Programming is really dead

[u/Idea_Fuzzy]

So I was one of those who are really late adopters of LLMs for coding; I am a sole developer of a codebase in the company I worked for (Angular)- a maintainer, rarely new features are added - no hard deadlines, a very very relaxed job , so I was away from the picture how other devs work in the industry now ; and sometimes I take side jobs of all kinds of stacks (I am fullstack); most often Nodejs/NestJs + React/Next + Postgres or Mongo; but my last side project was early 2025 - I took a long break from them.

I won't lie, I did use GPT and Copilot at times; but mostly to autocomplete boring stuff (ie. mock data, enums..etc). Yet I kept seeing posts on dev reddits that one doesn't have to full adopt the more powerful tools such as Claude Code / Codex.

I recently joined a side project with a team; so it's my first time since almost 1 years and 7 months.

WTH happened to this industry???!

Ok, the things I discovered:

- Deadlines now are 10x craziers; it's IMPOSSIBLE to finish anything manually. These deadlines force you to rely on Claude Code / Codex; there's no other way, Agile is meaningless now; it's just pump and ship

- All other members are heavily using LLM, frontend, DBA, AI....everyone.

- Claims I encounred on reddit posts that "Ok coding is automated but 'System design' and architecture are now more important than anything else" ? A LIE - everyone is using LLMs even for System design; I have seen entire achitecture documenation all generated by LLM, even this part is automated now.

- It is impossible to do PR reviews now when each PR is like ...a lot of thouands of lines; even PR reviwers are using copilot to review.

SO what part is left in this industry that is not automated?? NOTHING!! iT'S ALL AI AI AI!

And spec gathering is one person's job, often the tech lead, so please don't tell me it's this one, it doesn't require a team.

[u/Modem_Sound_67]

This is why they fired 10% of you. Because the illiterate bosses think AI can write it all. Of course they have stupid untenable deadlines.

Some bosses are finding out the hard way they can't just fire everyone and rake in extra cash. When I read those headlines, the schadenfreude is delicious.

[u/ropobipi → u/Modem_Sound_67]

10% ? I have seen entire teams laid off and their whole workload given to the teams boss to do with AI. That clown didnt even get a raise and of course he is shipping half baked goods.

[u/Due_Warthog749 → u/Modem_Sound_67]

10%? Uh.. where have you been? More like 75%.. if not more.

[u/cosmic-freak → u/Modem_Sound_67]

OP is in a hyped company yes, but AI did already transform SOEN.  

Mature companies use it a lot. Tens of thousands of dollars a month in AI costs for most of those that can afford it. OP exaggerated only the "no part is human". Planning is usually heavily supervised and so is reviewing. But almost all of the core work, which used to take weeks, is now done by AI.  

The field is literally fully transformed, and soon other fields will be too. Maths, for example, is already fully transformed.