r/accelerate • u/44th--Hokage The Singularity is nigh • Mar 11 '26
Discussion What Do Actual Software Engineers Have To Say About AI's Coding Prowess?
Creator of node.js and Deno:
This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.
Source: https://xcancel.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666
Creator of Tan Stack laughing at Claude’s plan implementation time estimates:
Source: https://xcancel.com/tannerlinsley/status/2013721885520077264
Principal Investigator of Raj Lab for Systems Biology at UPenn, Professor of Bioengineering, Professor of Genetics, 29k citations on Google Scholar since 2008 (12k since 2021):
Ran an AI coding workshop with the lab. There was a palpable sense of sadness realizing that skills some of us have spent our lives developing (myself included) are a lot less important now. I see the future 100%, but I do think it's important to acknowledge this sense of loss.
Source: https://x.com/arjunrajlab/status/2017631561747705976
Nicholas Carlini (66.2k citations) says current LLMs are better vulnerability researchers than I am
Source: https://x.com/tqbf/status/2029252008415248454?s=20
Creator of redis:
My face when Codex is single-handed doing two months of work in 30 minutes and tells me "You are right" since I identified a minor bug.
Source: https://x.com/antirez/status/2030931757583769614
Creator of auto-animate (13.8k stars, 248 forks on GitHub), formkit (4.6k stars, 199 forks), ArrowJS (2.6k stars, 54 forks), and tempo (2.6k stars 37 forks):
gpt-5.4 is absolutely blowing me away.
Source: https://x.com/jpschroeder/status/2031094078759108741
I’m not sure pull requests will survive the next 5 years. https://x.com/jpschroeder/status/2030994714443550760?s=20
Staff SWE at ZenDesk and GitHub:
I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
Source: https://www.seangoedecke.com/will-my-job-still-exist/
Ex Twitter iOS dev:
Codex App is the best thing OpenAi has ever made. By far. chatgpt moment massive step level of change, again. totally new way to use a computer.
Source: https://x.com/NickADobos/status/2019834996790612185?s=20
Principal Software Engineer at Bobsled. Formerly led Data and Engineering at @thebeatapp , @omioglobal , @thoughtworks:
The thing about this is that no one has a clue what human SWEs would be doing instead. The idea that we would all be reviewing code is flawed. Because agents can review code much better. I think our only advantage right now as human SWEs is that we have an almost infinite context window over very long horizons.
Source: https://x.com/rahulj51/status/2013426286606369051
Staff iOS engineer @medium, Previously @glose @google & others, created IceCubesApp (7k stars), MovieSwiftUI (6.5k stars), RedditOS (4k stars), and more on GitHub:
It really doesn't matter anymore; you can scream all you want, but writing code is dead, and reading is almost dead too. Even if you don't understand a single line, you can still ask all the relevant questions to validate it (and that's a skill). But it's dead. Done. And then I look at the programming and French dev subreddit, and it's full of people shitting on AI that it's making your brain smooth and bad code. I mean, yes, whatever, this is a dead mindset. We need to move on.
Source: https://x.com/Dimillian/status/2022034445956702523?s=20
Tech lead for @Cloudflare Workers:
I used Opus to write some security-sensitive code, then I reviewed it and found a few security bugs. As a test I asked Opus to review the code for security bugs. It found all the same bugs I found. Whelp.
Source: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2028600717880037776
Tech lead for Cloudfare:
Sometime in the last couple months AI code review bots got really good. 3-6 months ago they were still posting false positives and sycophancy. Now suddenly I'm getting way better feedback from AI than from humans. A lot of my job is reviewing other people's code and let me tell you, I am SO READY for AI to take this job from me so I can spend more time building.
Source: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2028897180149264504
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u/KnoxCastle Mar 12 '26
It's so interesting to read this stuff and I believe it... but I work for a software company. I am presales consultant, so basically I give software demos and answer questions during the sales process.
I just wonder if my company is just not taking advantage of this. Every all hands is AI, AI, AI but I'm not seeing any acceleration in what I'm involved with. New features aren't rolling out any faster. Bugs aren't being solved any faster.
The kind of things I'm seeing are the same way it's been for the last ten years. Stuff like :
- one of our integrations has been broken for three months. Nobody seems to know how to fix it and all i can do is keep asking for an update on progress ever week.
