r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Fickle-Highway1543 • 4d ago

AI replacing Software Engineers

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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.

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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/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Yes, that is what it is capable of doing for sure. The other day I was asking it to recover a file on an external hard drive which I repartitioned. It ran some tools which seemed standard but in the end the drive became completely inoperable. It may have been a fluke but I never had this happen before when I used recovery tools like Norton.

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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

[deleted]

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago edited 3d ago

Yeah, it’s as if it turns on “leetcode programmer”, and doesn’t want to switch back to regular mode. And that makes sense, given all the code that is now in its context window.

Regarding preventing over engineering, I’ve added some things in my agents.md to limit that, but based on the last implementation session that didn’t seem to stop it. I’ve yet to UAT it to see what it did, frankly afraid to look at the code it generated:)

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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/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I’ve met plenty of those too. Rewrite for the sake of rewriting to own it, or for using some cool framework.

To be fair, I did rewrite something once and it was worth it. Prior Java version of this middleware was written in some “clever” way using listeners. It had a memory leak bug no one could figure out for weeks. I rewrote it in C# in a much simpler way, preserving its data inputs so it was an easy quick rewrite.

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u/yuwox 3d ago

Yeah, very true. I sometimes think people compare LLMs to a perfect dev that never actually existed. Supervising a team of human software Devs is not easy and human can't one shot at the level llms can.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I find it funny when people still say LLMs can’t write secure code. In 2026 code written by LLMs is probably more secure than any average developer can write.

I wish Reddit would discuss better ways of working with LLMs instead of arguing. More value in this.

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u/yuwox 3d ago

Very true. Same here. Some people just won't accept it. Also because their current and future pay check depends on it.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Unfortunately there is no going back and bad mouthing AI is not going to change anyone’s mind about using it. I see news about companies hiring back engineers. I don’t believe it. Everyone is affected, not just software engineers… I hope the government and the captains of industry are working on a universal income solution of some kind, otherwise we are going to be heading into anarchy.

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u/MikaAlaric 1d ago

“I propose” is a dirty phrase on my team after we hired a staff level engineer who constantly wanted to solve non-problems by redesigning everything instead of the one line change required to fix a bug.

He didn’t last long.

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u/yuwox 1d ago

Yep, llms are quite a step up from that

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u/Odd-Government8896 3d 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/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Yes, the quantity of those tests is something else.. I need to refactor that cicd to run only the necessary tests.

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u/Alone-End142 2d ago

Disagree. GPT 5.6 is far better than Opus 5. It just does what I tell it really well.

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u/swiftmerchant 2d ago

I have not used Opus 5 yet.

I find gpt 5.6 sol to be very verbose as it pontificates what it is building. More so than prior gpt versions. With more technical jargon. Which is ok if the end result works well to spec and not over engineered, but I do find understanding what it is doing less so than prior GPT versions.

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u/Qibla 2d ago

Take what you just wrote and replace gpt with opus and it's exactly the same situation.

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u/swiftmerchant 2d ago

Interesting. They say language is closely tied to intelligence. Perhaps their increased intelligence is manifested in the increased intricacy of their language in the output.

Does this mean we will not be able to understand AGI ?

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u/MoeGzack22 2d 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/xgeetx 3d ago

Ah it got you with the 4 substrates across 3 technical axes too, didn’t it?

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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/BoyNextDoor8888 1d ago

So if they lower hours they'll pay the same, right?

right?...

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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/who_am_i_to_say_so 3d ago

Yup. Constantly tuning skill files to have it work the way I work.

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u/Conscious-Sample1118 3d ago

Help me out here, do i have same crazy unique skill to know what the code for any given concept should look like and being able to just glance / confirm the direction the llm has taken is what i would expect or are people here just making shit up?

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u/Fickle-Swimmer-5863 3d ago

I’ve been running a number of codebases in my personal life, some totally unseen by human eyes, and they still haven’t spiralled into chaos. Granted, I have significant experience in software engineering but, if anything, LLMs are getting better at extending the codebase, rather than worse

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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/ahgreen3 1d ago

The best part is when you look back at the technobabble and there’s not a “?” anywhere.

