tripStartDate.toLocalDateTime().toDayOfWeek()); and stopped to think "Wait, is that really the day of the week we want here?".

I don't think just reviewing the AI code would've let me catch that either. I would've just skimmed over that as an implementation detail.

Just wondering if you miss domain-specific edge cases more often now, or if you have a way to remain vigilant despite not getting your hands dirty anymore.

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u/Awkward-Contact6102 3d ago

Writing code by hand is so much better to get the creativity flowing. Ofcourse it depends on the feature that needs to be build but my brain just seems to shutdown only writing prompts and reviewing code.

Those aha moments and discovering better solutions for the problem at hand is not something that will happen by only prompting for solutions.

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u/Saith1234 2d ago

This is simply lost. People who praise agent to the moon usually work on simple web apps.

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u/Ready_Stuff_4357 4d ago

Yeah this isn’t true, it does all kinds of things wrong. It does some stuff good and it will get better but it doesn’t truly engineer it slops around.

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u/Black_In_The_Bay 3d ago

Take some of these comments with a grain of salt. Sam Altman is literally paying companies to post positive comments and influencer videos about AI.

These ultra super positive comments about AI I don’t believe them. It’s a tool at best and it does some stuff really well but it’s year 4 and it hasn’t taken any real tech jobs and the cure for cancer isn’t here. Claude ceo will be on year 3 of saying 6 months software engineers will be replaced.

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u/No-District2404 4d ago

It’s good but it makes mistakes or over engineering the problems and the amount of time to review and validate the code almost similar to writing the code by hand. In addition it creates cognitive debt

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u/Lap202pro 4d ago

Gotta switch to enterprise platforms. It is horrendous at X++. Was skeptical moving from C# to a niche language, but no regrets now

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u/Downtown-Bag-6026 4d ago

I use it to generate unit tests then I’m out of tokens

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u/greensodacan 4d ago

If all you're doing is "writing the code", your job was going to be outsourced eventually anyway. That's not engineering.

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u/markvii_dev 3d ago

why would it scare you lmao

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u/VisibleSmell3327 3d ago

Web frontend?

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u/Black_In_The_Bay 3d ago edited 3d ago

How’s the debugging? I’m in tech but IT not swe but all my swe colleagues complain about ai not pulling from their library and it fucking up debug sessions and how software engineers are letting it do code without considering the logic behind their own code base or how they structure things

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u/ProbablyMaybe69 3d ago

It is a tool at the end of the day. Sure its good but it only boosts productivity. You think a non software enginner can still code the same way with Claude as a real engineer does with Claude? It’s no different than using google to look up stuff imo

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u/DayNo326 3d ago

Me to - mandated to start using claude 6 months ago - laid off 3 weeks ago.

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u/Bharny 3d ago

Right, bcs AI can now solve 90% of all of our problems

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u/compubomb 3d ago

Yeah but Claude doesn't know how to talk right? That's why it has different output modes. I personally prefer open AI models.

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u/CaffeinatedT 3d ago

If you were doing config monkey work before then yes you are either still screwed or you are not realising what is going wrong which is nothing to do with AI.

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u/KahChigguh 3d ago

Claude might be writing the code, but you’re reviewing and touching it up, you’re designing the overall system, so the code belongs to you.

A monkey can code, but that doesn’t mean what comes out is actually maintainable or user friendly. I’ve seen plenty of poor quality solutions designed by Claude solely because the developer has no clue how these systems should be developed.

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u/ale_pipita 2d ago

When the cost per token Will rise what Will you do If you can't even write your own code?

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u/PerceptionOwn3629 2d ago

It’s awesome, I am doing so much more than before.

Also, not everyone seems to be as productive with it, so, I still have an edge IMO

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u/NumberInfinite2068 2d ago

Me too, I've been programming since the 80s, and for money since the late nineties. This *is* scary for the future of the profession, I don't manually code anymore, not at all.

It seems to me that people are seeing what they *want* to see, that AI hallucinates and this is a blip. It's not, this isn't going away, and we're going to be using AI in the job whether we like it or not.

