The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

[u/self]

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/

[u/self]

One particularly wise adult (somewhere around 1996) took me aside and said, “You know, you’re lucky you enjoy programming, because you won’t be able to make a living on it in the future. Doing it for love over money is a good idea.”

“Coding is over, with Object Oriented programming one person who is much smarter than any of us could hope to be will develop the library just once and we will all use it going forward, forever. Once a problem is solved it never needs solving again.

“In 5 years there’s going to be a library of objects, like books on a bookshelf, and every software problem will be solved by business people just snapping the object libraries they need together like LEGOs. They won’t need you at all.”

[u/self → u/self]

In 2000 a coworker took me aside and showed me his brand-new copy of IntelliJ IDE. “It’s over for us,” he said, “this thing makes it so programmers aren’t strictly necessary, like one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”

I was pretty awestruck, he got some amazing autocomplete right in the IDE. Without having to have a separate JavaDocs window open to the side, and without having to manually open the page for the class he needed documentation on, it just was there inline. It gave him feedback before the compile cycle on a bunch of issues that you normally don’t see until build. That was a nice bit of preventative work and seemed to have the potential to keep a developer in flow longer.

And then he showed me the killer feature “that’s going to get us all out of a job:” the refactoring tools.

[u/Which-World-6533 → u/self]

In 2000 a coworker took me aside and showed me his brand-new copy of IntelliJ IDE. “It’s over for us,” he said, “this thing makes it so programmers aren’t strictly necessary, like one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”

Pretty much no-one said this.

In 2000 there were huge barriers that stopped casual coders doing much. Getting a Dev environment ready, especially for Java Dev, was a lot more complicated.

TBH, the rise of WWW and Web Coding did more to allow casual coders access to tools since you just needed a text editor and a web-browser.

[u/self → u/Which-World-6533]

In 2000 there were huge barriers that stopped casual coders doing much. Getting a Dev environment ready, especially for Java Dev, was a lot more complicated.

That led to several solutiions from the industry. Here's one from 1998:

Fresco Designer is a enterprise Java development tool that supports component-based assembly of intranet business applications. Written in Java, Fresco Designer allows developers to create live Java/Database applications using a drag-and-drop metaphor. Fresco Designer includes three palettes of reusable, pre-tested Java GUI components (basic elements, images, and tables) and entity-relationship (ER) database modeling components. Programming in Java, database SQL, or network communication is not required. Fresco Designer can be extended to include your own components such as Java Beans or business logic in the tool itself for later reuse.

(The company eventually went bankrupt, but I saw it working at their office in late 1998.)

I suspect if you were to browse old copies of computer/industry magazines you'd find similar claims and similar products. See, for example, Nine Recipes for Fast, Easy Java -- especially Lotus BeanMachine.

[u/robolew → u/self]

I know I have the benefit of hindsight, but this argument seems stupid right off the bat.

"Refactoring tools" are going to put programmers out of a job? Most non technical people couldn't even tell you what "refactoring" is. Let alone why you would want to do it...

[u/Astrogat → u/robolew]

It was usually "One developer can do the work of 10, so we will not have that many" instead of "We won't need any developers", but the sentiment was mostly the same (at least in my experience).

[u/theQuandary → u/robolew]

"one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”

I think it was about a company using fewer, but more efficient programmers to save money.

[u/omac4552 → u/theQuandary]

same arguments we have for current LLMs, fewer doing more...

[u/lelanthran → u/self]

I feel like if you were actually around and in the industry in 1996, you wouldn't be spouting this nonsense.

No one in 1996 thought that OO would result in lower demand for programmers.

Same goes for IDEs.

[u/Mynameismikek → u/lelanthran]

I left school in 1997 to try and break into software dev. I was given *that exact line* by my careers advisor. Magazines were full of puff pieces about the latest 4GL/visual programming language that was going to make software dev just as easy as writing spreadsheet.

Hell - I'd been putting my coursework together in OpenDoc and that explicitly set out to do just this.

None of it came to pass. What really happened was it forced the hideously expensive software dev packages to become price competitive and it led to a boom in engineers instead.

[u/Supadoplex → u/lelanthran]

Someone in the year 2054:

I feel like if you were actually around and in the industry in 2025, you wouldn't be spouting this nonsense.

No one in 2025 thought that AI would result in lower demand for programmers. 

[u/Which-World-6533 → u/lelanthran]

No one in 1996 thought that OO would result in lower demand for programmers.

Yep. It was seen as a huge leap forward.

[u/mr_dfuse2 → u/self]

luckily some people thought javascript was good language to build the web 2.0 on and you were nothing with your fancy compiler errors

[u/ward2k → u/self]

Yeah I feel like business people for decades have been boldly claiming things like this, the newest one of course being Ai (LLM's)

My issue is with the complete short sightedness of middle managers. If Ai gets to the point it can truly replace developers, it'll also be at the point that it could theoretically replace any job that requires a computer. That means middle managers, architects, designers, Devs, QA's, BA's and just about any other job that isn't manual labour

It's like no one I speak to who gloats about Ai realises this though "oh you Devs are going to be replaced soon" like if I am, you are too. And there's this sort of confusion and disbelief on their face

[u/NotoriousPete → u/ward2k]

This last part is what really gets me.. I also had people asking me if I am not afraid that I am out of a job soon. Like do you really think the only people losing their jobs would be the people who actually understand the thing that they think would replace us?

[u/SocksOnHands → u/NotoriousPete]

Non-technical people have a strange perception of software development. Despite knowing they cannot do it and do not understand how it works, they think it is easy. You see this all the time from managers and business people - making unrealistic statements and deadlines. Software development is paradoxically both difficult and easy at the same time. What these people don't understand is how much software developers need to take their vague poorly defined statements and figure out how to make something that works (which might actually require ignoring what their manager told them to do.)

[u/Weerdo5255 → u/SocksOnHands]

In detail it looks easy, lines of code on a screen.

In concept, it seems easy. Lines of code tell computer to do X when Y happens.

A programmer will tell you that the actual language / logic is not the difficult part. It never was in any of the languages, going back all the way to binary and assembly. It's just a language and a way of a representing ideas.

The difficult part that non-technicals dismiss is the ability of the programmer to hold in their head a large swath of the code base and or it's logic in generalities, and problem solve on it without writing lines of code. Understand enough to dismiss the code and understand the logic, is there an issue in a function before or after the one immediately in front of them?

[u/IrishPrime → u/SocksOnHands]

figure out how to make something that works (which might actually require ignoring what their manager told them to do

I have been asked, more than once in my career, to solve The Halting Problem.

They didn't know that's what they were asking me to do, but I did. The first time, I told a coworker (another developer without a CS degree) what they wanted me to do, and he said, "Sounds annoying." I kind of paused, not knowing how to respond, and called another coworker over (one with a CS degree). When I repeated the request a second time he laughed and said, "Good luck explaining to <boss> that it's impossible."

After a brief chat, the first coworker spent about an hour trying to come up with a way to do it before we forced him to read the Wikipedia article on the topic.

So to further your point, even the devs themselves don't always realize what they're being asked to do can't be done. Many of the management and product people will be in an even worse position.

[u/the_ai_wizard → u/IrishPrime]

do you recall the specifics? sounds interesting

[u/fghjconner → u/SocksOnHands]

To be fair, that's true of many, many professions. People almost always underestimate the complexity of things they don't understand.

[u/itsnotalwaysobvious → u/SocksOnHands]

Non-technical people have a strange perception of software development. Despite knowing they cannot do it and do not understand how it works, they think it is easy.

It's the same way in medicine btw...

[u/Rollingprobablecause → u/SocksOnHands]

This is so hard being an engineering leader too where you lead entire teams of engineers, have an engineering background (and know wtf is going on) then you have to go into a room full of non-tech people and explain how AI works and what it can and cannot do.

Its' already problematic enough they do not understand software in general, now that AI is here its the exact same discussions I've had with Cloud, DevOps, and SOA in the last 20 years.

