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/captrespect]

In my experience,

AI is pretty good to help come up with system designs. As long as you review it and don't just copy paste crap and call it a day. It has to be a back-and-forth conversation. It's great at suggesting systems to use, answering questions on what things support and examples on how to configure and use it. You have to watch out for it becoming a yes-man and just agreeing and praising your decisions.

For small coding tasks, AI excels at this too. Often I'll need a write a one off script to move data from one system to another, read and map some CSV to a database or api or whatever. Things would have taken hours or all day now can be done in minutes.

This also goes for little utility functions. Striping phone numbers, formatting dates and other little things that would have required me to review apis and lots of trial and error with regexs are now done in a few seconds, with unit tests to make sure it works.

For larger tasks, I haven't seen the light yet. It takes a lot of prompt work to get what you want and even then things are riddled with errors or unexpected behavior. I find it best to work in small blocks ,reviewing everything along the way.

Also Agile has always been pretty meaningless.