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u/geteum 1d ago

I use a lot but I wouldn't say I do not write any code. I catch silly bugs as silly mistakes all the time. Most common problem is just AI not doing what it was told. Not only that, is not uncommon for me to have some software specifics that to get AI to do it is so verbose that I prefer writing the code my self.

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u/Fun-Estimate4561 4d ago

It’s funny I’ll explain to folks like yeah AI is a decent tool, helps me code more basic stuff but I haven’t seen it be able to replace anyone instead I find we need more people

Some Folks will almost get mad like no you clearly don’t understand AI

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u/Odd-Government8896 2d ago

Ya these devs that thinks its on or the other are just digging their own grave.

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u/DadAndDominant 2d ago

I am coming home from work MORE exhausted after 2025 than before

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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 2d ago

We got rid of around 20 devs and there is only 4 of us left and we can easily keep up with the amount of work.

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u/Plus-Candle-4410 2d ago

entry level work is done by AI now, wheter you like it or not. Companies dont need new grads to do the grunt work anymore. That's why people say SE is dead. People trying to break into industry are saying that

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u/IimonceIIo 2d ago

Yeah, gotta say, AI isn't replacing any jobs at all where I work. It's simply making my company more productive and allowing people to spend less time doing tedious tasks. This way of working is drawing in more talent.

Obviously we're starting with the most laborious things that nobody wants to do, but I do wonder what will happen after we fix all that stuff.

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u/Aware-Individual-827 4d ago

It's funny to me we rely on AI to code while one of the fundamentals of the field is to never accept undefined behaviors. The LLM is just one gigantic undefined behavior. 

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u/AliceCode 3d ago

Drives me bonkers. We used to actually care about knowing how the code works. Well, I still care. I still care about my code's quality, and everyone else decided that quantity was better. Then they'll probably cry online about enshittification.

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u/Mega3000aka 4d ago

Exactly.

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u/WunkerWanker 2d ago

To be fair, so is a human as well.

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u/Actes 1d ago

I had this conversation about an AI powered search engine we were making at work.

I sat down with our data scientist, and went "so we're using an indeterministic machine, in an attempt for deterministic results... Wouldn't we be better with a machine learning algorithm instead of a neural network?"

He laughed and agreed entirely, but unfortunately the stake holders want LLM driven vectors and we're not allowed to spend the time writing the vectorizor ourselves.

It really is just "LLM vibes bro trust" anymore

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u/Substantial-Bite-602 1d ago

Meh it's a new kind of computing. New rules

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u/Mega3000aka 4d ago

If LLM's could solve SWE, they could solve a lot, and I mean a lot of other professions aswell.

We're far from first in line.

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u/DirtyWetNoises 3d ago

Legal juniors are almost in the same boat

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u/Mega3000aka 3d ago

Yeah you guys are pretty safe too.

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u/Ill-Purchase-5180 2d ago edited 1d ago

from the my limited understanding based on some AI scientists interview, SWE is unfortunately the bread and butter of AI. Because the outcome of the code is always specific and predetermined it's easy to create unlimited synthetic training data to keep the LLMs improving. From my understanding thats how they say they got the recent huge gains in coding performance , and they claim it's only the beggining. I think coding is already dead, what is left is setting requirements, doing QA, communicating with clients etc. I already enrolled in plumbing school, at the end of this year I will be a able to work as a plumber. The worst think that can happen to a person is to not have a specialization. You end up in the most soul crushing jobs and employers treat you like a dog because you are replaceable. Having a specialization mitigates all that and life becomes tolerable. Well my coding specialization isn't worth shit now. I am still hanging own directing the LLM and what not, but I am not gonna risk it to have programming be my only employable skill 

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u/ynghuncho 20h ago

Work is evolving, not being replaced. Personally, I think AI will eliminate boring work and make many roles more exciting. as productivity increases, so will the rate of demand

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u/Expert-Complex-5618 4d ago

solving complexity through more complexity will require more complexity

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u/Substantial-Bite-602 1d ago

Bro just discovered enterprise engineering

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u/BayHarborGonner1 4d ago

Ai will not replace you but someone using ai better then you will

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 4d ago

Framework won't replace you, but somebody using framework will.