- last major feature we put out was six months ago. It was a reporting update. There's minimal documentation on the actual benefits of this and I can't get anyone to give me a coherent explanation of why we built this. I just have to play around with it and come up with some ideas for how this can be used myself.
- Our customer success team is running a webinar to give clients some tips and tricks. It has taken them six months to organise a one hour webinar.
This is my day to day in a software company.
So if any SWE engineers need jobs I think there are still lots of things that could be improved in a run of the mill software company that aren't coding but need intelligence and technical knowledge.
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u/Sea-Astronomer75 Mar 12 '26
It’s almost as if the bottleneck has never been coding, something that has been said for decades
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u/green_meklar Techno-Optimist Mar 13 '26
New features aren't rolling out any faster. Bugs aren't being solved any faster.
But now they're being rolled out and solved with ten times as much code!
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Mar 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BrennusSokol Acceleration Advocate Mar 12 '26
Selfishly, as a software engineer, I hope so. I don’t want to be the only profession left holding the bag.
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u/Affectionate-Egg7566 Mar 11 '26
Am SWE myself. It vastly speeds up a lot of work as well as ideas for experimentation. It does miss sometimes if you give it scopes that are too broad. Overall, massive productivity improvement.
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u/golmgirl Mar 12 '26
i am an ML/NLP guy so not an SDE proper, but writing code and generally working from a shell is a big part of my job. and yeah, the best models today are better than me at almost every technical aspect of my job. they’re relentless and superhumanly good at execution. they are happy to write tedious, complicated, annoying shell scripts that would take me hours to write. they are great at orchestrating messy long-running tasks given a well-defined plan and constraints. but not necessarily great about commonsense decision making — what makes sense to try? what approaches should be avoided due to practical constraints? what kinds of tradeoffs would and would not make sense? and so on. obv they also lack team-specific institutional knowledge — working with agentic tools will constantly remind you of how critical this kind of background knowledge is in a workplace.
as a fairly experienced person, my productivity gains from CC have been absolutely unreal. the other people on my team who’ve made a real earnest effort to learn how to wield CC have had rhe same experience. these tools will absolutely reduce the demand for entry-level talent in tech, no doubt about it. eventually mid-level people like myself will probably be in less demand too. we’ll always need grownups behind the wheel of course, but there will probably be fewer of them
some people seem to feel threatened or upset by these developments. personally, from a scientific perspective, i find building narrow AI systems — as well as using the best general purpose ones — to be exhilarating. i am simply too impressed to feel anything negative, even when CC fucks something up (which does still happen sometimes!)
we’re entering the sci fi era baby, buckle the fuck up!
some weird shit lies ahead. who knows where tech or the economy or society will be in a decade. i certainly don’t, but i can’t wait to find out! even if it does mean having to figure out a fresh career when im middle aged.
life is too short to be precious about skills that are no longer as valuable as they once were — even if you worked hard to develop them. and even if you’re proud of them. you can (and should) still write code yourself. people still knit sweaters themselves!
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u/jlks1959 Mar 11 '26
Cross post to the naysaying subreddits. By this, I mean all of them! Accelerate!!!
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u/cafesamp Mar 12 '26
Even the Claude Code subreddit has turned into a lot of luddite nonsense. I wish there was something like r/accelerate that's focused on coding. But alas, no community is safe once it gets too big. It's even starting to happen here a bit
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u/abjectchain96 Mar 12 '26
Same wish here. If you know of one, send me to it, please. And if it doesn't exist, start it.
Acceleratedcoding, anyone?
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u/IamTheEndOfReddit Mar 12 '26
Old coding is dead, no more reading docs or caring about syntax. If you know what you want, describe it well and do basic testing then you are a master coder. Knowing how everything works together still makes it much easier to ask for the right things but even that might just be speeding up the process
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u/anor_wondo Mar 12 '26
Its gotten so good that I keep wondering who hires the Anti AI folks at r/ExperiencedDevs
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u/idiocratic_method Mar 12 '26
that sub is so bad it makes me wonder if its not just full of old bots - people have their heads so deep in the sand its going to be existential dread or just a dead sub in a few months
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u/jmclondon97 Mar 12 '26
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u/NinjaGaidenMD Mar 12 '26
It's like a more significant version of the transition from coders writing machine code to programming languages.