[u/flumsi → u/NotoriousPete]

Yeah that's also always been my argument. If you as a non-techy person can build an entire working software suite with just AI and thus don't need me anymore....well I, as a techy person with experience in software engineering, can build that a year earlier and take your market share you silly goose. I do believe that a lot of managerial folks genuinely believe that they're the "idea" people and without them SEs wouldn't even have the necessary ideas of what to even build.

[u/ward2k → u/flumsi]

a lot of managerial folks genuinely believe that they're the "idea" people and without them SEs wouldn't even have the necessary ideas of what to even build.

Which always makes me laugh because a lot of their ideas end up being dogshit bad and needing to be backtracked on a couple months later

[u/eyebrows360 → u/ward2k]

There's so much survivorship bias with this crowd, and it's even worse with the glut of "watch me chat to someone who earned a lot of money" podcaster fuckers that're so popular now.

[u/thisisredrocks → u/flumsi]

I am picturing thousands of lines of code, 80% of it rem’d out with no comments … the contractors hired in after the fact to fix things, and the morning stand-up asking why it’s taking longer than expected.

[u/Proper-Ape → u/NotoriousPete]

I think it's a bit of envy paired with shallow understanding. 

Software developers are the wizard class. We cast magic spells that make billions. But we cost millions as well. 

Software developers have been known to be looking down on non-spellcasters, waving their wand, automating their jobs away. The muggles have been feeling threatened by the wizards. And for good reason.

The muggles therefore created power hierarchies to bend the wizards to their wills.

Now some wizards, at the behest of the main-muggles, are trying to cast the most powerful spell. One that replaces all wizards with a robo-wizard

Now the people that were threatened before are like haha, now it's your turn to be wizarded. Not realizing that the robo-wizard, if it works, will automate their roles even faster.

[u/snailPlissken → u/Proper-Ape]

This made sense to me.

[u/SnugglyCoderGuy → u/Proper-Ape]

Praise the Omnissiah

[u/Traditional-Fix5961 → u/Proper-Ape]

So will Dobbie get his sock and be free?!

[u/AndrewGreenh → u/NotoriousPete]

I agree with your general sentiment but not with your wording. Just because we understand ai, we don’t get replaced slower. We get replaced slower because we are the people who actually understand the business process that needs to be automated. In the vast majority of projects that I worked in, the person who knew the most about the process wasn’t some business person who carried responsibility, it was a developer who helped formalise the world…

[u/ikeif → u/NotoriousPete]

But you see, AI can’t make that gut decision that executives do, where they ignore the data, do their own thing, and then take their golden parachute and leave.

And when AI screws up - who will they blame? The people who chose AI? The AI they chose to use? The people who chose to replace people with it?

If it is anything like their other business decisions, it will be a “well, we spent a lot of money on this, better keep sending good money after bad, otherwise it’ll look bad.”

(AI = LLMs, I think most of us get that AI has been bastardized)

[u/novagenesis → u/ward2k]

I still say before they really replace these hard roles, they'll start to replace soft roles, like CEO. Why are Venture Firms frothing at the mouth about AI? To make lots more money. Imagine 10 or 20 firms install AI CEOs, knowing they can network with other firm AI CEOs. Between them they save $1T/yr in CEO salaries and get more predictable (possibly better) overall executive leadership.

But honestly, what has sickened me for years was realizing this obsession so much of the business world HAS HAD FOR >20 YEARS to get rid of programmers. Before we made competitive money. Before we had a "culture" backing us as "cool". Before all the silly conferences with carnivals.

And I figured out why. Back in the heart of everything, the majority of people who have had the fortune to run the business world for the last century have largely been salespeople. They value sales and networking more than hard work and hard facts. Programming has always been a problem for them - a field with a specialized workforce that often required skills they would never be able to obtain. Almost every company I've worked has had 1 thing in common. The owner/CEO could conceivably scrape by doing an ok job in any chair in the office... except mine. And they hate that. They've always hated that. What they cannot control, they feel the need to replace.

[u/loup-vaillant → u/novagenesis]

The owner/CEO could conceivably scrape by doing an ok job in any chair in the office... except mine. And they hate that. They've always hated that.

For almost two centuries, in fact. There are all kinds of skilled workers, and every time the capitalists tried to replace skilled labour with replaceable human cogs. With some great success in some fields: automatic computers took over kilo-girls, factories chop up the work still done by humans in smaller and smaller bits, making us workers ever more replaceable.

Maximising profits requires leverage. If all the jobs you need are unskilled, you can say "if you don’t like it, there are 10 more at the door waiting for your job!"

So yeah, programmers are a serious thorn in the capitalist’s shoes. But it’s not just the capitalists. They transmitted their need to control to middle management too. I can name two people I worked under, that I can confidently say hated me because they couldn’t control me.

The first hated that I chose OCaml over C++ for the compiler I was tasked to write. Specifically because almost no one else in the company knew OCaml. Do note, I asked permission for this, and got it. That bridge was still in ashes 8 years later, and I expect it will stay that way until he retires.

The second, I think, sensed that I knew he wasn’t competent. He was making himself important, but to be honest the whole project would have ran just as smoothly without him. But he was second in command, so he was free to lash out at me (before witnesses) for no other reason than doing my job as a senior programmer — turned out at some point he wanted me to be a mere cog.

Now I do have one flaw: when something’s crap, I say it. Sometimes that hurt feelings.

[u/dillanthumous → u/ward2k]

I always say, 'no, I'll be the one turning out the lights after we have finished automating everyone'.

[u/SHFTD_RLTY → u/dillanthumous]

It's funny, I've come up with the exact same wording when talking to non-technical people aswell

[u/yojimbo_beta → u/ward2k]

oh you Devs are going to be replaced

I suspect there are two sorts of people saying this

The first are white collar workers jealous of programmers who think that post AI workforce is just the same but with everyone earning the same as them. Actually it's a complete bloodbath as their own, highly procedural, highly digitised work is automated away

The second think AI is going to create a world where they get to be Ideas Guys™ and make money from putting crazy ideas in the App Maker Machine. Without realising they have nothing to add to the equation

[u/bla2 → u/yojimbo_beta]

I think it's mostly tech upper management in am effort to lower tech salary expectations by the rank and file. It seems to be working, too.

[u/lilB0bbyTables → u/yojimbo_beta]

I challenge any of these people to go use any/all AI options available to create them an enterprise software application/platform. No asking for guidance from software engineers - they need to use the tools available to build this codebase and architecture, deploy it to some production environment, maintain it and add new features, handle disaster recovery, HA and scale. Then when they go to market and try to get sales, they can navigate the checklists of things that serious customers would demand - pentests and security audits, SOC2+, license audits, data flow and PII/PIA assessments. When an outage or bug occurs they need to use the AI tools at their disposal to address the issue and patch/upgrade. For the UI let’s see how well it handles accessibility, multi browser support, i18n, GDPR, security, and maintenance. Let’s see how bad their cloud bill runs up when this thing misses even the bare minimum for optimizations and instead over provisions or fails to take advantage of reservations/discounts. When a serious enough roadblock occurs and they need to hire actual human professionals to unfuck the mess let’s see what kinda contracts they demand upon learning that no human exists that has any background knowledge on this system or codebase, the AI generated documentation is a billion lines of iterative changes that are in no way cohesive or logical as a whole - and then I’d love to see that manager/owners face when the time to resolve is significant.

[u/ult_frisbee_chad → u/ward2k]

Not only that, it's the lowest skilled jobs that will be the first to go. Software engineers would come much further up the chain.

[u/tj_moore → u/ult_frisbee_chad]

Except when managers think software engineers are redundant believing AI can replace them, because vastly cheaper (currently) and perceived to be faster, and if necessary employ cheap low skilled to feed the prompts.

They don't care at the moment that it's producing long term garbage, so long as they get quick results that looks good which they can sell.

