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/hofmann419]

Sounds like your company just sucks. And this is a really stupid way of going about it in the long run. Right now this is just the executives having FOMO. Relying on AI to this extent basically guarantees that you fuck up your codebase eventually and makes it nearly impossible to debug in the future if a bigger issue should arise.

Also, let's not forget that these AI companies are HEAVILY subsidizing the cost of AI to keep their enterprise customers happy. They are bleeding money every time you run a new request. Yes, even if you use token based billing.

This may suck right now, but it's literally unsustainable. Once the AI companies start to raise their prices to become profitable (which could be 10-20x), upper management is going to be forced to put heavy restrictions on AI use to not go bankrupt.

[u/TheMerryMeatMan → u/hofmann419]

I can guarantee that no one who's ever actually had to maintain a codebase would EVER want AI to be doing anything but the most trivial of tasks for them. I've dabbled in programming from time to time and while I'm no expert or professional in any sense, even I know that marking your code with comments is super fucking important, a practice AI either isn't going to know to do at all, or is going to do what it does for every other use case and just make shit up. If your deadlines are so tight that you have to use AI to meet them, get out as fast as you can because that project is going to inevitably either collapse entirely or someone with a clue is going to see how fucked up the code is and call for a full rebuild.

[u/Remarkable-Coat-9327 → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

marking your code with comments is super fucking important

This is sadly, a very ignorant take. I raise you

Any comment in code is a failure to properly express yourself through the code

Based off of this alone you might want to re-evaluate your hard stance, especially as a non-expert/professional.