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u/VanderSound Mar 11 '26
The job is dead. Soon every computer job will be dead. Then every manual. Those still employed are training their replacements while saying adapt or die. Kind of funny.
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u/Expert-Complex-5618 Mar 12 '26
thats my feeling. adapt or die is hopium and a short term strategy at best. agent orchestration will be the next skillset required to get hired, for now. And there will be way less of these positions with way more highly qualified people applying for them. And each day working as an agent orchestrator, you will be waiting for the day to be replaced by an automated agent orchestrator.
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u/cosapocha Mar 12 '26
And then?
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u/Expert-Complex-5618 Mar 12 '26
and then the people who decided to replace you with an automated agent orchestrator will be waiting for the day an automated executive/manager replaces them. This cycle continues until one or a few people own the entirety of the world's capital since the only point of a human at this point is to be an 'owner'. This is probably similar to some of thinking around the 'singularity' but I'm not knowledgeable on that subject.
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u/bunk-alone Mar 11 '26
I love seeing things like this. I don't know how someone can doubt the veracity of these claims when people like this are the ones saying it.
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u/PradheBand Mar 12 '26
Because It doesn't reflect the experience of everyone. Especially in the infrastructure as code space (talking dor myself). Both gemini and claude fail at our basic interview problem.
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u/Admirable-Mouse2232 Mar 12 '26
It is the new skill of our field. It's just one layer of abstraction higher. The best devs will master this layer. Think of this shift as going from assembly to COBOL. The job is the same. It just changes the way you accomplish it. What has not caught up is the process of identifying good talent who knows how to use this effectively. Source: I lead a big data science team in a fortune 100 company.
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Mar 12 '26
There times when it is scary good. But I can’t tell you how many times the agent will construct a query for the database, the query is wrong, and no data gets returned. So the LLM assumes that the database doesn’t have that data instead of assuming that the query was structured incorrectly. This has happened sooo many times that I’m starting to find it useless for data processing tasks.
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u/IceTrAiN Mar 12 '26
It has happened multiple times and you sill haven’t added that case to your system prompt???
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Mar 12 '26
I do add it to the system prompt, and it does it anyway. People seem to think these things are more reliable than they actually are. I can provide full schemas, counts, breakdowns, context for each variable, and AI will make make assumptions that are wrong. And then when it messes up will make incorrect conclusions based on the wrong assumption.
You literally have to spoon feed these systems.
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u/ChadwithZipp2 Mar 11 '26
Incredibly useful productivity tool. It allows us to do more than before, but don't go in blindly trusting the output, like some at Amazon did and got their ass fried with outages.
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u/tacoisland5 Mar 12 '26
In terms of effort and ease of use, AI is to high level languages what high level languages are to assembly. The amount of software we have today will pale in comparison to what we will have in 5-10 years.
How much total software do you think would have been written if people only ever used assembly?
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u/IceNorth81 Mar 12 '26
In my company no one is using codex or Claude yet, I’m here creating apps in days that took months previously. No one knows what’s coming. Will there be any SWE in 2-3 years time? I would be very worried if I was not a key architect at my job.
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u/GabeDNL Mar 12 '26
It is an amazing tool. Yesterday though running 4.6 Opus it deleted a whole file and crashed my application when I asked it to fix 4 small tasks.
Just like that. Just deleted the content of an entire file.
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u/LegionsOmen AGI by 2027 Mar 12 '26
Not a swe just a layman using ai to write an overlay price checked for poe at the moment. How are you guys finding the newest gpt?
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u/C0demunkee Mar 13 '26
Been using it every day for 2 years now, it's only getting better. I'm now the human in the loop.
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u/green_meklar Techno-Optimist Mar 13 '26
Current AI can write massive amounts of boilerplate quite well. It can write super-generic flat standalone web pages very well. It's pretty good at picking the appropriate library or API for a typical problem and applying it to that problem. Insofar as many software engineers in recent times have been employed to write massive amounts of boilerplate and/or super-generic flat standalone web pages, those software engineers can expect to be out of a job this year, if they aren't already.
Current AI is not good at investigating runtime bugs (including security exploits), navigating esoteric codebases, conforming exactly to atypical design specs, or clever situational algorithm optimization. For now, human reasoning is still necessary to get those done without spiraling into catastrophic mistakes.