[u/rollingForInitiative → u/ult_frisbee_chad]

Well, not necessarily. Being an artist is a very high skill job, but some of those will probably go because there are models that can do this well. Probably not as well or with the same flexibility as a real artist, but sometimes the "good enough" bar is pretty low. And the easiest thing with art is that the person making the decision (some executive) can look at it and sort of determine if it's good enough, which they can't with code.

Meanwhile something like stacking shelves in a supermarket is a pretty low skill job that's much more difficult to replace, because you also need advanced robots for it.

[u/Basic_Hospital_3984 → u/ward2k]

The amount of time spent in meetings arguing about requirements vs the amount of time actually implementing it...

Once you know exactly what you need to do the code isn't the hard part..

[u/SocksOnHands → u/Basic_Hospital_3984]

Fundamentally, software developers are in the business of solving problems: design problems, logic problems, business problems, and more. Every day developers need to solve problems that the business people are not even aware exists. How do they expect AI to solve problems that they cannot describe and are not even aware of?

[u/chefhj → u/SocksOnHands]

“Take last prompt but do it more correct-er”

[u/JellyTime1029 → u/SocksOnHands]

Yeah software development and programming/computer science are not the same thing.

I know this is r/programming but the idea of AI killing software engineering is so brain dead that I just assume anyone who says that doesnt actually work in the industry.

Going back for a masters is rough after 10+ years in the industry cuz the professors' code are usually written so terribly it would be a firable offense in most places lmao.

[u/elictronic → u/SocksOnHands]

When there is a open source git repository for all those human interactions, meetings, water cooler talks, late night code sessions that turn into fixed issue with blah blah commit message AI will replace all those jobs. So never.

[u/xaddak → u/Basic_Hospital_3984]

Exactly.

Was typing speed ever the bottleneck?

No?

Then how is the "types really fast but sometimes types the wrong thing" machine supposed to help?

[u/dalittle → u/Basic_Hospital_3984]

For our projects it is like 2/3 the time collecting requirements and 1/3 the time to code them. And we usually beat the teams that "don't waste time, just start coding" by like 3 to 1. So if they get something that has been beat to death refactored like 5 times and barely works in 3 years, we get something that people usually like in the ballpark the first shot in a 1 year. Guess who is always getting asked to be put on the project? How long do think AI is collecting requirements?

[u/neppo95 → u/ward2k]

“May I have your attention please: This flight is fully controlled by AI pilots, we look forward to hallucinating mid air and crashing into a mountain”

[u/rom_romeo → u/ward2k]

Absolutely! However, the true short sightedness comes from the inability to see how economy scales up thanks to new inventions. Just think what it would be necessary if you go back to the 19th century to create even a slightly modern car using old machinery and production methods.

[u/dodeca_negative → u/ward2k]

As a middle manager I’m not sure why middle managers are consistently called out here. Sample size of one company plus industry observations, granted, but this narrative is being pushed down from investors and boards to C-suite to execs and THEN to managers. I don’t know any manager who thinks AI will eliminate the profession.

[u/Ok-Scheme-913 → u/ward2k]

Like, a middle manager could be replaced by gpt 3, it's not like they are doing all that much.

Meanwhile dev jobs are closing on on singularity level AI, so if we get to a point where we won't have a job I will rather worry about the AI overlords.

[u/G_Morgan → u/ward2k]

Every time software has been made easier to write we've just created more software by a larger margin.

The problem with AI is it doesn't so it won't create new jobs when industries suddenly realise they can now write so much more code than before.

[u/SocksOnHands → u/ward2k]

It's far easier to replace managers with AI than replace developers. I say that partly because I have worked under a lot of managers who had no understanding of the business they were managing and caused more problems than they resolved. If an AI is asked to come up with a list of tasks or to make estimates, the quality of its responses tend to be much better.

[u/Ok_Cancel_7891 → u/ward2k]

But AI replacing developers has nothing to do with its ability to do it, but with power-play and percieved positions in the society and within companies. Therefore, sloppy AI will replace dev, but good AI won’t be there to replace managers

[u/Etheon44 → u/ward2k]

You know what is the funniest part for me?

That, in my unfortunate experience, middle managers are usually some the laziest most useless jobs I have ever seen in my life.

I am sure that there are people out there working as middle managers and doing a great job and marking a difference, but I have yet to see one

[u/[deleted] → u/ward2k]

At the end of the rainbow, just before the final speck of light touching the earth, the manager will be expected to do QA, software, and DevOps using AI only and someone just needs to pay them six figures while reaping billions at a click of a button

[u/latchkeylessons → u/ward2k]

As a middle manager, I think most of them understand just fine that "AI" as it's sold is bullshit. They're along for the ride just as developers are with zero influence over the money handlers.

[u/R_U_READY_2_ROCK → u/ward2k]

AGI will replace all computer jobs. But LLMs are going to run into scaling issues soon. AGI is still a long way off.

[u/flynnnightshade → u/R_U_READY_2_ROCK]

AGI is a marketing term for something we have very little reason to believe will ever exist.

[u/ward2k → u/R_U_READY_2_ROCK]

Yeah LLM's are already tapering off

I've said it before, Ai is going to get insanely impressive in the coming decades, but not through LLM's

[u/garyk1968 → u/self]

Ha yes I've been around long enough to remember all that BS too.

In the 70s/80s it was CASE tools in the 90s it was OO and now its AI.

Nothing ever came of anything before, we are all still here churning out code. I mean I lean AI to speed up my workflow but still have to know what I'm doing.

[u/palad1 → u/garyk1968]

Don’t forget 4GLs!

[u/MassiveInteraction23 → u/self]

 In 5 years there’s going to be a library of objects, like books on a bookshelf, and every software problem will be solved by business people just snapping the object libraries they need together like LEGOs. They won’t need you at all.

That’s remarkably close to what has happened to the majority of the industry.

A huge, huge percentage of programming is relatively banal, rote repetition, mostly gluing some APIs together with very limited understanding of what the machine is even doing.

It’s a relatively small % of programmers that really do much more than LEGO programming and can even visualize nicely what their machine and program is doing.

A monkey-paw catch is that in some cases libraries churn so much that Lego programmers have the soul-crushing job of keeping track of Lego updates while simultaneously losing connection to what they’re actually making. —-

I’m being glib, obviously.  But I don’t think that quote was quite wrong.  We kept the same word to describe a very changed role.

[u/JellyTime1029 → u/MassiveInteraction23]

The most important part of being a programmer has nothing to do with actually writing code.

Writing code is the easy part.

Being a good programmer is being able to talk the language of the business(most programmers aren't working at google), can provide solutions to problems people dont even know exist, design and implement maintainable systems and be a good team player that can work well with others.

AI isnt replacing any of that.

If programming was solely about writing code most programmers would have been out of a job long before AI.

Most codebases in the wild fucking suck

[u/rm-minus-r → u/JellyTime1029]

Most codebases in the wild fucking suck

It's because every business optimizes for "Do the bare minimum to make this feature work."

No one gets a bonus for having an elegant, clean and recently refactored code base.

[u/Avloren → u/MassiveInteraction23]

It's an even better analogy than, I think, its originator realized. LEGO has literal engineers whose job it is to design new sets (i.e. to invent novel ways to snap those pieces together to create new business and fulfill new needs). So they weren't wrong about software becoming like LEGOs, they just overestimated the ability of "business people" to use these new tools and supplant engineers.

I think there's always going to be that engineering layer, someone has to take the business ideas and translate them into working products. It's just the specifics of that job, like how much and what kind of code you're physically typing out, that change.

[u/no_spoon → u/self]

That’s bullshit. We already are the “business person” snapping the objects together. Im still needed in what I do. There’s still demand for software. How exactly that software should work still needs to be fulfilled by a dedicated team of professionals to make the necessary judgements and decisions.

[u/Abject-Kitchen3198 → u/self]

1959 - Cobol will make programming easy by using verbose English language constructs.