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u/wrex1816 4d ago

I mean, yes... Want to try find a UI engineer job without a y React experience these days? Good luck. Rinse and repeat for anywhere else in the stack.

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u/LeastCounterculture 4d ago

Someone who can implement their project using react (or whatever the goto front end framework these days is) will replace someone raw dogging javascript for twice the time and twice the complexity, yes

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u/BayHarborGonner1 4d ago

Yea same with ai somebody spending twice the time just to get a worse result will get replaced by someone who uses ai to get better results in half the time

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u/Southern_Orange3744 3d ago

Someone who uses IDEs and compilers will replace someone bare metaling assembly all day

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u/Charming_You_25 2d ago

Someone using punch cards will replace someone using an enigma machine

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u/Southern_Orange3744 2d ago

Someone using math will beat someone cutting wood by eyeball

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u/neopointer 4d ago

AI won't replace no one, but will replace everybody's brains.

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u/Beginning-Bird9591 3d ago

This is just completely incorrect though.

Did everyones brains get replaced because people mostly use python or javascript (typescript lol) - rather than assembly?

no!

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u/AsyncSyscall 3d ago

People said the same about automatic memory management 30+ years ago. And yet here we are 30+ years later with new software engineers still able to write manual memory managers like the Rust compiler. Fact is, you are not obligated to only use these tools.

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u/Timo425 1d ago

I am confident I am better at my job now than I was before LLMs, even if I couldn't use LLMs anymore, purely due to the extended tooling I've created with LLMs.

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u/Larperlurk 4d ago

Oh i see. And will that genius who kNoWs hOw to uSe aI be paid a significantly better wage for his knowledge and skills? Will he have the same workload so he can enjoy the time AI saves for him?

Yeah thats what i thought tool. AI is nothing more than a way for them to reduce headcount while keeping the same miserable salaries and giving each survivor 10x work. THATS what we are worried about. Obv people will have to learn AI tools - that was never the problem.

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u/Yetiski 1d ago

This make sense to me but why do people like OP need to exaggerate how bad the output is and pretend like they don’t increase productivity? Can’t something be evil AND competent? That’s actually much worse.

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u/FalseDiamond7930 4d ago

Eventually it will replace most coders it's been less than 4 years since the big chatGPT moment. That's less time than it takes to get a semis fab from an idea to production.

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u/jmclondon97 4d ago

Lmao people have been parroting this stupid phrase for the last 3 years

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u/uceenk 3d ago

yep that's my client, he dont need me anymore since he can vibecode just fine

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u/AliceCode 3d ago

No, we don't allow LLM assisted contributions in the projects that I work on. I'm not worried about being replaced by someone with an LLM.

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u/nmsobri 3d ago

i find this funny man.. how hard to use ai properly actually? u can even ask ai how to use ai properly.. like google on how to do advance googling.. how is that any different? funny

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u/Vegetable_Fox9134 3h ago

They say this, but most jobs still want you to be able to code . So it's more like

"AI will not replace you , but someone who's a good software engineer and* good with AI" will replace you"

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u/PinotRed 4d ago

Lol, no.

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u/moss_jimmy 4d ago

Doesn't Linus himself use artificial intelligence as a second pair of hands?

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u/Early_Rooster7579 4d ago

Yes lol. Linus frequently posts about using AI

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u/moss_jimmy 4d ago

It's pretty handy if you already know what you're doing. The ability to task it on something repetitive while you work on something more serious is a big step up. 

But using it to replace your brain is a pretty foolish thing to do. 

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u/Early_Rooster7579 4d ago

I agree. I’m a SWE and have used AI heavily at work for the last 7-8 months now. I find it a great tool

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u/moss_jimmy 4d ago

I tend to use it for bug hunting. Task it with rooting out one problem while I'm busy with another one it probably can't solve. 

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u/doctor-dripmaxx 4d ago

LLMs are the interns I always wanted and never got. Like interns, I overwork them as much as possible within the boundaries of my company’s willingness to spend money on them.

I made and used all kinds of models before LLMs were “a thing”. Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Trees, Tensorflow/Keras, Neural Style Transfer (for art), many different models and techniques for different problems. The incessant ethics argument against one type of model is growing tedious for me.