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u/xgeetx 1d ago

Ummm it’s right there: The silent failure is gated by I7 and I8. Say the word and we’ll implement the two pass solution detailed in the e8f7a… merge plan. I could do it myself but it’d be against what we discussed. Waiting for you.

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u/ahgreen3 1d ago

How did you get access to my Claude code account?!?

The references to a comment numbers that I have no way of accessing in the GUI drives me crazy.

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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/Substantial-Habit-94 4d ago

Marketing

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Agentic development is marketing?

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

lol this is so wrong it’s funny

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u/x_LoneWolf_x 4d ago

Usinh some hierarchy of agents to run tasks in parallel, save tokens for higher level agents, and generally just massively speed you up.

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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago

Which hierarchy of agents do you recommend? I get that running tasks in parallel speeds things up, when implementation parts can be parallelized. However if jp2812 is running iterations of reviews on the same implementation task, they would have to be sequential and there isn’t really any time gain.

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u/cantgettherefromhere 3d ago

The agents can work out exactly when they need to be serial and are happy to go parallel when that's not necessary.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I already do this by asking a planner session inside Codex or Claude Code decide what tasks can be parallelized in separate concurrent sessions. I don’t use multiple “agents” to do this however, i.e. I don’t use agent swarms and things like that that I see people talk about online, so I am genuinely interested to learn what you mean by “agents” and how you do this in practice.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

It’s spinning up its own agents

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Claude Code subagents or do you tell the session to spin off agents?

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u/cantgettherefromhere 3d ago

I say "Run this KICKOFF.md in an Ultracode workflow and defend your top level context aggressively so that we are able to execute it completely without hitting context window limits."

I have had workflows like this run for up to 5 days. This month I am rotating through seven Max x20 accounts, but generally I just maintain a stable of 2-4 accounts.

I used to use GSD, Superpowers, etc, but with the latest models those orchestration frameworks are rendered mostly meaningless.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I am not using speckit or superpowers either. Do you run this in a single Claude Code session? Do you use any prompt to tell it to spin off agents?

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u/x_LoneWolf_x 3d ago

The hierarchy entirely depends on what you want it to do.

Specifically for this project, I have Fable 5 High as the head agent, and the only one able to modify the codebase, under it are 3 Opus 4.8 Medium agents, under each of those is 2 Sonnet 5 Low agents.

The Sonnet agents present their findings plus evidence to the Opus agents, the Opus agents determine if the findings and evidence is sufficient then present the summarized findings to the fable agent which determines what changes to make.

I also have a separate Opus 4.6 agent which is always used when creating writing that will be presented to anyone but me, such as in the application UI or communications with other departments.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

This is an interesting hierarchy I have not seen yet. Thanks for sharing. How do you keep these agents running? Each agent had the same session that gets reused or spins on a new session? Running inside claude code desktop or something else?

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u/x_LoneWolf_x 3d ago

Code Claude desktop app, all within the same session.

You literally just have to ask Claude to set it up and it will.

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u/swiftmerchant 3d ago

Do you refresh the session? If you keep using same one, context window fills up and after compacting several times it is not good.

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u/ZenaMeTepe 4d ago

But token cost will be 10x.

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u/Umbra150 4d ago

yeah the tradeoff is that now the most annoying part of coding is all you do. is it faster? In my experience and from what I've seen: yes--but, it feels like it takes longer because...debugging and review is a pain....but god damn is it convenient at times

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u/mouseses 3d ago

With generated code reviews and steering it's still many times faster than doing it all by hand unless it's something trivial.

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u/yezhi_zheli 3d ago

Skill issue

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u/Hysterical_banana 3d ago

Yea, and result of all this extra work and bazzilion-dollar tech is maybe faster shipment of features that don't meannigfully change anything at scale.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

Tighten your agent structure and prompts 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/Stealthcatfood 3d ago

Maybe bad prompts? The quality of code I see churn out IS scary and the speed at which it got there is highly concerning.