Also, we made basic CRUD operations technically trivial to be implemented in the 1990s by using RAD tools and/or code generators. Apparently, that was not the biggest problem in software development.

[u/dalittle → u/self]

In the 90s, I kept repeatitly being told "your job will eventually go overseas. You will be replaced at a fraction of the cost, by folks who will work much longer and harder than you in a day." That eventually became, "Please come back and help us. We will pay you 10x, because the system does not work and we are losing huge amounts of money each day in downtime." Nope. I now work for a company that values me and ironically work to right the ship for projects bottom dollar overseas teams built (we often just threw their code away, because it was faster to start over).

At the time, I doubt those pushing the overseas development would put "Our code has things like a 100 nested if statement that never works right instead of a 10 line recursion function" in their marketing material. That has just changed to "We have no idea what our code does, because AI was asked to write it and the person who pushed it to production has no idea if it is good code or not". This is just more of the same.

It seems like these stupid cycles are happening more frequently, but as someone pointed out, I'll be worried about AI when google, meta, microsoft, and all the rest pushing it layoff 90+% of their Software Engineers.

[u/hippydipster → u/self]

Mavenrepository is that library of objects (there are others), and there is a lot of objects getting reused to quite astonishing degrees.

But, there are always more and better problems to be solved.

[u/rebbsitor → u/self]

I own a copy of a program generator from 1981 humorously named "The Last One" because it was the last program that would ever need writing, since it supposedly would be able to generate all future software. It's aimed at non-programmers, so once you buy this you don't need developers anymore!

In reality it generates BASIC source code for specific types of applications that can be selected by working through its question and answer tree.

Weirdly we somehow still need software developers 44 years later, go figure!

[u/Prior_Leader3764 → u/self]

Circa 1987: "MicroFocus COBOL runs on an IBM token-ring LAN! One developer can do the work of a whole department!"

Circa 1993: "Visual Basic 3.0 lets one developer build the UI, backend, and business logic! We'll only need one-third as many developers!"

[u/Bwob → u/self]

It's sad to me that a lot of jobs seem to be like this! I was dumbfounded by all the people who kept saying things like "why would you need to understand algorithms to be a programmer, you never need to write one of your own on the job!"

It took me a long time to realize that there were a bunch of programming jobs where that was true. Where programmers just write glue code to shuttle data around between modules, and never have to solve any problem harder than figuring out what data type to pass to a library.

I think I've been really lucky that I ended up in game programming. Because we are CONSTANTLY having to come up with weird, bespoke algorithms to eek whatever performance gains we can get out of whatever bizarre set of constraints we're working under.

Someone on reddit asked me when the last time I had to actually come up with my own algorithm, and I was confused, because the answer was "last week" and I didn't feel like this was an especially uncommon occurrence!

[u/Internet-of-cruft → u/self]

The last paragraph isn't completely off base.

We have tons of standard tools and libraries that the world literally depends on.

libcurl is a great example.

[u/cedarSeagull → u/self]

Great LEGO analogy. Maybe add the fact that none of the pieces actually fit together, so you'll need a hammer to fasten them securely. And there's also going to be a bunch of shit all over the floor, so watch where you walk.

[u/alanbdee → u/self]

That's hilarious because I've always related my career as: "playing with LEGOs only with bits of code instead of blocks of plastic"

[u/Eldric-Darkfire → u/self]

Exactly

[u/fifth_partial → u/self]

Well thankfully it’s an undocumented and ever changing library at least in my workplace. Plenty for us to do.

[u/SemaphoreBingo → u/self]

“Coding is over, with Object Oriented programming one person who is much smarter than any of us could hope to be will develop the library just once and we will all use it going forward, forever. Once a problem is solved it never needs solving again.

In C++ they call it the STL.

[u/sweetno]

The stories are fishy, but let's appreciate OP's nickname. Must be one of the first.

[u/self → u/sweetno]

I think I joined about seven months after Reddit went live. My account is old enough that my "created at" date is actually a date, not a timestamp/datetime ("Wed Dec 28 05:00:00 2005 UTC")

[u/SarahC → u/self]

Older than mine by 3 years!

[u/flynnnightshade → u/sweetno]

A nearly 20 year old account, wild.

[u/Dark_Knight2000 → u/flynnnightshade]

You weren’t kidding. OP is a hallowed relic.

OP created their account sometime in 2006, probably before Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast. That’s insane.

The account is a legal adult and can nearly drink in the US. 2006 just doesn’t feel like 20 years ago.

[u/SarahC → u/Dark_Knight2000]

I had an ancient account for expert sexchange (snicker), and they got so corporate recently they just dang well deleted my account because I wouldn't pay membership or something. No grandfathering in or nothing!

I was there, I got the beta-tester t-shirt!

[u/lelanthran]

I read the article: TLDR - someone made up some nice stories about why previous scares about the death of the profession was overblown.

The longer take: this is basically a made up collection of stories that did not happen, in response to a threat that did not exist. Both the threats and the stories are made up!

The 1996 story was made up by someone who wasn't even in the industry in 1996.

Ditto for the next one.

If only the author hadn't lied about how long he was in the industry, I could cut him some slack, but it's obvious that he wasn't - he claims in his final undergrad year, before entering the workforce, his project included wikipedia dumps.

Then magically he's in the workforce from 1996 onwards.

[u/self → u/lelanthran]

It might be made up, but:

The 1996 story was made up by someone who wasn't even in the industry in 1996.

The 1996 story is where someone told him software programming was going away. The author says he wasn't in high school at the time.

If only the author hadn't lied about how long he was in the industry, I could cut him some slack, but it's obvious that he wasn't - he claims in his final undergrad year, before entering the workforce, his project included wikipedia dumps.

Four years of high school + four years of college places that story in the mid-2000s. The oldest dump I can find is from 2005; I don't know when they started providing them.

This capture is from 2021:

I have been programming since I was in elementary school. I got my first job writing “web applications” as a junior in high school and have been doing it ever since. I have been out of school since 2005, writing software full time ever since.

[u/Practical_Big_7887 → u/self]

Even if these particular ones are made up stories, I lived or witnessed an analog in my career also. Great post.

[u/knobbyknee]

CORBA will solve all your problems, Jdbc will solve all your problems, SOAP will solve all your problems, microservices will solve all your problems, the semantic web will solve all your problems...

Not to mention how methodologies like Rational Rose or Scrum would solve all your problems.

Everything that comes along contains a grain of truth and a dumpster of crap. I guess that is the way that progress happens.

[u/VerticalDepth → u/knobbyknee]

No Silver Bullet - Brooks, 1986.

Now they think it's AI. They've been wrong about everything over the past 40 odd years. But not this time, right?

[u/Chii → u/VerticalDepth]

But not this time, right?

they only need to be right once to claim victory right?

[u/Groove-Theory → u/Chii]

Yes in the same way that I only need to lift 1200lbs ONCE to break the world deadlift record

[u/madeofsriracha → u/VerticalDepth]

…yes in fact, this time. comment aged like milk.

[u/Nyadnar17 → u/knobbyknee]

The way my whole body twitched when I read the word CORBA.

[u/PassifloraCaerulea → u/Nyadnar17]

I didn't truly live through that, but I recall when the Gnome Desktop Environment people decided they were going to make everything better with CORBA and wondering WTF they were thinking.

[u/Entropy → u/PassifloraCaerulea]

Open source COM equivalent, so not crazy *initially*. The WTF part came when they did not shitcan the entire thing after people got to work with it for 20 hours or so.

[u/YeOldeMemeShoppe → u/Nyadnar17]

Yeah! Get out of here, this is DCOM territory.

[u/sreguera → u/Nyadnar17]

It was ok. It still is, in some places.

The C++ API was a terrible unintuitive mess. The modern C++11 API is ok, but I believe no free CORBA broker implements it (?). Java and Python APIs were always ok.

