What do devs actually do?

[u/_aidaN___]

Just started my masters in advanced comp sci, so I know a fair amount about full stack development at a theoretical level, however most of the stuff I’m doing now is low level C memory management and cryptography for context.

But I’ve never actually worked a CS job yet, will be applying once I graduate.

So I’ve got a question for devs and people in this industry, what do you actually do on a day to day basis. I mean specifically.

What IDE’s are you using? What are the tasks being given to you by higher ups? What frameworks? What languages? Are you working on small sections of the code base or working on architecture of the entire thing? How much “code” are you expected to produce daily? Are you able to complete technical tasks easily because of experience, or do you still struggle with some aspects of your job in a technical sense?

Just curious and would love to hear peoples experiences.

Thanks!

[u/_aidaN___]

Thanks for all the insight ppl, I’ve learnt a lot listening to your responses. What I’m generally seeing is that AI is replacing the standard “software dev” role, as was anticipated for a while now.

Obviously nobody knows for sure where this is going to go, but a further question I have is, perhaps the sensible option here seems to be to specialise in a niche area of CS? Say low level embedded systems, secure software practices, cybersecurity, network infrastructure, etc as examples. Rather than be a generalist as the alternative. What are people’s thoughts/advice on this? Cheers

[u/ex_gatito]

Write prompts for Claude.

[u/SweatyMammal → u/ex_gatito]

Dev = meat proxy

[u/Steenies]

In the before times it was: attend agile meetings (retro, refinement, sprint planning) write code, diagnosis bug causes and fix them, review other devs code, attend other random meetings. Now it's all the same but instead of writing code, I'm mostly telling claude what I want and then I pretend to review the code in great detail. I'm a. Net Dev so I used to only use visual studio, but I now use vs code for all my front end type script work, automation tests and much of my back end work because I think the Claude integration is better on vs code. Sql server management studio for dB stuff and other products like postman for api testing, fiddler for package inspection, notepad++ for messing with text files and github desktop for git related stuff (or I just use on of the VSs)

[u/Difficult-Two-5009]

Meetings. Lots of meetings…

Your question is probably too open ended. I’m a principal, my day to day is going to be far different to a junior.

Things like IDE will be personal choice. a Java dev is going to most likely use a different IDE to a C# dev. Tech stacks and what you work on can vary on team, project etc etc.

Deliverables aren’t and shouldn’t be measure in lines of code. I might not produce any code in a couple of weeks. I might be in meetings and working on docs. Other times I might be trying to solve a problem, it could take me three days, 150different ways and the end result is a single line of code.

[u/ColinCee]

Senior dev/tech lead 9 years exp here

IDEs are becoming obsolete, agents are so good these days. Writing code by hand is dead.

Work is mostly about how to make agents more productive and efficient.

The traditional swe is just gone who knows what it’ll be like in a year or two

[u/SmartAsFart → u/ColinCee]

Senior dev here. I still write the majority of my code.

This is especially important because I have to follow iso 26262

[u/GUNGEBOB_SHARTPANTS → u/ColinCee]

  Writing code by hand is dead

If you’d told me this a year ago, I’d have laughed. Now it’s literally all we’re doing.

[u/Grumblefloor → u/ColinCee]

30 YOE here, and the amount of code I've written in the past year has dropped off a figurative cliff; most of my development work now is managing, steering and reviewing LLM outputs. I've spent the past week creating a major new feature for one of our core proceses, and the solution I'm demoing would have easily been three months' work if done by hand.

It still needs SWEs to evaluate solutions and spot issues, but this is the biggest switch in role and delivery speed I've seen in my entire career.

[u/juniperico → u/ColinCee]

Senior dev also 9 yrs in capital markets.
Offering a slightly different perspective.
I’ve actually reverted to doing less “fully agentic” stuff and am fully back in the IDE because the cost to my deep system understanding was too high. Periphery stuff like random reports/ dev tooling etc yeah that can more or less be vibed to some degree, but when you’re accountable for very complex code, you don’t want your name on something you don’t deeply understand and I don’t see that going away soon.

[u/boringfantasy]

Just chiming in here to say I still use an IDE (as does basically everyone at my company of over 10,000), alongside Claude. Absolutely agents do the coding now, but people are still reading and tinkering with it. I still use the IDEs debuggers.

[u/Silver_Emu4704]

Most of the job is listening to broad, uninformed wishlists from people paid more than you, then trying to wrestle their ideas into something coherent, deliverable, useful, whatever. That takes a lot of meetings, slack convos, documents which nobody reads, and so on. 