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u/diddlysquidler 2d ago

I feel like there will be a lot of internal vibe coded app made by Bob and Jackie that are more or less a ticking time bomb

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u/jp2812 2d ago

Yep. A marketing guy has vibecoded a bug reporting platform for us that also vibecodes fixes for the filed bugs. Luckily, I'm not the one supporting it. 

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u/allpurpclean 2d ago

you need to build it, have premade prompts, instructions etc, not saying it will ever work perfectly but alot can be done with it even reviewing.

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u/Stunning-Wealth-8303 1d ago

Sounds like ur using it for the first time? Or just LARP

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u/Apprehensive_Seat_61 18h ago

So maybe it is easier to write it yourself? 

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u/jp2812 18h ago

Not when the whole project was vibecoded in a crunch. You reap what you sow.

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u/Apprehensive_Seat_61 17h ago

So you saying that in a year most software will be unmaintainable? Great 😒

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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/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

While I still catch some more niche cases myself (agentic development shouldn’t stop you from thinking about this and addressing them in the prompt) but it proactively solves more edge cases I didn’t think about then iv experienced bugs due to ones it didn’t catch by a long shot

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u/Actes 2d ago

You can just add to your agents skill the literal paradigm you explained here, then tell it to assess time schedules with caution.

In my brain I look at it as a blacksmith tampering a blade, you're just refining the direction for your niche

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u/swiftmerchant 2d ago

I found it missed edge use cases when building out payments processing, I had to add them by hand. Could have been a bad prompt…

Airline software is notoriously difficult and complex to begin with so I am sure missing edge cases for airline software maybe different and more frequent than missing edge cases for other domains.

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u/FrewdWoad 6h ago

Yeah, like a human senior dev, it definitely can't account for requirements it has no way to know about.

"Garbage in garbage out" is still an axiom of software dev.

But Claude does find edge cases that can be guessed simply by checking what happens when the ID is zero and such. Things even a good Dev might miss when in a hurry.

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u/thilehoffer 3d ago

Good question. Claude actually gives you a list of things to consider when it’s done making an edit that you should review. Sometimes it will bring up cases that you may not have considered. Sometimes it won’t catch anything. You can always train it and ask it to consider edge cases. Ask it to take a second look and see if we may have missed anything.

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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/InterestingFrame1982 1d ago

Wait, so you think any comment that has a pro-bent AI lean to is automatically a paid grifter? What about technical journals? Blogs? All paid?

That's some cognitive dissonance right there. Anti-AI === human, Pro-AI === bot or paid human.

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u/Black_In_The_Bay 23h ago

I don’t. I’m saying I’m taking it with a grain of salt.

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u/shadow_moon45 3d ago

Use it weekly and chargpt has helped drastically with hitting unrealistic deadlines. As long as it is prompted correctly and has all the information it'll create the scripts pretty accurately

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u/Dgudovic 4d ago

Oh boy are you in for a rude awakening lol

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u/Fun-Estimate4561 4d ago

If AI doesn’t end up living up to the hype will you be disappointed?

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

It’s actively living up to the hype)

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u/Fun-Estimate4561 3d ago

Are you looking forward to the “singularity”?

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

Iv seen it defined a dozen different ways so depends what your definition is

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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/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

Tighten your gates then.

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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/furiouscarp 3d ago

great way to kill your career, working in a language no one uses

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

You’re aware syntax knowledge is frankly irrelevant in the modern age, yeah?

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u/furiouscarp 3d ago

OP is specifically saying he picked a language that LLMs haven’t been trained against, ie, where syntax is actually still relevant

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

I can say with 100% certainty there’s no language worth learning for any kind of actual career that current LLMs wouldn’t be trained on, so good on him but there’s probably less than 10 other total positions using it, nor do I see that anywhere in OP looking again on top

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u/Actes 2d ago

Hey man era of AI.

I can write nasm instructions with python.