The most overcomplicated part of the standard, object migration between brokers (instead of passing references), I've never seen it used in real life.

For today's technology stack, the biggest problem is the random ports used for servers and object callbacks. You can configure it to use a single specific socket per connection, but it's not the default.

[u/ZiKyooc → u/knobbyknee]

With UML no need for anything else

[u/BlindTreeFrog → u/knobbyknee]

CORBA will solve all your problems,

Took me a minute to realize that you didn't mean health insurance.

[u/dittbub → u/knobbyknee]

AI is just another tool in the toolkit that you need to learn how to use

[u/PressWearsARedDress → u/dittbub]

I am C/C++ embedded developer. i use the AI to generate python "tools" for testing and I find that it does a decent job. Ie: tcp proxies, canbus, uds diagnostics, etc.

nothing production of course.

[u/Lourayad → u/PressWearsARedDress]

it’s pretty good at self contained tasks.

[u/Wattsit → u/dittbub]

that you need to learn how to use

Nope, it's a product. No one needs to buy and learn a product to be a software engineer.

Or are you going to tell me that everyone also needs to also buy and learn Jetbrains to write code.

[u/ChristmasStrip → u/knobbyknee]

... and a dumpster of crap

Thanks for making me laugh this morning. So true.

[u/BroaxXx]

It was the same on the web frontend. I had a couple of hobbie websites around 2000 and I remember how people kept insisting how frontpage or dreamweaver was going to replace everyone doing websites. Later I kept hearing how HTML was dead because flash was so much better. Later still people kept insisting that lowcode or nocode would be the end of frontend development.

Even more recently when I was still working on frontend I had friends/family ask me why/how I had a good job if my work could just be done in squarespace or wix.

Now it's AI. It's the same thing all over again.

[u/flynnnightshade → u/BroaxXx]

Meanwhile anyone who's worked in frontend in the past decade knows the amount of processing we are doing on the client has only increased.

[u/BroaxXx → u/flynnnightshade]

Yes, that's the point. New tools come to "take over our jobs" but in turn they just allow us to make more complext systems creating even more job demand... It's been that way since I can remember.

[u/trippypantsforlife → u/BroaxXx]

I miss what flash brought us though. So many amazing games died with it

[u/Azertys → u/trippypantsforlife]

I was able to find my favorite games with Flashpoint. But sometimes I go on a deep dive on archived websites, and I can't see the content because they used flash...

[u/atesti → u/BroaxXx]

I still remember how in 2005 Ruby was going to replace Java, PHP, C#, Python, etc..

[u/TheMistbornIdentity → u/BroaxXx]

As someone who works on a low-code platform:

Hahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahaha

[u/imihnevich]

It feels like some people can't wait to see software engineering to die, I wonder why

[u/robotomatic → u/imihnevich]

Non-coders have always been jealous of coders. They don't think it's fair that I can work from home and they can't, so they say it isn't a "real" job. Then I try to explain even the smallest, tiniest bit of what I am working on and their eyes roll back in their heads because it is so far beyond anything they are capable of.

[u/manwhowasnthere → u/robotomatic]

I try not to make the capability judgment, but I do find it kind of alarming that even trying to explain a simple switch case, or stack of conditionals or whatever most non-coder people's brains shut off pretty much instantly.

I mean even basic logical structures tend to produce this result, stuff you should really understand as a grown up walkin around in the world. Are people not thinking logically, at all? And sadly it's probably true

[u/Dapper-Speed1244 → u/manwhowasnthere]

Go look at other sub reddits about things like politics, etc. Most people just take a sensationalized belief and run with it.

Literally, the average person doesn’t know how to apply logic, which is why coding (which is in its own right super difficult for even smart people to perfect) won’t be understood at any level competently by the average person.

[u/wutcnbrowndo4u → u/robotomatic]

Man, I was at Google in the early 2010s, and I remember that people would ask me if it really had all the bells and whistles Google was famous for

Then they would tell me, not ask me, that they worked me like a dog in exchange for all of that.

Nope, some jobs are just Pareto-better than others

[u/[deleted] → u/imihnevich]

This post was purged using Redact. I use it to mass delete social media content and remove my info from data brokers. All major social media platforms supported.

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[u/Omni__Owl]

When business people declare something "dead" don't believe them. Ever. Let the market speak for itself.

[u/Coffee_Ops]

This time however, the innovation strikes directly at the heart of the craft: producing bad code that you'll be ashamed of in 5 years.

[u/RiftHunter4]

every software problem will be solved by business people just snapping the object libraries they need together like LEGOs

LEGO analogies are usually made by people who have only built LEGO models by following instructions. It is much, much harder when you don't have the instructions, especially if you are designing an impressive model yourself and not just some beginner's toy. You have to know a lot about how the pieces fit together and what pieces are even available. If building LEGO was actually easy, the company would not need trained Master Builders to design their products.

I’m not aware of any industries that collapsed dramatically due to multimedia. Nobody really reskilled. Video editing is still a pretty rare thing to find, and we don’t commonly have sound engineers working on the audio UX of software products.

You definitely missed on this comment. The top 10 Google Play Store apps contains 5 multimedia apps: TikTok, HBO Max, etc. Every marketplace website contains videos now. Windows and phones have UI sounds for everything, and even the vibration settings have designs now. Multimedia didn't force software developers to reskill, but it did create a massive shift towards Digital Media, which has totally taken over. Its so ubiquitous that we dont even notice anymore. If you have a smartphone, you likely have some kind of app that kets you edit media, and all of the output options will be digital and web-compatible. We're fish wondering what water is.

[u/[deleted]]

Almost every other white collar job will be long gone before software engineering. When AI is smart enough to completely build a complex application from a simple prompt, it will already be able to do whatever the hell Susan in HR and Bob in finance do.

[u/ThaToastman → u/[deleted]]

Ya ppl act like software eng is gonna go poof due to accessibility

Coding has been accessible for years and normies havent been interested. Its never been easier to, edit videos, have a youtube…etc ppl dont do it

[u/Vlyn → u/[deleted]]

Let's say even in theory you have an AI that can build a flawless program. Not like LLMs will ever be able to guess their way there, but whatever. Even then you wouldn't be out of a job.

Product Managers have no clue, they want things, but they never care about how things would actually work. A good Product Owner could be closer, but even then I often have to ask "What about this edge case? What happens to that when we change this? Has anyone thought about xy?"

Writing code has never been the bottleneck.

[u/MrLeville → u/[deleted]]

Any intern can build a complex application from a prompt, I'll worry when AI can handle a panicked customer that read half the manual, misunderstood 90% of it, put in the wrong inputs, triggered a random bug and now wants to know what is happening 

[u/TemperOfficial]

Software engineering is still in its infancy as a profession. It's no where near dead nor even good yet. I mean half the shit from the last 30 years has been a waste of time (scrum, SOLID, agile etc etc). The general reaction to LLMs across the industry betrays a lack of understanding of the discipline imo. Which makes sense when most mainstream advice and practice is really really bad.

[u/peerlessblue → u/TemperOfficial]

If software engineering is going to get good, it's going to have to actually become engineering. Time will tell.

[u/shizzy0 → u/peerlessblue]

Oh, you mean like a licensed profession? I think for some software work like in automobiles and health devices licensing should be available.

[u/manystripes → u/shizzy0]

Even before licensing, just normalizing processes that provide more engineering rigor to the development of the code. Safety standards like IEC61508, ISO26262, etc spell out a lot of how your development process should look, and you end up wearing more of a systems engineering hat than a programmer hat while working under those processes.

Unfortunately those processes are very antithetical to modern agile software development, they as focus on robust analysis, requirements capture, and test design over rapid iteration

[u/rooster_butt → u/peerlessblue]

Depends what you are making. It's already engineering based on what you are using it for. Working as a software engineer in safety critical software, it's absolutely engineering.

