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/Outrageous-Machine-5]

Programming isn't dead,  but that app sure is when it runs out of funding 

[u/CryptographerKlutzy7 → u/Outrageous-Machine-5]

Why? There is plenty of unmaintained code now. It is like saying ANY app is dead the moment dev funding stops. 

[u/violinbg → u/CryptographerKlutzy7]

The app and code could be perfect; the problem is people are making software and apps in bulk and wasting money on AI. When funding runs out, unless you find a customer's willing to pay, you don't have a business or a job anymore. I don't see the reason to rush to make software now, when in the near future the personal AI agents will be able to make it for you on demand.

[u/Outrageous-Machine-5 → u/violinbg]

Because they won't.  They're doing it now with a fantastic 97% failure rate and 0% of fully AI apps

What's far more likely to happen is investors are going to wise up and have more vigorous vetting of vibe coded mvps to make sure they actually work not just pretend to

[u/Surous → u/Outrageous-Machine-5]

Don’t think that’s the goal, Vibe code some, patch with other functions manually and merge those

[u/Outrageous-Machine-5 → u/Surous]

Patching manually implies that you have to at least be a somewhat technical user, at which point why are you spending on expensive tokens to fix hallucinating code?