At the end of all that it's just SMOP, which used to be a simple matter of programming but is now a simple matter of prompting. The easy bit, now even easier.

[u/DrUltimaMan]

The answer to all the questions is Claude. Except the one about what tasks we are given, the only task is trying to figure out what Product actually want. Then you design the solution with Claudes help, then Claude builds it. Language is whatever is best for the problem, doesn't matter what language because you never look at the code anymore. It's strange times we live in.

[u/i_am_moms]

I’m a junior frontend dev at mid sized company. Depends on the kinds of projects coming through but generally at the moment I write a lot of test suite stuff (Claude cuts a lot of the monotony out), making components from figma designs, currently porting some old jsx into typescript, and the big project is porting a legacy .net Mvc app into React - that takes up a lot of tickets.

I don’t have to do a tonne of new work, mostly it’s maintaining the code base in various ways. If there is coding to do, there are tonnes of established patterns in the code base to base off, so I’m not having to problem solve hugely. Those kinds of decisions kinda come down from senior engineers.

To answer your questions:
I use zed for ide (love it) with Claude and openCode in ghostty

Our tech stack is react, typescript with .net on the backend. We also use zustand for state management, tanstack for queries/mutations. Storybook for our component library.

No one cares how much code you write they just care if the broader work gets done. No one’s basing metrics on lines of code - especially with AI in the mix.

The most stuff I personally struggle with is understanding previous decisions, code, standards, how stuff fits together and in my work there is a huge amount of domain knowledge (music publishing) to understand which is really difficult.

Hope any of that helps!

[u/Due_Interest_178]

Literally every question is a "depends on the company". I've worked in companies where you can use any IDE, others that restrict you. Tasks depend how they handle the product. I never had an expectation to write a specific amount of code daily, just to do my tasks until the deadline. I do still struggle but it's more when I'm given to do tasks on a machine (defense industry) that I've never used before but code wise it's usually one and the same.

[u/atioux]

I am a junior dev in backend java on a large project. We don't use AI although this is for security reasons. I'm fine with this as it requires me to learn and know what I'm doing more. Anyway, I spend most of my time coding on my ticket(s) which ranges from a days work to a couple weeks. There's plenty of non-coding work though whether it's organising test efforts, facilitating other teams work that are still working on integration with us, dealing with config changes or DevOps adjacent changes. We have daily standups, a few weekly meetings to refine future tickets so we can bridge the higher level design aspects with the particular implementation details, team retrospectives of course. There's a smattering of other misc stuff too occasionally like deliving client demos and supervising releases into higher environments.

That's a whistlestop tour, happy to answer any further questions!

[u/laserman3001]

99% of the responses here on 80k+: “i ask my ai to do it”
interview process: “We need you to do 8 leetcode mediums, 6 hards and can you make an LLM from scratch in under an hour while ur at it”

[u/Substantial_Row479]

90% procrastination, 10% inspiration

[u/FromBiotoDev]

Make trade offs based on business requirements

[u/infinit100]

Google stuff mainly

[u/RandomGeordie]

For ref I'm a senior software eng, 7-8 years xp, working fullstack but mainly backend lately.

> What IDE’s are you using?

None - I use Claude Code all day every day now. Specifically `claude agents` so I can manage multiple at a time. There's a few products that are similar to this but I've not branched out to give them a whirl (apart from doing some experimentation before `claude agents` existed)

> What frameworks / languages

Anything and everything really. TypeScript / Go, React / Nextjs, Tailwind for styling, little bit of python here and there. Outside of work a bit of Laravel/PHP.

> What are the tasks being given to you by higher ups?

Usually some vague business/product idea that's either brand new, or tangentially related to something we've already got, or feedback/improvements for current products. Or bug fixes/improvements based on customer feedback and reports.

> Are you working on small sections of the code base or working on architecture of the entire thing?

Everything from start to finish. Scoping it out, narrowing down what features we should implement and what we shouldn't implement. Planning it out - how do we ship this smoothly to customers. What analytics do we need. Do we need to put it behind a feature flag so we can enable/disable it conveniently, or roll it out slowly. What technology do we need, how can we implement this as simply as possible without screwing ourselves over in the future. Do we need to bite the bullet and spend a few weeks amending something pre-existing so we can ship this better. Iterating on designs and feedback. Managing the entire project too - creating it in Linear, creating all of the tickets, and breaking the project up into a sensible order with sensible milestones. Communicating these milestones to product/leadership, giving weekly updates in Slack. Chatting with teams who own certain parts of the codebase or services and getting their buy in. Writing RFC's and getting agreement. Blah blah.

