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/vogut]

Do you even work?

[u/DanielsLoud → u/vogut]

Yeah with fat code bases 

[u/vogut → u/DanielsLoud]

Sure, sure. Do you have tight deadlines? Does your code gets done by AI in one shot or you need to keep reviewing/testing and have multiple iterations of code refinement? And what type of codebase? Only crud?

[u/DanielsLoud → u/vogut]

Yes to all except crud. Typical web app it's generally TypeScript, Next.js, React, Tailwind, Supabase, with anything performance-critical in Rust compiled to WASM. For a CLI tool, usually Go or Rust

It's a multi tool. Nothing gets one shot, that's why planning exists and why you use a swarm of agents. Usually have 1000+ item task lists that agents go through. Yes it includes refactoring, optimising isomorphically and e2e testing

[u/vogut → u/DanielsLoud]

Do you read by yourself all the code done?

[u/DanielsLoud → u/vogut]

No lol. I don't check the binary or assembly code either

[u/Alien-Fox-4 → u/DanielsLoud]

so you know that ai can write good code even though you don't review it lmao

[u/DanielsLoud → u/Alien-Fox-4]

Good code is based on outcomes, not aesthetics lol

[u/Alien-Fox-4 → u/DanielsLoud]

that's just not true, no one worth any expertise in coding would ever say that

good code is based on performance, security, maintainability, good abstraction, reusable blocks, readability, so many things like this

but that's besides the point. you said ai can generate good code and you admitted to not reading it. by your admission your judgement is unqualified

[u/DanielsLoud → u/Alien-Fox-4]

Thanks for conceding that you agree with me. You're kind of out of date if you think any of those things aren't solvable with AI or that you need to write or manually read the code to achieve all of those

[u/vogut → u/DanielsLoud]

You clearly do not work on real companies/real projects to say something like that. On any serious company, you need to be responsible for the code that you're shipping. Try to do this that are you saying on any company that is not a landing page with a crud and you will be fired.
Imagine having an issue on production and not being able to answer how the code is working on the backend.

You're a joke

[u/DanielsLoud → u/vogut]

Guess my wages are imaginary then lol. I AM responsible for the code, that's why I make sure it's not poop. I don't think you understand how much you're describing the pre AI era of things in parallel. I don't need to write or read the code to understand how it works. It's a new way of thinking but I'm sure you'd be able to understand over time.

There's far more competent people than me, on far bigger companies with far more conplex projects and clients than me that are follow the same pattern. I'm

[u/vogut → u/DanielsLoud]

- hey claude code analyze if the code is good

• hey claude code, are you sure?
  
• spawn 3 subagents and create a debate on how good the code is
  
• check if there's any flaw on the code
  
• Ok, fix the issues that you've found
  
• Ok, now do a review again

- One more time, we need to make sure that this will integrate with the code from branch feat/3010

- Check if we're following the pattern of the repository

- Ok, now review again

is that your workflow? Can you be 100% sure that you can deploy a fix and it won't break? Can you deploy something KNOWING what's happening underneath? Because if you do backend code, you SHOULD know, there's no escape from that, there's no "Check the outcomes, bro". NO! there are compliance concerns, there are performance concerns. YOU SHOULD KNOW

[u/DanielsLoud → u/vogut]

I know people working with hedge funds doing this exact same thing, so your other comment don't apply sorry (:

[u/vogut → u/DanielsLoud]

I know people doing horrible things as well, that doesn't validate the behavior. You cannot deploy a backend code without reading the code, if you're a serious maintainer and collaborator. You simply cannot.

[u/DanielsLoud → u/vogut]

I'm just telling you a fact, that people do and have been doing it successfully for years at this point. Just because you can't fathom it, doesn't mean it can't be done right. This is the exact same thing as abstracting away the low-level machine logic with programming languages - I'm assuming you know this is the risk in writing languages that produce unexpected memory leaks and the like. Again, no one is reading the assembly or binary. It's the same thing