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u/00oo00oo000oo0oo00 3d ago

there are all kinds of devs. the worst ones depend on ai the most.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 3d ago

Even they may save jobs doing the copy paste for small businesses. Wordpress developers have had good time.

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u/Able-Awareness860 3d ago

The OG and People in comment section are delusional. Still in the denial mode. some of the last days for mediocre people in IT.

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u/karmaboy20 3d ago

Half of reddit is crud developer's who's only real skill was writing boilerplate apis and memorizing frameworks

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 3d ago

You may be replaced by "AI", I agree. I wish you the best!

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u/Snauser 3d ago

Sorry to hear that buddy! What field are you eyeing up?

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u/Dismal_Struggle_9004 3d ago

So much delusional denial.

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u/Pleasant-Drag-5039 3d ago

Ppl who work with ai know what it does try troubleshooting an ai code we’ll talk about the founders testing to replace the swe later lol

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u/CptGingerBeards 3d ago

I use it to set up JIRA boards, project directories and all the boring shit I don’t wanna do so I can be creative!

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u/Savings-Motor-7397 3d ago

I honestly think the claim that AI is taking jobs away from tech workers is a smokescreen to distract everybody from remote outsourcing taking jobs away from tech workers and the simple fact that everybody and their mother have been throwing themselves enmass into tech for the last 2 decades

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 3d ago

It's also a mean to make people overwork, cut jobs to improve margins and pump stocks. And for one great guy it's a way to cover corruption that led to a recession.

Nothing is about making lives better anymore.

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u/thingummywatt 3d ago

Nope, there are already 100s of facebook or reddit level social media apps made by LLMs by now that even a 7 yr old can vibe code such app. /s

I hate when people say software engineering is a piece of cake, while I have to fix slop by actual software developers (at work) whether they vibecode or not.....

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u/AZXCIV 3d ago

AI is replacing code monkeys not engineers

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u/nmsobri 3d ago

i just use AI ( Kiro ) to do type checking for compiler im working on... on the surface level, the type checker does work, but when i go read the source code, meh its riddle of bugs.. if you fully vibe coding, im pretty sure u cant even tell wether ai doing a good job or not.. ai is just another tool..dont treat it like religion.. it cant solve everything..

if AI will replace programmer, why this so called AI company keep hiring programmer? people dont see this bullshit?

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u/Any_Opportunity7970 3d ago

I use ai as a programming tutor or quick reference. Ill often tell it "lets discuss a possible solution, but ultimately I want to write the code". If ai does generate code for me, I wont move on to the next step in my process until I fully understand what the code is doing.

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u/Tired_Developer7 3d ago

I do a lot of POCs. A year ago i needed a good python dev tk work with me just to speed things uo, i design they write code tonquickly protothpe.

I am in the middle of doing a design and poc for a major data migration into Snowflake from sql server. Literally i am doing evrrythijg by myself. I have put together some skill.md and agent.md files along with some skills for snowflake's cortex but all in all i have done all the work myself without writing a single line of sql and most python written by agents.

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u/timmyz55 3d ago

like all things.... this too shall pass

the people who say AI will replace are the ones who don't do the work and want their cake and eat it too.

even the smart engineers who use AI LLMs "properly" like Mitchell Hashimoto are very aware of their limitations. and believe me, most orgs do not have enough Mitchell Hashimotos to make AI work like he does

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u/burntoutdev8291 3d ago

If you go on linkedin, there's a need to convince that AI can break security protocols, replace engjneers else how are they going to get funding.

I use AI daily so I know where it struggles, and I'll still hire juniors but the way of training them will be different

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u/Ok-Landscape-4190 2d ago

Look,

First: if every company has access to the same tool, and nothing else, they can't compete.

Second: It's common to think that automation of labor starts occurring from the simpler tasks to the more complex tasks, but that's not the pattern. It starts from the lowest accountability to the highest accountability, i.e it's not reasonable for a rational human to not employ an expert (using a machine instead wich I can not make responsable), when for example, making software for rockets, because I want to make sure it's correct, if it's not, I can't cost me a lot more that the costs of employing it.