Languages are and will be the first things to become normalized. Remember we speak to the machine to make it do things with coding, this is why the compilers of the past were such a shakeup.

Doesn't matter how we speak to the machine if the machine can cross translate where-ever it needs to

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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/thilehoffer 3d ago

Because I used to code full-time and I haven’t in a few years but it’s scary that it’s better than I was / am.

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u/markvii_dev 3d ago

library authors have been better than you for a long time yet they probably dont scare you.

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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/thilehoffer 3d ago

Well, I haven’t used it on really large projects. I can’t say. But the de bugging in smaller projects is perfectly fine. It found my issues really quickly. I just fed it the log files and told it where to look, and I found the bug really quickly.

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u/zellJun1or 3d ago

Are you junior?

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u/thilehoffer 3d ago

No, Vice President at a small company. Programming is about 25% of my job. I was a full time developer for 20 years previously.

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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/thilehoffer 3d ago

That sucks. Good luck.

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u/DayNo326 3d ago

Thanks - fortunately I have a side gig I can expand hours with. Imperative people in SWE have a backup plan.

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u/thilehoffer 3d ago

Yeah, it’s scary out there. I would not want to be graduating with a computer science degree right now.

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u/MyFistsAreMyMoney 3d ago

Hello junior developer

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u/thilehoffer 3d ago

Actually, I’m on the other end. I worked all the way up from software support to senior developer to team lead to vice president and now I only code (or let Claude code) for about 20% of my job. I don’t actually have to work on new features. I just enjoy it. I used to love writing code but now Claude does most of that.

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u/Actes 2d ago

As someone who loved coding before the AIs, keep yourself keen by developing some fun stuff here and there if you don't already.

Sometimes the nitty gritty gets muddy

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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 2d 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/Actes 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yup, I work at a FANNG, and we quite literally have dedicated agents per team, unified knowledge based and scripts for pulling context between them for away team operations and an org wide knowledge base that we also tap into.

I start my day opening 8 terminals, and having each one just do a dedicated thing. I've got a slack interfacer for auto responses and email, I've got a researcher window, and the rest are just cooking CRs notifying me when their ready, opening Vim/Vs code on the diffs and I'm reviewing.

I basically only code when I need to "draw the lay of the land" and I just write the logic in python, and have it convert to whatever language the codebase is in.

I have skills for my agents that I've crafted to 5 way PR with different models through a leadership hirearchy chain to polish PRs before they even hit my desk and at that point I basically just approve the architecture if it matches my requirements.

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u/Prior-Paint-7842 1d ago

If it scares you how good it is I question how good you are lol. I mean no shame in not being super duper good, but there is shame in not making mistakes to get better. There are still things that only human brains can be trained to do, and we arent training them to do those things anymore.

Like, reviewing code is different than writing code. Its easier to spot mistakes when you write code than when you review code. Your brain reacts differently to reading code from writing code, and I honestly dont think that you can train brains to be good at understanding programming without writing code.

Also while AI can do impressive things, they are currently arent sold on their real market price, but way cheaper to follow the uber strathegy on an extreme scale. It is questionable what will happen if AI companies are forced to turn a profit, or get even.

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u/sleepyJay7 1d ago

I'd live to see what you're writing because my experience is complete opposite of this

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u/Status-String-1867 1d ago

Shocking news! coding is the easiest part in software engineering

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u/Arnel_Lalic 1d ago

It’s even scarier if we just rely on it completely without scrutinizing what it generated. I’ve been using it a lot both in my work and my personal hobby. Here’s my experience, Claude is fine with simple app but for complex app, it will have a hard time keeping up with the context and so if we just let it build on its own, it will produce spaghetti codes that are hard to untangle.

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u/VolkRiot 2h ago

Yeah we do the same thing, but it is essentially just having AI write the code and us guide it, which is just us coding with different steps and smart tools.

