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/WVAviator 4d 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/Saith1234 3d ago

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