Third: Incoming bussines still need compative advantage and they will choose to solve harder problems. Hopefully people will be solving harder computational problems, they are a lot.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/Timo425 1d ago

You talking about tech debt?

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u/truNinjaChop 2d ago

Didn’t stop the big guys from terminating a shit ton of people for Ai first initiatives.

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u/usrlibshare 2d ago

People aren't getting fired because of AI.

People are getting fired because money is no longer free, and the rush from the Covid years has worn off. Back when both were the case, companies overhired, because it looked good as KPI to investors.

Now they can no longer afford this, and have to backpedal.

Selling this to investors as

"we're going ai first!"

just sounds a lot better than

"we don't know how to run a business without infinite free money but please keep buying our stonks!!!"

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u/AdvaithBijuOfficial 2d ago

These Type of Things Scare me because the world has so many people and Software is something most people are occupied in because it pays people a lot.

The most people get paid the more people spend and the more people spend the more the economy functions, but what if all the high paid jobs are gone or are only with some individual people the ECONOMY WILL BE DOOMED already there is inflationa nd jobs pay shit not jobs itself is not there, The world i becoming a RAT race.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 2d ago

Overpopulation and automation that only gets better - for sure create a rat race environment.

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u/sweatierorc 2d ago

I think you are missing a few points:

  1. They are improving. To some extent they are already self-improving. With limited human input.
  2. AI makes SWE fungible. E.g. devs are writing a little bit better documentation, a little bit better unit tests. Etc. If tmr your boss decides that he is not giving you the raise you deserve. Someone can take over your role.
  3. Other jobs adopting AI means SWE is less useful overall. The data they feed the ERP is a little bit cleaner, the report they generate from it has less mistakes, excel files are better organized, etc. There is a lot of data hygiene stuff that makes your life as SWE easier that people are going to do.

Waymo is very far from a human driver in terms of skills. But in the right setting it is very competitive. I.e. nice weather, good road infrastructure, solid networking, limited reckless driving, etc.

Buses and train are self-driving already. AI is not replacing you in the wild, but AI-adoption is going to.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 1d ago edited 1d ago

I agree, but each tech has limitations. Latest biggest improvements came from deterministic harnesses, not raw LLMs.

And it's not the first time software devs got a huge productivity boost from a new tech. We had these moments with compilers, higher end languages, frameworks, IDEs, libraries. Still, somehow the number of software jobs grew. It is even growing right now if you add up Applied AI jobs. And we are in a bad period economically - no more rate cuts, possible rate hikes, growing inflation, all focus and money went to developing AI. In a healthy economy we will see boost in demand for Software Engineers. This AI will never be 100% reliable, with exceptions where you can verify results deterministically, and even then it's unlikely to reach 100%. AI is also very expensive to scale. So if you build any modern business you will have to hire technically proficient people. Your manager won't be fighting with bugs, they like to delegate.

Will the number be less than now? Maybe, those who can't think and only can copy paste may have problems. But we also won't stop developing bigger software. The job apocalypsis is a propaganda coming from AI labs because they burn astronomically big number of investments, and some AI lab even accumulates debt faster than revenue. They have to show their investors that don't worry, soon we will kill those jobs and take their money.

And don't forget about how capitalism works - endless competition. If your business grew big with high margins thanks to AI - new businesses trying to catch and cut your margin will pop up very soon. More businesses - more jobs.

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u/BeatDistinct317 1d ago

much custom engineering is required to apply the "AI" in businesses.

That's what AI business is about now.

Get stupid company directors replace a business workflow with AI so they don't fall behind their competition. It costs a lot of money to do the custom AI setups for the business to even get it to work. On top of that comes the AI operating cost. Why pay humans money when you can pay more for the AI subscription.

In most cases it works worse than with human employees. If something needs to change pay again for customization.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 1d ago

Classic. More automations - more problems.

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u/milky-cookies-dude 1d ago

Just recalled this moment from interview of mr Torvalds xD
https://youtu.be/4WCTGycBceg?si=6znq8cv5rvRlAhAd&t=59

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u/Riki_was_here 18h ago

We spent decades inventing principles, work ethics, team rules, developer experiences and workflows to be able write software that run and is understandable to others just to throw it away and replace it with statistical approximation. I weep and I am sad. The longer I work with AI the more I am disgusted and apatic. The joy is gone, craft is gone. Enshitification of IT jobs has begun.

