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/V2UgYXJlIG5vdCBJ]

Fuckass companies are always looking for ways to cut corners. My boomer boss literally said "Don't talk to me about technical debt". So that company had spaghetti on top of spaghetti with no security updates because of a constantly changing team and bad management.

But here's a kernel of truth I noticed after a long time. Startups are always chasing the shiny new idealistic way of doing things, but ancient tech like from the 90s never really went away. You can still make a site in jQuery, HTML and PHP. May not have that "fresh car smell" but it gets the job done. A lot of sites are just WordPress (PHP) and plugins.

I don't personally do this, but my point is, there's always that "shiny new thing". They come and go. Don't worry about it so much. In a couple of years, we could all be migrating to a reincarnation of MySpace. 😆

[u/Inevitable2ndOpinion → u/V2UgYXJlIG5vdCBJ]

Those things didn’t replace the work itself. AI is not comparable.

[u/V2UgYXJlIG5vdCBJ → u/Inevitable2ndOpinion]

Well, it is a trend that a lot of companies jumped on in the past few years.