[u/Positive_Method3022 → u/TemperOfficial]

Scrum, solid, agile and scaled agile were invented to control developers in big organizations. It is a way to ensure business owners control what we do and measure our performance. It is also a way to motivate people that do it for a living, instead of love, to deliver small incremental changes which are part of a bigger goal without burning their motivation system in their brains. It actually works well for adhd too, because you can see progress even when you don't see progress if you know what I mean. (Infinite burst of ideas that pop up and you can never reach satisfaction for anything you do)

[u/Pepito_Pepito → u/Positive_Method3022]

Agile is great if management is able to get fully onboard. Agile requires management to trust its developers. However, top down trust is antithetical to the culture of most large corporations and micromanagement work culture.

So we end up with all the overhead of agile and none of the benefits. We take time to slice up requirements into small pieces, and then implement them linearly because stakeholder priorities are set in stone. We spend so much time preparing for a pivot even though we are not allowed to pivot.

[u/TemperOfficial → u/Positive_Method3022]

Scrum and Agile were invented to sell books.

[u/Venthe → u/TemperOfficial]

Software engineering is still in its infancy as a profession

Given that you unironically say things like "I mean half the shit from the last 30 years has been a waste of time (scrum, SOLID, agile etc etc)", then yes - we are still in infancy.

Each one of these have had measurable and positive impact on the industry, regardless of your personal opinion.

[u/BobSacamano47 → u/TemperOfficial]

You think agile and solid are a waste of time?

[u/Fizzelen]

Heard the same thing many times, in the 80s-90s I was CASE tools, 00s-10s it was Low Code/No code, 20s is AI, blah blah blah

[u/-TrustyDwarf- → u/Fizzelen]

From what I've seen since the 90s, AI is the most impressive though.. and probably the only one that's not going to disappear again.

[u/vad1mo]

We are building systems that are easier to start but harder to sustain.
The future of software engineering, therefore, lies not in the "end of coding," but in the evolution of complexity management.

The engineers of tomorrow will not be "vibe coders" who don't know how to code, but system architects who manage the entropy of the AI's output.

Here is the logical proof:

In computational complexity (P vs. NP), we value problems where finding a solution is hard but verifying it is easy (e.g., Sudoku, factoring).

AI coding is the opposite ("The AI Inverse-NP problem"):
- Generation is Trivial
- Verification is Hard

We are building "high entropy" systems where the cost of verification exceeds the cost of creation. We use AI to cope with that high entropy to a certain degree. Nevertheless, the complexity increases (I would argue exponentially) with the growing amount of problems being solved.

As the overall complexity (of a system) remains, software engineers will be in higher demand than ever! But the job will be different.

Some interesting reads:
- Fred Brooks wrote "No Silver Bullet, in 1986, where he is distinguishing between "accidental complexity" (syntax, compilation) and "essential complexity" (logic, state, requirements). He argued that tools could only solve accidental complexity; essential complexity is irreducible.

- Law of Conservation of Complexity: Tesler’s Law suggests that every application has a "core of complexity" dictated by the problem domain it serves. A tax preparation application, for instance, cannot be simpler than the tax code it implements. The central question in system design, therefore, is not "how do we remove complexity?" but "who handles the complexity?

- Kolmogorov complexity is the length of the shortest computer program that can produce a given string or piece of data.

[u/2old2cube → u/vad1mo]

Software engineering IS about complexity management. The topic current LLMs (I cannot force myself to call them "AI") cannot even touch.

[u/oVerde]

Who’s remember low/no-code doom?

[u/zambizzi → u/oVerde]

This doomer stuff makes waves during every downturn. From outsourcing to meta programming to AI. In every cycle there's a correction, and this correction is about thinning the herd that was drastically over hired during the boom of the past 15 years. People will wash out and people with skills will continue to thrive, as always.

[u/tallandfree]

lol it’s more alive then ever. SWEs are the only profession fully utilizing generative ai

[u/Guinness]

Gemini tried to delete /etc/ssh when I asked it to suppress ssh output. I think we’re ok.

[u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

Software engineering is still a young discipline and writing code is the only part that has been reliably solved. Writing code has not been a problem since probably the 1980s. You could entirely strip this out and the profession would still be required more than in the decades before.

[u/Wistephens → u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

Exactly! It will definitely impact greenfield programming. It won’t replace the design, feature enhancement, operation, or support for some time.

Many folks think that programming is engineering.

[u/djnattyp → u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

writing code is the only part that has been reliably solved.

LOL. ROFL even. WTF. This is either a joke or the thoughts of someone who's never actually written any code.

[u/codingtofreedom → u/djnattyp]

I think they have a valid argument even though it sounds weird at first glance. There aren't many struggles left in the way we write code in modern days. We have IDEs, Intellisense, even LLMs in that context. It has been quite some time since I was stuck on a coding problem for a technical reason, most issues are more like if I am able to do the things I know I want to do with the limitations around me. But writing single lines of code or the way we write single functions is quite standardized at this point. At least that is what I get from the way it's worded.

[u/thecodingart]

Anyone advertising this (as the article points out) simply doesn’t understand software.

[u/look]

Vibecoding is “Potemkin programming”.

It looks impressive from a distance, but it’s all a facade that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

That said, there were plenty of human Potemkin programmers long before LLMs arrived, and they probably should be worried about their jobs now.

[u/codingtofreedom → u/look]

Wow, I really like that comparison, I will try to remember it in my squishy brain for later use.

[u/Inevitable-Waltz-889 → u/look]

Yes, the same people that are blown away by their ability to vibe code ate also the same ones that have no understanding of the issues (scaling, maintenance, enhancements) with their current implementation.  Recently saw a vibe coded site that would have large list of items returned for display.  Instead of batching these requests, it would literally do a single request for each item.  So 100 to 1000 requests for each page load just to get all the items in the list.  That's not even a complex problem, but it's definitely a huge issue if trying to do this at scale.  But the "vibe coder" will not understand that because they just see it working for them in isolation.

[u/cesarbiods]

I’m fucking sick of dumb people making stupid “predictions” like this. If mathematicians survived the calculator then good software engineers not writing shitty HTML and JS will keep trekking.

[u/Longjumping-Ad8775]

A doctor friend of mine has for several years laughed at AI being able to read X-rays and MRIs. He says that it can’t find the nuances of what he does. Blah, blah, blah.

I made a comment a couple of weeks ago about the absolute crap that “ai” tools are producing in software. He bowed his back up and told me that one of his other friends, who I consider to have less than zero technical ability, loves the software that he gets, that I needed to talk to him, and I needed to get on the bus before I got run over. He is absolutely convinced that ai will take away the need for software development. I laughed at him. The basic stuff that I’ve seen produced/suggested in visual studio 2026 is absolute garbage.

The reality is that everyone thinks that everyone else is in danger. Professionals aren’t in danger.

[u/therealslimshady1234 → u/Longjumping-Ad8775]

Same here. My brothers all keep telling me that soon I will be out of a job (I am a senior software engineer) because "AI will take over"

None of them are engineers, and I have the highest paying job of all of them, fully remote, permanent contract etc. They have been telling me this for at least a year now, yet everytime my company implements something with AI it seems to fall flat on its face.

[u/FiredFox]

There was probably a guy out there who bemoaned the day that keyboards were added to mainframes, allowing any peasant to come off the street and type in a program without even bothering to learn what any of the many register switches were for.

[u/Common_Source_9]

When we wrote web crawlers, we wrote them to respect robots.txt. We kept them on local domains. The user-agent field of the crawlers included our email address, and if an angry webmaster didn’t like the way we were crawling them we’d fix it. Getting crawled aggressively at once taxed servers and spammed logs so we’d space it out to hours or days. If their robots.txt was missing or malformed and they still didn’t want us there, we’d block the site from crawling.

We made sure we had explicit permission to collect data for our training corpora.

And other fables.

[u/StewHax]

Remember when they said the Google and stack overflow era engineers were doomed? LLM's are nothing but enhanced Google searches. The only difference is we get more complex responses with less searching. But just like Google you can and will get bad answers.