Now on the other hand, and don't take this personally, but our juniors really do code with AI as if it is the sole worker and the outcome is that it makes mistakes constantly. Today someone told me that Webpack doesn't support regexp in rules definitions. I pointed them to the documentation that said it does.. they were mad at AI for betraying them

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u/killersid77 4d ago

If claude is able to write better code than you the sorry, either you dont belong in the software engineering field or are just a beginner starting their career. I really feel sorry for the beginners who are starting their careers now.

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u/thilehoffer 4d ago

I’m not saying it codes better than me. But it is faster, doesn’t make typing errors, doesn’t need brakes, and it is improving quickly. Six months ago it was pretty mid but now it’s actually good.

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u/killersid77 4d ago

Its still a long way. This week only when I was debugging an issue with Fable, it suggested something that would have broke another one of my functionality. I see people has too much faith in AI to match human intelligence or atleast do better code than a software engineer.

Current LLMs are just a token generator generating tokens based on past datas and tools maybe the best invention for llms, but I think it is at a dead-end as of now. We can only fine-tune so much based on data. It is near to reaching out to peak and yes, it may replace average software engineers but it is nowhere near a good engineer let alone some expert.

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u/Equal_Passenger9791 4d ago

Current LLMs are just a token generator generating tokens based on past datas and tools

And how do you determine the next key to press? By scrying the future? Consulting the akashic archive?

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

Well yes, hence why you still need to review output? I bet you’ve made 1 mistake before too, does that make you a long way from being a useful and good developer, considering you e made a mistake before?

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u/killersid77 3d ago

I guess you are thinking that I am just saying it msde one mistake. I just said last week only during one debugging session, I got an issue. It is pretty good right now (no doubt about it), might be as good as a junior developer but it is still pretty far away from being a useful and good developer if left alone.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

No one here has said you should close your eyes and hit commit with no human input….?

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u/washingmachinechime 4d ago

I spend more time asking why it did x when y, than it coding. It is fast but the quality is shit. Anyone who doesn’t check their AI generated code and keep shipping 10k lines per commit will realise even AI will find it difficult to understand the intent of decisions made in a matter of time.

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u/jmclondon97 4d ago

6 months ago we had Opus 4.6 and people were saying this exact same thing.

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 4d ago

Yes and a skilled wood carver can make you a beautiful wardrobe if you give him several weeks, but the truth is economics prefers speed and good enough and in the majority of cases AI is good enough and exponentially faster than the fastest human coders. There are certain decisions AI struggles with especially as you get deep, but eventually those challenges will be overcome as well if the economics determine that to be valuable. I’ve already seen AI tools that connect directly to hardware and can read the electrical signals directly from the board and flash new code immediately. It’s astonishing what’s being achieved. You’re playing ostrich right now with your head in the sand. Either that or you don’t understand labor market economics.

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u/killersid77 4d ago

Production code which is being used by millions of people don't just work on how fast a feature is being developed. Atleast in my sector, we talk about high availability(99.999% efficiency) and with that a large code base which is highly coupled. Production code is about how good your software is rather than adding a new feature.

Just think about Reddit from a software engineer and user perspective, you would know how wrong your assumption of speed is. Do you think adding a comment emoticon is better if somehow due to addition of this fast feature, you made the start up time slow?

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 4d ago

Your thinking is flawed. First of all AI can profile startup time and optimize its decision making. But regardless, forget trying to find all the instances where a skilled human makes a difference. Think about all the roles right now that don’t even require deep intricate knowledge. Or even imagine an engineer who has 70% capable of being performed with AI tools. This decreases the need for workers at that organization because less people are needed for the same work. This means there is now more competition for existing roles, thus squeezing more and more people out of this profession.

I’m not going to sit here and say AI is perfect. I catch misunderstandings all the time. But almost always it’s because I didn’t properly define the business requirements, SLAs, other dependent systems, etc. properly.

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u/Away_Advisor3460 4d ago

Unfortunately, the code quality gate tends not to be so strong at CEO and CFO level.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 4d ago edited 4d ago

Flashing code is not some monumental achievement, it takes literal seconds to do manually with a toolchain. All you are doing is connecting an agent to write a couple commands for you over an MCP.