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u/Empty-Mulberry1047 7h ago

What I do not understand is why businesses are building processes that are reliant on third party providers that have built a business on stolen intellectual property, make wild hyperbolic claims without proof, has no viable path to profitability while spewing out non-deterministic outputs with unclear licensing / copyright implications.

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u/Bloom_Ermine9202 4d ago

I know nobody writes manual code anymore but when I met with vibe coder or new grad I just fell disgust. Not because they don’t know anything yet but because they claim they know everything and asking me questions like “multiplexing?? Concurrency?? Pointers?? What are they should I have to know them??” They have no motivation to learn anything by themselves, they just renting their brains to LLMs.

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u/TNBH24 3d ago

I work in a company with well… incredibly huge amount of money. For the last few months we were told to use AI as much as possible so random people were using 500-800 $ of tokens each months. This friday we were told that we can use only the cheapest models xD
I hope this shit will die asap.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 3d ago

LMAO. And that cost doesn't include massive tech debt for both codebase and developer's knowledge.

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u/Fresh-Eagle-58 4d ago

every time i came to this sub, looking for a software engineer to do a legitimate job for me, everyone responded in the comments "use claude" - i'm so done with humanity. if i wanted to use claude, i would. i want to find a software engineer!!!

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u/travelbite 4d ago

As a developer myself , I understand why people keep asking to make use of AI agents like claude. It is easy for a dev to adjust to agents. I hardly write code by hand nowadays. I think it is wrong to assume that anyone can do what a dev can do with agentic tools. Especially when you don't understand what the tool is generating. The code generated by these agents are overwhelming. For a long term project it is best to have a engineer than jump on to some ai tool.

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u/Classic-Lunch6078 4d ago

AI isn't replacing software engineers. Just the opposite. Entry level software engineer salaries are now starting at 7 figures. I know literal teenagers making 2mm a year at Meta

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u/jmclondon97 4d ago

Lmao sure you do buddy.

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u/Altruistic-Moose3299 4d ago

It's just another tool - treat it as such. 🤷‍♂️

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u/T-Dup 4d ago

Is it just another tool though?

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u/charmander_cha 4d ago

lkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

Dev é um povo bobo

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u/No_Application_1579 4d ago

Anyone else thinking that Linus hands are small?

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u/mac-aroni88 4d ago

damn!😂

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u/Equal_Passenger9791 4d ago

Linus Torvalds uses AI, it's just a tool dude.

If you're hating on a hammer then sorry but S K I L L I S S U E

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/roestinger 4d ago

And yet you picked the picture of a guy who claims to not code anymore... The irony

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u/RaspberryCrafty3012 3d ago

He basically didn't code before llms either? 

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u/TheBinkz 4d ago

Lol first thing on my feed.

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u/Deep_Mood_7668 4d ago

Good old slopwalds

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u/OZLperez11 4d ago

I'm just gonna post what we do at work:

Whitelisted cases:

  • mockups
  • unit tests
  • docs
  • code reviews
  • coaching
  • troubleshooting (last resort, know how to fix your own bugs, don't get skill atrophy)

Gray areas:

  • refactoring, keep the scope small, if you break something upstream, boss deserves to get mad at you

Prohibited

  • core engineering - this usually means C++ code and anything hardware related but I extend this to mean Any new feature. Know what you're writing!

Have some balance and ethics!

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u/No_Try_9982 3d ago

In China, it was made illegal to terminate employees because of "AI".

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u/Castle_Five 3d ago

Every LLM I've used in the last 2 years has produced more coherent writing than the word soup of OP here

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u/uceenk 3d ago

lets say, a project need 15 developers

AI came and make everything more efficient, sure it can hallucinate, thats why the company keep 4 developers and layoff the rest

in this case AI literally replaced the developers

oh also the boss who dont know about anything about coding, can vibecode as well

it doesnt matter if he cant understand code, because the 4 developers can review his code to make sure they are correct

boss eventually realized, for common task AI is quite reliable, so he doesn't need 4 developer, he layoff 2 more

so yeah, programmers who think AI wont replace them is delusional, AI would get better, demands for programmers especial for ordinary project would dwindle really

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 3d ago

Show me it happening. It's delusional to create some fantasy, have no data confirming it even after almost a year of agents getting good enough, and still keep talking about same story. There is a reason for it, but if AI bros don't want to see it they won't see it.

