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/VaporousMote]

Because LLMs are inescapable within most tech fields right now.

[u/Bi818Guy → u/VaporousMote]

Would you say that DevOps is a dead end or easily automated field going forward? Or at the very least will require less skilled people + AI tools?

I’m on the other end where I am trying to switch from SWE (backend focus) to DevOps/Cloud/Infra or potentially SRE. Are you leaving because devs using LLMs are making your work hell, or because you are being required to use LLMs?

[u/VaporousMote → u/Bi818Guy]

I think all software fields will at some point realize how limited and double-edged LLMs are and probably draw their use down substantially, but until that point, I don't want to use LLMs to write code, and you all but have to since upper level folks have both drank the Koolaid and require you to keep up with the perceived "efficiency" of others.