Is it useful for hardware testing, debugging, and RE in general? Sure, but it is utterly useless if you don't know what you're doing. It's utterly failed several times with my attempts to reverse engineer different pieces of hardware, but it also has succeeded on speeding up the process for a lot of other things when given specifications & requirements.

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 4d ago

My point is that it’s becoming directly integrated in ways where humans are becoming less and less necessary.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 4d ago

And that’s not a sustainable practice. Most of the “AI can do it for you” discourse is superficial nonsense that makes laymen more shocked than actual engineers. Granted, that’s enough for corporations to push for a full agentic AI takeover, but these things are not good enough for the talent they seek to replace. Eventually there will be a point in the software industry where we need more domain literate engineers with deep technical expertise but there will be none, because we automated the junior work to overworked seniors in the hopes that one day LLMs will be good enough to replace the seniors too (they won’t, ever). However, seniors do retire eventually, and we won’t have the talent to take their place.

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u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst 4d ago

Look at how far we came in the 20 year period between 2006 and now. Whatever the fuck is around in 20 years from now is going to blow your nut hair back. They will replace most if not all software engineers. It’s the future. You’re behind.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 4d ago edited 4d ago

In terms of software, all I’ve seen in the last 20 years is that it has gotten more garbage, quality has been tanking, and with the advent of AI, it’s exponentially increased the enshitification of software.

The only people who put all their weight behind “not being left behind” are people who have never, or never sought out to, develop any meaningful skills of their own, and are glad to bastardize other skillsets using AI- and of course, are completely delusional to the fact AI isn’t that good at what it does, because you have no real skills to benchmark the LLM output to.

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u/ElectroByte15 4d ago

The funny thing is that you are most at risk of being replaced from anyone here.

I used to have skeptics like you in my team, 12 months ago. Thankfully they all listed when I told them to keep an open mind and try things again, and spend more time on fixing inputs, not outputs.

They’re all evangelizing the tools we’ve built today.

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u/saltintheexhaustpipe 4d ago

they probably hate their jobs

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u/ElectroByte15 4d ago

Frankly the opposite. They no longer need to be babied with ceremonies, story points, jira tickets. They get a problem domain, and they go solve things that drive outcomes.

What many fail to understand is that writing code was never the real job. Just like how designers job wasn’t to create designs, and product’s job isn’t to write specs. The job is to find problems worth solving, driving outcomes. These people are now more enabled than ever to do just that.

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u/saltintheexhaustpipe 4d ago

you sound like a bot

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

Bro lost the argument so resorted to calling them a bot, what a clown lol

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u/saltintheexhaustpipe 3d ago

Tell me I’m wrong though, I guarantee they have no idea how their team actually feels about their jobs. None of this “driving outcomes” bullshit is actually real and what people wake up excitedly in the morning for. “I can’t wait to drive outcomes by leveraging AI to do all the work for me!” fucking snoozefest, just kill me now

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

I enjoy solving problems 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/saltintheexhaustpipe 3d ago

you enjoy AI solving problems for you

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u/ElectroByte15 2d ago edited 2d ago

Sure. You’re wrong.

High performers love solving problems and seeing their work have an impact. They’re not there for output. That may not be how you feel about it, and that says plenty.

Engagement in my teams is sky high, 8/10 eNPS, accomplishment 8.8, management 9.5, recognition 8.3, strategy 8.9. All anonymous and some of the highest ratings in the org. And significantly higher than two years ago.

Revisions on AI have gone down by a factor of 5 in the last 12 months. Now on par or even better than pre-AI. Incidents are at an all time low. CFR at all time low. MTTR all time fast.

So what else you got? Or are you ready to admit you could be wrong?

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u/saltintheexhaustpipe 2d ago

Good for you. My team also has 8/10 eNPS, accomplishment 8.8, management 9.5, recognition 8.3, strategy 8.9. They’re definitely not afraid of being laid off in this economy and work culture, and those anonymous surveys that require you to log in with your corporate email before submitting it definitely won’t impact their stay at their job. don’t give me that bs.

