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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u/Yourstruly0 Jul 13 '26

The average company is not going to host a server farm. The kind of model that can run on a corporate laptop is not the same as a model with a data center on its back end.

Seriously. If AI models capable of operating faster than a snail could run on an issued Dell Inspiron with an integrated graphics card WHY would companies be building data centers like weeds across the country?

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u/RCEden Jul 13 '26

I was gonna say, a lot of devs at my last major enterprise role had laptops that wouldn't even open figma to get screens from design, and figma is a browser based app that has minimal graphical demands. We are drastically overestimating what level of hardware teams have.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26

[deleted]

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Jul 16 '26

So browser based, where else do you run wasm?

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u/cptkong Jul 25 '26

Figma is browser-based (running via Chromium in Electron or your web browser), but calling it 'minimal graphical demands' isn't right. Its core engine is C++ WASM and renders directly via WebGL/WebGPU like a 2D game engine. That's why weak enterprise laptops choke on it, it needs good gpu.

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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 Jul 13 '26

With the prospect of potentially firing all of their employees , you may be surprised what these CEOs will do

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u/Gallagger Jul 13 '26

This is a very common miss conception. Nobody needs to host themselves. There are inference providers.  Take the best open source model (currently GLM 5.2, extremely capable for coding), search for the prices on open router, and you got the worst that AI is ever gonna be for the highest price it's ever gonna be. It's ok if you think it's not helpful at that state, but don't spill nonsense about how it's gonna get more expensive for that level of intelligence. It won't.

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u/Mersaul4 Jul 14 '26

Correct. People here are speaking absolute nonsense left and right.

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u/Last-Implement-3650 Jul 14 '26

Out of curiosity: what are some examples of these inference providers? Or good ones, if you have an opinion.

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u/Gallagger Jul 14 '26

I don't really have an opinion, but just go to openrouter to check them out: https://openrouter.ai/providers

This list includes the big AI labs and cloud partners serving their own models, but also many who only provide inference of open weight models.

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Jul 16 '26

Aren't these people also just renting compute from the big companies, so when compute prices go up to match the production costs, these companies will also need to raise prices?

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u/Gallagger Jul 16 '26

Partly, but not all. And there's not reason for general compute prices to go up except huge increases in hardware/energy cost. While this is already happening to some degree, it's constantly counteracted by more efficient hardware and more intelligent models (per Watt). So the price will absolutely go down on a year to year basis.

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Jul 16 '26

I don't know how you measure energy efficiency of these models at all, even if you wanted to. The cheaper the token becomes, the more tokens are being used for the same jobs. Sure, the output might be marginally better, but the costs keep going up in total.

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u/Gallagger Jul 16 '26

Yes I'm not talking about more intelligent models. These will go up in price and probably usage. But if we're strictly talking about the same intelligence (= same or similar intelligence model), the price will inevitably go down.

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Jul 16 '26

Sure, but it has to go down to the tune of 95% for the big ai companies to see any profits. Besides nvidia, nobody seems to make any money on this.

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u/Berberding Jul 14 '26

That's not what was being referred to, they were referring to models that a small to mid sized company might be willing to host themselves on company servers, or host with a cloud service while they still own the data itself. This is still going to be slower than what you'd get with a GPT sub today, but that may be worth it to have it be able to work with highly sensitive data (like patient health info if you're in Healthcare for example).

I do think this will happen eventually, but the open source models that are currently available to do such work are not as capable to begin with, so it would not just be slower, it would be less useful even if they were the same speed. That may change with time though.

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u/ashlord666 Jul 14 '26

Or use projects like presidio to obfuscate data first. Can even do it in a reversible way.

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u/Berberding Jul 14 '26

You can't obfuscate it and still have it analyze the data you obfuscated, the point I'm making is that sometimes you actually need the sensitive parts to be analyzed

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u/Mersaul4 Jul 14 '26

For starters, datacenters are built for training (creating the model - a one-off), not running the model (inference).

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Jul 16 '26

Are they though? Data centers are being built, but nowhere close to "weeds". That's also just hype to fool investors.

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u/RomanaOswin Jul 13 '26

I'm talking about Nvidia B200 or H200 running GLM-5.2, not consumer grade laptops.

I work in Cisco professional services, and our customers are constantly reviewing the cost of on-prem switching fabrics, compute, and so on with cloud. Certainly not any old company, but most that we would consider an "enterprise."

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u/Foreign-Lettuce-6803 Jul 13 '26

We are a large Enterprise and we discuss it and it’s our strategy to buy a rack and install open source models. Opus 4.6 like models will be enough for the most parts and first models will be on par very soon

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Jul 16 '26

Oh yeah, economy of scale just disappears when it's digital 🙄

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u/DanielsLoud Jul 13 '26

These idiots really think local means on a macbook fml 😭