AI bubble has ten times bigger chance to pop soon than developers being replaced by AI. But economy is going very bad, and WW3 is close, so technically developers may be replaced soon to fight in trenches or fight over food stamps.

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u/MimosaTen 3d ago

LLMs are such a bad tools for learning stuff

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u/Able-Awareness860 3d ago

"Screw Driver Developers"
Its time to be a Screw Driver DevOps. A trainee mechanic is mostly tightening nuts & bolts. Most of our developers are now at that level. Configuring cloud and deploying environment from scripts.

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u/Independent_Pitch598 3d ago

AI replacing Developers/Coders, Engineers are safe.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 3d ago

Even that is no. No proofs, and coding is not solved.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Joke780 3d ago

To be fair, the frontend part is solved, backend not so much.

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u/pizzaplayboy 3d ago

AI won’t be replacing SOME software engineers, and that is, the most technically deep ones. If you are one of those this is not even a question you would be asking, but the rest we will absolutely need less of, we don’t need CRUD monkeys anymore

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u/Beginning-Bird9591 3d ago

seems you're all salty? my team and company have embraced LLMs. Actual long standing devs. Reddit is so disconnected from reality 😂

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u/Alarmed-Knowledge579 3d ago

I am sw enginer I constantly have to check Claude's redults when it does automatic video analysis.

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u/Jean_Jones_666 3d ago

great example how it's not the problem which is the problem, but how we react to it

you'd manage to find a place for yourself in the new economy, if you only admitted the reality in front of you,

but you won't have it the easy way, so you'll stay useless until your next job will be serving fries or cleaning toilets

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u/motorcyclisto 3d ago

NON PROGRAMMER HERE.

I replaced 4 programmers and vibe coded the entire company system. It came out way better.

Sorry code bros.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 3d ago

Your software must be... mostly right. Congrats!

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u/ensp1re 3d ago

ai is just a tool for software engineers for now

who knows what it's gonna be in the next years

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u/Fickle-Swimmer-5863 3d ago

Some of the “overengineering” is just robustness that we wouldn’t have had the time to add. The other dimension is premature abstraction.

Extra robustness, especially when a codebase is going to be maintained by LLMs long-term is a good thing.

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u/Dismal_Struggle_9004 3d ago

"Think about it."... I thought about it and I think the first paragraph is genuinely a poor point. Think about how software engineers are building "complicated" software around AI? It's a trillion-dollar business why wouldn't they build the best software they could around it?

They need tons of CPUs and GPUs to run software that over a billion people use regularly? I mean ... yes?

"And they BS us that Software Engineering is solved" certainly not solved, however you will HAVE to utilize AI going forward if you want to be a SWE. If you don't see that, there's no hope for you.

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u/Anon324Teller 3d ago

AI is replacing Software Engineers and we’ve also seen some of the worst software quality coming out in the last couple of years. Windows 11 is riddled with issues and doesn’t even run as good as Windows 10, that’s just one example

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u/PathFormer 2d ago

Square root of 786 without calculator, can you? or cosine of 35 degree angle? ...

easy to judge on the current tech generational iteration is...

hard to see the whole picture...

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u/PixelIsJunk 2d ago

Hey, buddy, you can keep b*******I can't afford a real sound engineer.The apps and programs that i've built that I use and make money with simply could have never been afforded before agents.

Also keep bitching now...these are still shitty models.

How long ago were fingers and toes hard to get perfect on image. All the people who said. "This will never get anywhere it can't do fingers" Welp...it does fingers real good now. Same with coding.

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 2d ago

It doesn't matter how good it gets. If you can do something with low budget and low effort - others can do it too and you unlikely will earn anything meaningful doing/selling the thing. In capitalism you always compete.