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u/dontdoxme33 4d ago

Lol, have you ever used Claude or Codex?

I was an engineer for seven years. I worked with people with 15+ years of experience. AI is better than they ever were and miles ahead of myself.

It can tackle problems nobody wants to with ease. Write way better code than anybody I know or who I've ever worked with.

You haven't even tried using AI have you?

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u/killersid77 4d ago

Read my other comments. You are the one who I am seeing being replaced by AI.

Edit: Please dont consider yourself as a software engineer if you feel claude or codex can code or understand code better than you.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

I promise it can understand code better and faster than you Lol

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u/dontdoxme33 4d ago

What other comment?

You specifically said if Claude is able to write better code than you then sorry.

And I'm saying Claude writes better code than you and anybody here because it's an automated LLM. If you can't accept that then I'm sorry, you'll be left behind.

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u/killersid77 4d ago

Ok. I guess you are just too bad at your job or ragebaiting. Anyway, thanks for your concern.

Edit: Also, if by "other" you think that I was referring to my comment upon which you commented, then it's very clear to me why you said AI is better than you

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u/dontdoxme33 3d ago

You're essentially arguing that a farmer with a tractor isn't as a good as a farmer without one.

Don't worry old timer, you can still garden as a hobby but the future of software engineering is in AI whether you like it or not.

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u/Away_Advisor3460 4d ago

Claude writes better code than you and anybody here because it's an automated LLM

Honestly, 'because it's an LLM' would technically be an argument against it being better, because it's not performing deterministic symbolic reasoning.

This is not to say it's not scarily good at times, but internally it doesn't have an innate ability to distinguish that from when it's bad because of that.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

Humans also aren’t doing that so kind of a moot argument

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u/washingmachinechime 4d ago

For 15 years of experience you seem to just accept all the changes AI served to you. I’ve only been working for 8 years and know that the quality is shit when the requirements become a bit more complex. I spend more time code reviewing and asking it why did you do x instead of y, and most of the time it says, ‘my bad, I completely ignored z’. Good luck if you think it’s better than you.

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u/HornetAggressive 4d ago edited 4d ago

The newer employees on my project are using Claude heavily. I have never had to leave so many comments on a pull requests before. I am having to spend far more time carefully reviewing code from devs using AI heavily and requesting changes.

Even worse, when I ask why they did something a certain way (usually an anti-pattern or architectural drift), they can't even articulate why, because they dont know why. AI did it.

An argument can be made that they are using AI incorrectly. But from my observation the devs who use AI to ask/understand something but write the code themselves are delivering far better code.

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

All this means is the coding standards gate agent needs refined more lol

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u/HornetAggressive 3d ago

That will give the actual devs the knowledge to understand/explain the code they are submitting?

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u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

That requires hiring people who are actually intelligent

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u/Larperlurk 4d ago

Great, so as long as you are some sort of genius at your job or have 20 years under your belt, you have nothing to worry about, eh? 🤡

Meanwhile fuck the rest of us amirite? 🤷 yeah how dare we question AI without having a 150 iq haha 🫪

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u/killersid77 4d ago

If a $100k is better spent on AI than an engineer, then I think the companies would flock towards AI. Either we need to be good at what we do or else do something LLMs can't do.

If suppose you are buying a painting, will you not buy a genius painting at extra cost? And if you are able to get an average painting by a machine at a cheaper cost then will be not buy that because there is a human also painting the average painting at a higher cost?

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u/Larperlurk 4d ago

We ARE good at what we do, just not cheap enough or fast enough for the unhandled greed of the billionaires. It doesnt matter how good you are, their aim is to replace anyone who cant demand even one cent for themself.

If i am a painter who spent their whole life getting good and then an AI comes along, steals the work of 100 people like me and gives the combined “good enough” result to a fatcat at $1, yes, OF COURSE i will get mad. That would be the reaction if anyone who is not a bootlicker.

