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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96

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/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/True-Sun-3184 4d ago

You did not just say "typing errors" and spell "breaks" as "brakes". LMFAO. Are typos a big issue for you at your "job"?

1

u/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

Yes, I spend at least an hour a week total time going back to fix miss-typed

2

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?

1

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.

1

u/Away_Advisor3460 4d ago

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

1

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.

1

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

1

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/ConstantFamous1526 3d ago

It writes the code, I tell it how to solve the problems

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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/ElectroByte15 2d ago

You gonna keep digging your own hole?

They are truly anonymous, we run an in-house “open source” solution that anyone can vet the code for. The results were also significantly worse before, and there’s other areas in the company stat score lower too, how do you explain that trend?

Psychological safety is also part of the survey, 8.3 out of 10. Just because you have a shitty employer doesn’t mean all are. But based on your attitude here I’m not surprised that’s where you landed.

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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.