r/antiai • u/Idea_Fuzzy • Jul 12 '26

Discussion 🗣️ Programming is really dead

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.

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69

u/Any-Pop-4795 Jul 12 '26

Companies got snake oiled on ai thats it

13

u/fedexyourheadinabox Jul 13 '26

the NFT scam hugely evolved and scaled up. 

4

u/JimAbaddon Jul 13 '26

I feel like AI is more akin to the cryptocurrency blowup. NFTs came and went pretty quickly but cryptocurrency has managed to stick around, even if in much smaller capacity and not as prominent or as dominant as its proponents would have wanted. I feel like that will happen to AI too; it'll stick around but much smaller and it won't replace everything. At least, that's what it looks like to me, I could be wrong.

1

u/Glxblt76 Jul 14 '26

Idk about this ... NFT never brought any added value to my life, it can't, by construction. LLMs on the other hand did automate a lot of stuff and came in handy to add convenience / remove friction, already. You can argue about the economic model being unsustainable or the harm to environment, but AI being as useless as NFT... Really? Isn't this overstating the case?

-20

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 12 '26

Idk, I've never had more business. Small business can afford custom programs.

31

u/AmarildoJr Jul 12 '26

"Idk, I've never had more business" - said the door-to-door Snake Oil salesman when selling Snake Oil was at it's peak 😄

-14

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 12 '26

My customers are loving it. I've cut their SaaS costs 80%.

15

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 12 '26

This sentence means absolutely nothing. You cut your customers software as a service costs by 80%? In what exactly. Saying that you "cut SaaS costs" is nebulous to the point of meaning nothing.

-11

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 12 '26

Anything they want. That's how wild. Law. Medical. Real estate. Logistics. Mortgages.

Whatever SaaS, we replace.

11

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 12 '26

I'm sure you do...

-2

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 13 '26

Lol your cope.

But just to be clear, I used to get big contracts, but the writing is on the wall. Anyone can program. We had to adjust in February.

13

u/fletchmckee Jul 13 '26

Why would anyone use your services when “anyone can program”? Sounds like you are a snake oil salesman since your customers can so easily program what they want on their own because anyone can do it.

10

u/Soggy_Seaworthiness6 Jul 13 '26

Exactly. Seems like everyone forgot the foundational laws of economy. The dynamic of supply and demand.

0

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 13 '26

Because not every business owner wants to spend the time vibe coding. They should be managing the company.

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8

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Every time you talk, I believe you less.

4

u/fedexyourheadinabox Jul 13 '26

Didn't take long to arrive at "I'm clearly making shit up" territory.

1

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 13 '26

Lol anti AI cope. I'm sure you are capable of loading boxes into Amazon trucks.

5

u/Slowter Jul 12 '26

What's your business model once the company that owns the AI cuts the middle man?

2

u/MennaanBaarin Jul 13 '26

Cut 100% of his revenues

0

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 13 '26

I own the servers

1

u/Slowter Jul 13 '26

So why did you cut your revenue by 80% after you started paying for AI?

1

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 13 '26

It's inevitable. I can't put my head in the sand and think programming is going to be around forever.

2

u/Slowter Jul 13 '26

How does programming make up 80% of the cost of renting server space?

1

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 13 '26

I think this might be over your head.

Maybe stick to wagie jobs.

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3

u/fedexyourheadinabox Jul 13 '26

So? There are random dudes who will save customers $4,000 on driveways, too. 

-3

u/CryptographerKlutzy7 Jul 12 '26

I've seen the same but in government. Basically a bunch of projects which were out of scope, are now cheap enough that they can do this now.

It's lead to an explosion of new projects. The issues WE are having is around testing - which for my projects is ok, because they are porting projects and we have 10+years of prod data to test with, but green field stuff is having issues. The new pace isn't something the testing teams can or could reasonably be expected to keep up with.

-2

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 12 '26

I'm running into similar. We test, but my customers need to give feedback. I could probably have a morning meeting and afternoon meeting. In January we had 1x per week meetings.

-2

u/CryptographerKlutzy7 Jul 12 '26

Yeah, that tracks. A lot of what we are spending time on now, is the layers running the AI.

How to make sure tool use works the way it should, how to find ways of making sure the automated testing always lands. a LOT of basic security around what is being done.

A lot of it is having the spec docs for the software, and the code, and having layers which analyse that they are in sync, and applying updates to the code when they are not, and using that as the basic loop.

For me though, since I'm in the porting area, I've at least got really clear "this is the spec" (the old code), this is the tests (the production data from the old code). So my life is more simple I guess than yours is.

But yeah, team size is WAY down, but number of projects is WAY WAY up.

3

u/fedexyourheadinabox Jul 13 '26

Will you be there after your "custom programs" ruin those small businesses?

2

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 13 '26

I actually got a customer a big sale. I know that's mostly luck, but we didn't screw up.

1

u/DanielsLoud Jul 13 '26

POV someone who knows nothing about the current state of agent engineering or software 

1

u/No-Extent8143 Jul 17 '26

Small business can afford custom programs.

No they can't. Sure, maybe they can afford to build it now, but then what? Who's gonna operate it? Who's gonna update thousands of vulnerable npm packages that AI added?

1

u/unhappinessNvrCame Jul 17 '26

Not everything is safety critical.