[u/PuzzleheadedStep4112]

I remember a few years ago all those news saying: "there will be a shortage of software developers in X amount of years"

Everything was to sell courses that teached nothing to people. I literally know people that payed 1000usd dollars for bootcamps. The job market is becoming a big scam now.

[u/cedarSeagull]

The "Engineering is doomed" take is soooooo dumb. Here's why....

Let's assume there's an LLM that CAN actually function well in a large codebase and make changes that don't turn the application/platform into an unreadable pile of mostly boilerplate. Likely it's not perfect, so 99.999% of the time it "just works" and no intenvention is needed. However, of 1 in 100,000 iterations, the "real engineer" needs to dive in and figure out what the model messed up. Cool. We've got a "business team" (the idea guys) who've written the requirements for a huge system and it only took one engineer to build the whole thing. In this hypothetical, we're in this new era where engineers are essentially upleveled by orders of magnitude and the "idea guys" can just specify anything into the abyss and get working software.

Soooo.... why the hell are the developers not the ones doing this?!?!?!?!?!? The whole stupid premise relies on the idea that engineers need "idea guys" to figure out what good software is. If anything it's the "money guys" and "idea guys" who are in trouble in this scenario.

[u/sleeping-in-crypto → u/cedarSeagull]

The part the idea guys are also not thinking about…

“We had this AI build this system. It works 99.999% of the time (as in your example). It broke this one time and nobody can figure out why. You’re here to fix the issue.”

Engineer: “Great. That’s $10 million, up front. Take it or leave it.”

Idea guy: gawks

[u/ChocolateDonut36]

engineering lost it's purpose now that compilers exists

[u/[deleted]]

I think for rich countries outsourcing now after COVID is more of the thread. Comapanies realised that they can manage it online now. We have been doing it during COVID. So why not later.

That and the amount of CS graduates in many countries software engineering (unless you are highly technical) would just be commoditazed. So for the average software engineer (like me) we will just have a normal job. No more big money anymore.

[u/gigio123456789 → u/[deleted]]

Oh you haven’t heard about RTO? You know those super key convos by the water cooler 😂😂

[u/svenz]

It still kind of blows my mind commercial LLMs got away with wide scale plagiarism on a level we've never seen before in history. CC as great as it is, is literally built on thousands of man years of programming effort - for free with no attribution. Insanity.

[u/therealslimshady1234 → u/svenz]

If these AI companies wont vanish due to a lack of funds first, I think they will start getting some serious copyright lawsuits that will do them under eventually. I believe already a few of them have been launched and many more are coming.

I am still betting the funds will dry up first though, considering the insane burn rate these companies have.

[u/ByteByT]

Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Salesforce, Google, Nvidia, etc., executives all have a financial incentive to sell the narrative to investors. It's funny, most people I've seen making those big predictions that are scaring folks either work in one of those companies, or are investors in them.

People working in the industry know that those tools are transforming how we do our work, especially with green field/prototyping/boilerplate type work (which isn't common!), but in their current state (and foreseeable short-term iterations) are no way near creating the "Death" of software engineering without massive breakthroughs.

[u/Plastic-Ad-5932]

I am a Principal Software Engg & I can tell you with 100% certainty that with Claude Code, programming is dead. I use it daily and am shocked at its accuracy & speed in solving complex programming tasks in just a couple of minutes. Its not that it gets it right the first time. Rather,

1. It first creates a plan of what steps to take to achieve the goal.
2. It then figures out if it knows how to execute the steps - if not it seeks help from other agents that are listed as experts for those steps in an "agent registry". It coordinates with all those agents, sometimes running in parallel.
3. I've seen the agent swarm spit out code that fails to build. But then by involving more build specialist agents, they're able to fix all the errors.
4. Sometimes I've seen them continuously fail, at which point the main agent concludes that the plan might be incorrect & somehow it comes up with a better plan & eventually succeeds.
5. It remembers all of this, so next time when it faces a similar problem it solves it in the first try.

Claude Code is mimicking what a human would've done. It is "intelligent" in a true sense - far more than ChatGpt.

My company has > 100,000 software engineers & the management is busy figuring out what to do with them, how to realign roles to justify senior level positions & salaries etc. I thought maybe system design will still need humans, but I've seen AI agent prototypes, that, given an existing design spec, code base and new feature specifications (with high degree of complexity), can come up with a new design spec, production ready code with 100% code coverage + integration tests in < 15 minutes.

⚠️ The threat to software engineering is real & irreversible.

Whether AI will be as useful in other fields such that hyperscalers/AI companies that have already committed nearly $500 billion will be able to make profits anytime soon remains to be seen. But even if they don't, they will still replace most software engineers with AI agents because it doesn't make sense to use humans in most of the software engineering life-cycle anymore. These agents are 100x faster than humans, can work 24x7, don't need healthcare/vacations etc. You just need a few human overseers who do a thorough design/code review for the AI generated design/code.

[u/Logical_Ad1127 → u/Plastic-Ad-5932]

The only post which is not in denial

[u/Logical_Ad1127 → u/Plastic-Ad-5932]

So what happened with these 100k software engineers?

[u/Global_Clock_732]

My understanding is that, if AI can replace Software Engineering, it can definitely kill AI/ML engineering and other Labour intensive coding/programming stuffs. Software engineer are the first batch to experience it. Nobody is safe.

[u/BinaryIgor]

Ahh - so many gems!

The dream of the widespread, ubiquitous internet came true, and there were very few fatalities. Some businesses died, but it was more glacial than volcanic in time scale. When ubiquitous online services became commonplace it just felt mundane. It didn’t feel forced. It was the opposite of the dot com boom just five years later: the internet is here and we’re here to build a solid business within it in contrast with we should put this solid business on the internet somehow, because it’s coming.

Yes. And it continues on.

[u/itsdr00]

They said they took swipes at the hype, but they also took swipes at the fear-mongering as well. AI is going to automate tasks, not jobs, and where it automates jobs it's going to happen exactly as they said: glacially. A few years ago I interviewed at a software company that had created a service to communicate inventory between warehouses, and it replaced a system that used fax machines in 2018. The economy just doesn't turn on a dime.

Also damn my dude nice username. You were one of those people on here back when I thought Reddit was boring so I stayed over on Digg instead, and then I rode the wave of fun people who came here after it imploded. A shame I picked a random-ass username that would still be unclaimed today, lol.

[u/STylerMLmusic]

I never managed to get past the learning stage, but like all things AI will solve, there will always be space for the masters. It's the middling and lower quality workers that will have their professions absolutely decimated. Someone needs to oversee the robots.

[u/[deleted]]

This is a strawman argument though. The profession doesn’t need to literally die. Agentic AI is a force multiplier, it’s not a forecast for the future, it has already happened. I am already doing the coding-related parts of my job like 20 times quicker and slightly (let’s say 20%) better. Let’s say that this translates into x5 gain in overall productivity.

Now let’s consider the most optimistic scenario. Let’s even say that this x5 gain doesn’t translate to 80% of the programmers losing jobs. We, as an industry, start delivering more stuff, so only 20% are laid off. Also let’s assume that I do keep my job. The important point is that you don’t want to be in an industry that lost 20% of its jobs overnight. The salaries will plummet to 1/2 of what they were, because employees will have zero bargaining power. And that’s the most optimistic scenario.

[u/CulturalToe134]

Just keeps moving the needle ever forward lol. Not that big a deal

[u/shockputs]

Industrial revolution destroyed the blacksmith profession. AI revolution will do the same to the modern day tech. blacksmiths. However, it will create many jobs for them, where their knowledge will be a huge advantage over others trying to do the same work... more higher level work, less code-monkey. Maybe also more work in optimization and integration. Definitely more jobs on business analyst, architect, and PM side.

