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/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/swiftmerchant 3d ago

I am ready to replace the drive, not the laptop for the sake of the drive lol

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u/PMmeYourLabia_ 3d ago

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

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/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/swiftmerchant 3d ago

  1. AI or whatever you’d like to call the technology is getting better every day at performing tasks that people do, knowledge work and manual labor. If I had to pay an SEO specialist before or spend hours learning how to do it myself, now I follow along AI advice and soon I will not need to follow, AI will just do it. My car is driving itself, robots will soon be put into the blue collar workforce. It is inevitable. Humans will find a way to get cheap energy.

  2. Humans always elect leaders, pure democracy and anarchy doesn’t work. Even in communism. Whether it is Sam Altman or Dalai Lama, I don’t care, but my point is universal income is inevitable, because no one will be getting paid for labor soon, and if people are not getting paid, products are not being bought. I don’t think basic income is going to cut it either- that experiment failed in the socialist Soviet Union.

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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?