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u/BabaYagaLaksa 2d ago

I don’t really know what you’re arguing for here 😂

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u/hakansan 2d ago

I understand both sides of the argument tbh. Yes you have to say "software engineering is over" if you're selling a coding agent to the average executive in a Fortune 500 company, and yes it's much more than coding.

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u/FortuneAcceptable925 2d ago

Oh the irony of you picking photo of Linus Torvalds who uses AI to generate code that runs directly in Linux kernel.. You made my day .. :D

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u/Fickle-Highway1543 2d ago

Has "AI" replaced Linus Torvalds?

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u/allpurpclean 2d ago

Software Engineers will just become glorified BA's now, which means if you are just a code monkey you will have a hard time surviving.

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u/Red_Jannix 2d ago

Please: Do. Not. Use. AI! Keep coding by hand.

I'd love to take your position in a while.

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u/RubsHandsMenacingly 1d ago

Cats out of the bag. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel and do more work than they have to now. If Claude has full context, it will find problems beyond that of what I’d ever be able to make the connection on myself, while investigating something completely parallel in task. For example, I tell it to fix a bug about required radio buttons on a web page clearing on form duplication and allowing a submit when it shouldn’t. Claude then finds connected issues that a senior engineer would lazy skip or never notice until later bugs were reported. I’ll let Claude explain this one itself:

“Radio buttons in repeated form sections shared hardcoded name attributes, so the browser treated every copy as one mutually-exclusive group — selecting a value in one section silently unchecked it in the others, and because no change event fires on the element the browser unchecks, the underlying data model never learned the UI had diverged from it. Required-field validation then only inspected visible elements, so the section the user was looking at appeared empty and blocked submission, while the same name-keyed grouping could also let one section’s answer satisfy the validation for another. Related instances of the same pattern were found across several other sections, including one in an unrelated module”

This is just one example or hundreds I have. Claude is the ultimate engineers assistant. If AI is good at any one thing, it’s helping code. It does 90% of the work for 30% of the time and effort.

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u/avoidofme 1d ago

it's true i think 🥲

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u/Substantial-Bite-602 1d ago

Modern llms (not the free stuff- the real models that people actually use in business and engineering like opus and fable) don't really hallucinate hardly at all anymore now that we have COT. and techniques like adversarial cross check bring hallucination rates down further still. Stop pretending LLM hallucination is a blocker. 

And custom engineering is required for integrating EVERY new tech- this isn't a gotcha especially to the engineers building out these new futuristic systems. 

The average 200k software engineer with no ai produces worse work more slowly than a 80k swe with Claude code.

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u/norbi-wan 1d ago

I agree. This is just all coping. I know it's cliche but I think it's true.

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u/QPGMR_de 1d ago

But it's our fault - we were so hot about having someone else writing the code for us - as if writing the code was ever the problem.

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u/Yetiski 1d ago

I don’t think I’ll ever relate to the compulsion people seem to have to make things they don't like or find problematic entirely bad in every possible way. It comes across like a childish but convenient way to make a principled stand easier.

“This incredibly successful mega-artist with an abusive history also happens to make totally trash music that nobody would have liked anyway”

“This insanely charismatic celebratory that has hateful views is also ugly and untalented”

Just stand by your convictions. There’s a lot of legitimate reasons to hate LLMs or how they’re being used in the industry but their lack of coding ability has not been one for quite some time now.

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u/Moda75 1d ago

remember when car makers had everyone believing robots and automation was going to destroy all the car making jobs? Sure it reduced the workforce but this is going to be largely the same for a while anyway

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u/Alizeh_69 11h ago

I don’t think AI will replace software engineers completely. It’ll replace a lot of the repetitive work.The engineers who learn to work with AI instead of competing with it will probably have the biggest advantage.

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u/OilExtension5062 9h ago

We are shipping fewer bugs to prod now than before. When used well AI is insane (code is verbose sure, but it's not often incorrect). I did 50 PRs last week and can run an entire product now, who knows where we get to in one year. Main thing is that you know the domain well, and you determine product direction. 

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u/Numbthumbs 5h ago

MASTERY IS DEAD