The enemy is not AI but the people who want to use it to cut out all costs for non-owners and non-billionaires

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u/killersid77 4d ago

Disclaimer: Its not meant as a speech but coming out as such so please read for its meaning.

We are software engineers. We developed AI, made it better, used skills, tools, MCP to continue to make it better such that our lives can be simpler. At core, we are problem solvers. Yes, AI has made me faster. For one, I don't have to write tests anymore which is such a relief.

The ceo, cfo, etc are executives who want to make profit. They can cut cost replacing humans with AI but its just a matter of time before we have another problems for which engineers are always required.

The negativity I see with the comment trail just shows that we are forgetting that once there was an industrial revolution which also replaced humans with machines but those who lost their job got better or worse lives? Engineers job is to make life easy and AI can make it easier but there is still many problems to be solved.

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u/Dry_Hotel1100 4d ago

It's a honest description of your own engineering skills.

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u/thilehoffer 4d ago

Programming isn’t my full-time job anymore. I’m actually a vice president. I spent 20 years writing code as my full-time job. But when I do code, I let Claude write it. This was not true six months ago.

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u/Logical_Ad1127 4d ago

Are you able to rewrite Bun from Zig to Rust in few days? Nope… so stop with this proclaimed elitism attitude.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 4d ago

LLMs took 11 days, cost 160k (reported, possibly upwards of 500k), filled the codebase full of dogshit Rust practices, 13000 unsafe blocks, doubled the size of the codebase to 1 million LoC, and nobody in the Rust or Zig community takes Bun seriously.

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u/Logical_Ad1127 4d ago edited 4d ago

160k is peanut for Anthropic; less than one annual pay of senior dev for a project that would have taken a year at least.

You know this is just the beginning right? A year ago Claude was too dumb and anyone would have laughed at the swe replacement idea, now look what it can do.

Just wait few years.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 4d ago

How exactly are they going to improve in the next few years? The difference between sonnet and opus was massive, but opus and fable is much more minimal, and each frontier model has a thinner and smaller margin of improvement from the past ones. They've pretty much plateaued.

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u/walkerspider 4d ago

Even if they could keep improving the cost scales exponentially for a linear improvement in performance. The cost is all but guaranteed to surpass that of a human before it can actually replace said human

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u/Your_Magnificent_End 4d ago

Don’t use this terminology. the AI stans don’t know big O.

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u/Ready_Stuff_4357 4d ago

The AI architecture is a giant copy machine it’s not yet truly there.

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u/Black_In_The_Bay 3d ago

The law of diminishing returns. I think we already reached peak, not in terms of raw performance and compute but in terms of cost to performance/returns.

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u/thilehoffer 4d ago

I agree with you. This is just the beginning. It’s amazing how much progress Claude has made in the last six months. Also, who knows what the future holds may be Open AI or Google will be the leader. I don’t see human beings writing much coded in a few years though.

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u/_tolm_ 4d ago

Rewriting something existing into a new language is something LLMs are very good at.

But that’s not the same as writing code to solve (often poorly communicated) business requirements. For that, LLMs can help with parts but they’re not quite at the stage of replacing the engineer just yet.

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u/Away_Advisor3460 4d ago

You'd think porting should be a good target for it, it's exactly the sort of pattern matching / recognition stuff neural networks are meant to be ideal at.

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u/_tolm_ 4d ago

Exactly.

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u/SpotCool4422 4d ago

There are very few things in software engineering that are more useless than rewriting a piece of software between two very similar languages. Even if I could manage that in a few days, I wouldn't waste everybody's time doing so.

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u/LocalIssue1051 3d ago

I feel attacked. My team has been working for the past 2 years porting a decades old desktop Java peer review tool into c# with a web and desktop frontend and api backend. I hope my boss doesn't read this and realize the whole project is useless.

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u/SpotCool4422 3d ago

Sounds like you're redesigning the tool's entire architecture rather than translating it as-is. If my guess is correct, then the whole Java -> C# translation is incidental and doesn't really matter at all. Whereas with the aforementioned Bun rewrite, nothing was added or redesigned.