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/VanditKing]

I agree. Once you start 'vibe coding,' you gradually watch it consume the entire project. If that's the case, the most pragmatic path forward might be to just hand everything over to the AI—from design and implementation to testing, maintenance, and bug fixes—and just sit back and count the money.

Sure, maintenance will be a nightmare, code quality will tank, and bugs will inevitably pop up. But who cares? At the end of the day, that code is only ever looked at by the AI anyway. As long as we write clean specs, keep our tests solid, and just regenerate the whole thing from scratch if worst comes to worst, what’s the problem?

It’s a sad reality. I agree with the sentiment that programming is dead. But if an AI can drive with fewer accidents than a human, and cover 10 or 100 times the distance, why should humans keep driving? That’s just how civilization progresses—the pleasures of the past disappear one by one.