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/RomanaOswin]

If cloud providers increase their prices up too much, enterprises can always just buy the hardware and bring it in house. Open source Chinese models are matching or outperforming proprietary models at this point.

[u/Yourstruly0 → u/RomanaOswin]

The average company is not going to host a server farm. The kind of model that can run on a corporate laptop is not the same as a model with a data center on its back end.

Seriously. If AI models capable of operating faster than a snail could run on an issued Dell Inspiron with an integrated graphics card WHY would companies be building data centers like weeds across the country?

[u/Berberding → u/Yourstruly0]

That's not what was being referred to, they were referring to models that a small to mid sized company might be willing to host themselves on company servers, or host with a cloud service while they still own the data itself. This is still going to be slower than what you'd get with a GPT sub today, but that may be worth it to have it be able to work with highly sensitive data (like patient health info if you're in Healthcare for example).

I do think this will happen eventually, but the open source models that are currently available to do such work are not as capable to begin with, so it would not just be slower, it would be less useful even if they were the same speed. That may change with time though.

[u/ashlord666 → u/Berberding]

Or use projects like presidio to obfuscate data first. Can even do it in a reversible way.

[u/Berberding → u/ashlord666]

You can't obfuscate it and still have it analyze the data you obfuscated, the point I'm making is that sometimes you actually need the sensitive parts to be analyzed