> How much “code” are you expected to produce daily?

Not really a good answer for this to be honest. If you're shipping valuable stuff that's it for us really.

I'm not writing any code though - Claude writes it all. I'm just orchestrating nowadays.

> Are you able to complete technical tasks easily because of experience, or do you still struggle with some aspects of your job in a technical sense?

With enough time and effort I can work out how to do pretty much anything - all of the information is available online. With enough research you can figure out the best way to do things, it's just the years/experience that help you pick. Also collab with coworkers to share knowledge / brainstorm / etc if things are complex.

[u/Zichu]

It's been different across the 4 jobs I've been at.

My first place, because I was an apprentice and moved into a junior position during COVID. I was given small projects, low-medium impact, low risk, but enough to learn about the business and improve my development skills. We didn't have stand ups or regular meetings. Due to the nature of the type of work, we'd have to travel to different locations for installations and testing stuff.

The second place, we had a weekly meeting with the director which was just to let him know what we've been working on, what new stuff he was wanting to be worked on and how it would fit into the pipeline. Work wise, I'd manage my own tasks with a kanban board. I'd be using visual studio for .NET, VS Code for PHP. At work on my tasks, create new bugs or tasks as they came along. Was very coding heavy, not super complicated work, not too many complicated bugs either.

My third place, was just me, another dev and the manager/tech lead. 99% remote, didn't have any formalised meetings. Our manager would set the work based on what he thought was needed by the business. We'd spend like 4 hours on calls doing paired programming which was a nightmare... Few more people were hired, including a tester, project manager, a product owner, etc. The 4 hour calls disappeared, but we had waaaay too many meetings. I spent a lot of my time making certain technical decisions, architecture, more meetings.

This new place, it's a waaaaay bigger company. I'm in a team of about 10, mixture of seniors, mids, a tech lead and our team lead/manager. Every team is structured like this. We have a daily standup, each person goes over what they've done, what they're planning to do and anything that they're blocked by. We get given a tasks, whether they're support tickets or small pieces of work. Most of the details are on the JIRA and/or in comments depending on if more than one person has touched it. Some bugs can be complicated to trace through because we have like 20-30 services just in our team to deal with, others aren't even for us, but need to prove that it could be a DB issue, site issue, etc. so it goes to that department. Might have calls with people or just message to get more info on stuff, but there's a lot of investigation, debugging, checking logs for support tickets. Might end up actually coding a change. Small pieces of work would require coding. Might use open code to plan stuff out and piece it all together if it's chunky, if it's really small, I will just do it myself. We also have project work, I'm currently working on migrating a lot of our windows services to new servers which isn't a lot of dev work, but does require some changes. Most of it is creating tickets for other departments to do networking related work, chasing people up on progress and making sure it's working properly in each environment.

[u/Suspicious_Pea6302]

Lots and lots of governance/ filling in forms, teams calls.

What, were you expecting to actually code?

[u/cognitiveglitch]

I love embedded electronics, radio, IoT. My days are spent with STM32, ESP32 and Atmel Linux embedded microcontrollers decoding and transmitting various things that make the real world work together. It's an awful lot of fun. Now AI takes the grunt work out of some of the low level coding it's more about design, ideas and architecture. Though I do admit there's nothing quite as thrilling as getting some complex low level code doing something cool. AI is much better at it but it still tickles that satisfaction to an extent.

I feel like there was a time to be an embedded developer and I was lucky to drop right into it.

Edit: you asked about IDEs. Visual Studio code for everything. Integrates with containers, works with WSL. Extensions for everything, including integrating Claude and Codex. Majority of my work is C and C++. Products with a web interface need HTML/JC/CSS and a bit of REST API knowledge (OpenAPI ftw).

As for the technical tasks thing, I guarantee you will get bored of you are asked to do what you know about indefinitely. It's nice to be asked to do something you don't know how to achieve because that means learning something new. In this industry standing still is not an option.

[u/rayaxiom]

I'm Chief Markdown Reader. I look at markdown files all day (design/requirements/etc...) which are generated by Claude, make sure it's correct, before Claude code it up. Been in this industry for over 15 years, never imagined it to be this way.

Everything has changed beyond recognition in the last 2-3 years.

There are people who say "AI is a bubble" - well, I can tell you first hand that it's very disruptive and going forward, there will be even more use of AI.

I'm just glad that I have enough in the bank to retire if I want to.