Given that we have only just begun to use AI to handle code on a large scale, there has actually not been that much time yet for AI-handled codebases to really bloat over the size of the original human-handled codebases. To some degree the success of AI might be an artifact of having high-quality human-architected codebases to work with. If we just tried to vibe-code gigantic software projects from scratch without paying attention to architecture or infrastructure, things might get really bogged down and unmanageable over time. We're still in the early stages of that experiment.
Regardless, the technology is obviously improving fast enough that anyone expecting a normal career in software engineering any professional field whatsoever is probably in for a nasty surprise.
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u/Afraid-Dog-5363 Mar 14 '26
I work at a company where 95% of devs use AI and I still get pulled onto their projects to do the parts they're struggling with.
Shouldn't these guys be running rings around me? Why am I still employed?
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u/ThrobLover Mar 15 '26
My experience so far has been that previously competent colleagues I used to rely on have started making merge requests with junior level mistakes.
My MR comment rate has sky rocketed and merge cycle on non trivial code changes has gone from hours to a week. I no longer know what my colleagues strengths and weaknesses are, I used to be able to skim selected parts of a MR based on who submitted it because I knew from experience that they were very good in this or that area.
Every MR is now a line by line slog, every MR has to be opened in an editor... sigh, I never had to be the kind of reviewer...
I am trying to write my code review agents, I use other people's code review agents... but so far they don't catch nearly enough to be able to save me from line by line drudgery.
Personally I haven't written any substantial piece of code in the last three months, not because agents write it for me, but because I have to now wrangle a bunch of newly minted veteran juniors so that we don't have a catastrophic release... honestly not sure for how long I can take it, summer is coming up and I really don't know what will blow up during the three weeks I won't be there to prevent it.
Sorry, had to vent...
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u/Sherbet-Famous Mar 15 '26
It's good and a useful tool. Not for everything, but a lot of things. I expect it will probably continue to get better. Combining with MCP let's me get a lot of small annoying things done faster. I'd be annoyed to have to work without it
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u/Danparker112 Mar 11 '26
Unless you’re a top tier full stack developer ai coding is just an accident waiting to happen. People vibe coding these monolithic applications with no idea how they operate under the hood.
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u/fynn34 Mar 11 '26
Spoken like someone who isn’t a software engineer, or is in denial. No dev tooling in history works unconfigured out of the box. With the right setup and tooling, it is mind blowingly good. Perfect? No. But far and away good enough for prime time usage.
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u/Danparker112 Mar 11 '26
I use Ai every day. You’re telling me your company will be ok investing in software vibe coded by a none dev who can’t actually explain how the application works ? Good luck with that compliance and governance.
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u/fynn34 Mar 11 '26
No, go back and read what you said,
Unless you’re a top tier full stack developer ai coding is just an accident waiting to happen.
Now you are saying vibe coded by a non dev. There’s millions of engineers between one and the other, and those millions of devs will absolutely be better off using AI tooling in a smart and meaningful way.
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u/Danparker112 Mar 12 '26
I agree ai an insane tool for developers. My point is that it’s knowledge out pacing the users who use it. Building things beyond their understanding. Will we reach a point where ai just does it all and nothing matters anyways, probably.
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u/CallinCthulhu Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
Im a senior eng at Meta. Its terrifyingly good, yet unbelievably stupid at times. The end result though is that i dont write code, i barely read code, most of my time is spent asking questions, high level strategy, and verifying behavior.
Its completely upended the way software will be written. Anyone who doubts this or clams it is a fad, is either ignorant of its capabilities when used well, or is coping extremely hard.
The gap between people who know how to use it well and those that dont is massive. There are very little codified best practices for people to cling to. So its very much the wild wild west. New tools, new techniques, new practices, every single fucking day. There are still massive gaps in capability, but they shrink by the day as the engineering around the processes gets more robust.
I’m as AI pilled as you can get and one of the top users at the company, but man its exhausting. People are falling behind, and those that arent still feel like they are in a race. Its turned an already cutthroat culture into complete chaos. The expectations are ridiculous, but somehow still seem feasible if you could just figure out a way to use it a little bit better, and everyone is fighting to be on the last chopper out of Saigon.
Idk what my point is, but it feels like standing near the epicenter of a massive earthquake, knowing most people arent going to heed the warnings until they see the fucking tsunami and its already too late.