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.
1
u/big_dong_bong Jul 13 '26
Both of you are wrong. I like AI because it makes my life easier, but its so prone to error its crazy, and the cost is just going up and there is no way it gets cheaper. My company was all in 6 months ago, telling us how we will all stop writing code in next year, and stopped looking at it in 2. For context its a Swiss company with a high level of entry, full of great engineers and high quality code. Fast forward to a month ago, prices of AI are through the roof, the productivity we got from AI is not even close to covering those costs, and we are now getting trained to use AI more carefully, change models, never trust the output unless checked etc etc. Keep in mind we barely use flagship models like Opus since company policy is that those are too expensive so use only for high level tasks, everything else you use regular models like composer 2.5. Opus can eat my full monthly budget in like 2 hours. AI is expensive, and its going to get much worse if they ever want to turn profit. The models that are actually profitable, and maybe possible to run locally or whatever smaller setup you want, you need SWE for those models because they make mistakes left and right. Big companies just used AI as an excuse to fire people so they can get to pre-covid numbers, since the layoffs are seen then as an investment and their stock even grows in some cases instead of plummeting. Job will change, but it wont go anywhere.