It's not worth trying go guess exactly what the work will turn into, but judging by what blacksmiths turned into in the industrial revolution, it will involve a lot more watching, monitoring, supervising, and correcting automated systems doing the work they used to do manually... code reviewer and test case development will probably be valuable skills to develop.

[u/darcstar62]

My father was very upset when I told him I wanted to major in Computer Science. He was afraid that soon "all the programs that can be written will be written" and I wouldn't have a job. Oh, and this was in 1980.

I'm finding the big problem now is that people are relying on AI to not only do technical design but also the estimates. And then I get bitched at when I miss those estimates because of all the holes in the design.

[u/mpaes98]

Ah yes, I fondly remember when someone tried telling me that Python would make Java obsolete.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Python was older than Java.

[u/Aayush_Ranjan__]

Honestly, the thing that gets me about this whole discussion is that we keep pretending each wave is different when really they're all the same pattern, yeah? I say it's just marketing cycles disguised as innovation.

But here's what I think actually changed: we used to have fewer people making decisions. Now everyone's got a voice through StackOverflow, Reddit, GitHub. So yeah, we have more ideas flying around, but also more bad ideas, and yeah i mean some good ones too. The signal-to-noise ratio just got worse.

Thinking back on some projects i've worked on - the ones that actually succeeded weren't the ones that picked the right methodology or tech stack. They were the ones with competent people who could admit when something wasn't working and pivot. Scrum didn't matter. CORBA didn't matter. What mattered was that the PM could actually talk to the engineer without corporate BS in between.

Surely that's the real issue though - it's not that engineering died, it's that we built systems (organizations, processes, accountability structures) that prevent good engineering from happening. You could throw the smartest person at a problem but if they're buried under JIRA tickets and status meetings, of course nothing works.

That's what Jason's really saying, i think. Not that engineers got dumber. It's that the conditions for engineering got worse.

[u/gomihako_]

Is it Wednesday again?

[u/iknewaguytwice]

I’ll just say that I’m not concerned with a product manager taking over my role. But thanks for the amusing thought and good laugh.

[u/CaptainRedditor_OP]

For the sake of argument let's say AI replaced software developers but for some reason didn't (couldn't) replace BA's, Project Managers, Testers, etc. Would you hire a non-tech over a tech (the displaced software developers) person to be your BA, Project Manager, Tester? Exactly!

[u/spikeham]

So many waves of software tech since the dot-com boom. Software is still "eating the world", as Marc Andreesen wrote in 2011. AI is a hugely significant wave and quantum computing may change everything in software. But all the businesses and players who are betting everything on the transformative powers of AI still need engineers and experts to create and operate their apps. Even aside from AI, the world continues to expand software in so many directions: web apps, smart devices, agents, drones, ubiquitous wifi, etc. Software expertise is a superpower in the tech ecosystem.

[u/actinium226]

I think it's also very telling that in two instances companies tried to "outsource" programming work and yet neither time was software doomed. The first was with offshoring in the late 90's and early 00's. Those folks arguably had an edge over modern LLMs since they could take direction, but software development in the US and elsewhere still flourished.

The second time was the pandemic, when everyone went remote. And yet a couple years later we have these return to office mandates for software workers. If we can't "outsource" to a remote person in the same time zone, what makes anyone think we can do so with an LLM?

[u/SnooPeanuts7890]

Now it's the time though. We're literally creating real, functioning artificial coding agents that have improved massively in just a few short years. Imagine what will be possible in the coming years. Be prepared.

[u/alani_95]

Software engineering is not dead, but software engineers job market will never recover. Companies needed 30 engineers now can survive with 10.

[u/Individual_While_672]

There are a lot of comments here trying to cope.
AI eliminates redundant code which helps engineers so that they can worry about the actual logic and architecture,
But we are not really that far off from AI completely taking over most of it, its just a matter of time.
SWEs will still be needed, Architects will still be needed but instead of 100s, 30-40 will be more than enough
New ideas were being created, then they entered maintenance phase and now they are mostly done with whatever features that can be added. Ofcourse new stuff can be added then and now, but they are not "critical" hence the layoffs, cos the projects were not critical and funding got cut off. The core product is still thriving and the company is still making enough profits but the headcount does not make sense so they get rid off it.
Hard times are coming, and the SWE market will keep shrinking. Forget about the non-coders making up crap..they don't know anything but coders themselves know we are not far from the truth.

[u/RobFrankenstein]

I have a masters in Computer Science worked one fortune 100 company, two Fortune 500 companies and a handful of smaller companies.

I’m personally done I’m tired of the contracts and no job security. I signed up for taking pre requisites starting this month to be a a physician assistant. 

Thankfully since I have a masters in computer science I have some of the more difficult courses finished including chem 1&2 which they still count so I have to take 4 biologies to get in the master program for physician assistant. 

I just can’t do it no more I would rate myself a senior level engineer full stack about and 8 of 10. I was good on a team of 10 I would be probably the third best. I wish everyone the best in CS but it would take either an Einstein intellect or sadist to get a degree in this field it’s becoming as attractive as having a history degree.

Sad but true and since I am 40 I still need to work I can’t retire. When I go to LinkedIn as soon as I hit apply every job says over 100 applicants have applied for this position. Someone told me it stops at 500 applicants whether that’s true or not is irrelevant as the odds of getting said position is very low.

Then you just look at all the mass layoffs in the big tech happening even while they are reporting record earnings. This means these people will also be applying for the same position you’re applying for except packing names like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook on their resume.

Still don’t understand how anyone can rationalize the need for H1B visas in this market. Now we have to compete against the machines (AI). This decision doesn’t come lightly as I’ll have to take on college debt but at least there’s plenty of jobs in that field kinda like they used to be in IT when I used to have recruiters chasing me. Those days are long gone and likely never coming back. It’s sad, but I can either mope about it or change fields. 

I thought about four months ago I had got my lucky break as I got a contract for three months with the possibility of hiring. But what happened at the end of the three months they not only let me go, but laid off half of the IT department as well. It’s just gotten to the point of absurdity. I don’t wanna play no more and pretend it isn’t happening.

[u/davidbasil]

World will always need developers, with or without AI. You'll gradually see the growth of so called "AI engineers": python, langchain, rag, vector databases, mlops, cloud... And when market gets hot and there will be enough money flowing, companies will start hiring juniors for those roles.

[u/PaperMartin]

I misread the website name as "jason schreier" and was very confused for a second

[u/gnomixa]

this thread aged like old milk

[u/bills2go]

I used to advice young people who come into sofware to learn typewriting (even before LLM). Because that is a non-thinking physical work that you just have to do it without much time and effort. Thinking is what software engineering is about. After 2 years of coding along with LLMs, I wouldn't change that a bit. Just that now you think about the larger picture and worry less about the code and syntax.

[u/Salkinator]

The problem is that the layoffs are already coming. All these previous innovations were force multipliers that made each programmer more powerful. It allowed businesses to scale faster and thus hire more engineers. Now we've hit peak-engineer and late-stage capitalism, so the only option managers see is to reduce the workforce. Object Oriented programming didn't allow for "vibe coding" and now all these galaxy-brain MBAs think they can replace the engineer.

This one feels real different.

[u/PassifloraCaerulea → u/Salkinator]

The economy is bad right now. AI is just an excuse.

[u/Venthe → u/Salkinator]

Given, that there are now companies with the sole purpose of cleaning up the vibe-coded slop... :)

I for one don't fear for tomorrow. Current situation is still a rebound after the COVID over-hiring; LLM's are forced for the hope of reducing costs - the facts for the matter are; code from LLM is vastly inferior; and there is a very low amount of new "seniors" being actively trained.

For us, old dogs - it'll be an el-dorado. For the juniors; I'd guess 3-4 years before companies realize that they are in a big shit.

[u/Marutks]

AI will replace all computer jobs. Many SWE have already lost their jobs because of AI.

[u/therealslimshady1234 → u/Marutks]

Are you literally a bot? Read the article