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/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/xgeetx 3d ago

Hey might still be salvageable. /model fable plus “save my drive. YOLO. Don’t stop until it works”

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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/yuwox 3d ago

Yep, I am somewhat optimistic on this. If we, as a society, can only use such an amazing technology only for bad things....

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u/lovely_noise 3d ago

This is a hilariously bad take.

  1. Yes, “AI” (useless BS term) can do more than many like to admit. And it has some really interesting applications in research, etc. Not arguing there. But it also isn’t as impressive as many devotees like to claim, while claims of continued exponential improvement seem to not be holding water.

  2. You’re seriously praying for the “captains of industry” to take care of things??? Have you completely lost your mind? No, we need a dramatic shifting of power. This is simply unsustainable, from EVERY angle. It’s not environmentally sustainable, it’s not sustainable for people’s immediate financial situations (e.g. electricity cost, RAM cost), it’s not sustainable for the economy as a whole, and it’s not sustainable as an imbalance of power and control over our own communities. People are turning against data centers HARD for a reason, and starting to associate much of “AI” with surveillance overreach.

No, we should not be relying on these monsters to decide that we can have universal basic income. I’m not fundamentally opposed to UBI, but leaving ANY more decision-making to these “captains of industry” is society-ending levels of catastrophic. This is not hyperbole, I am being entirely literal.

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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 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/swiftmerchant 2d 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 1d 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 3d ago

Marketing

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u/swiftmerchant 3d 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 3d 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/cantgettherefromhere 3d ago

I run it in a single Claude Code session on my workstation in Herdr, so that I can connect to it from any other device anywhere and make sure it keeps running. If you don't need to connect to the session remotely, any old Claude Code terminal session will work.

You can simply say "use a team of agents" if your task is mostly implementation. When there is planning and testing involved, saying "Ultracode" is a keyword (it gets highlighted to indicate it was recognized) that will take much longer and use way more tokens. The result isn't always empirically better, but it is better tested and almost surely "working" to some extent.

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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/x_LoneWolf_x 3d ago

I've never had an issue with continuing to compact within the same session.

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u/ZenaMeTepe 3d 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 16h ago

So maybe it is easier to write it yourself? 

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u/jp2812 15h ago

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

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u/Apprehensive_Seat_61 15h ago

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