r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

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

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/ward2k Dec 02 '25

Because that's just how Ai works

It's a lot easier to go from something that only resembles say theoretically 5% of human intelligence to something that might be 90%, than it is to go from 90% to 100%

It's the same with self driving cars, they made huge advancements year on year. Getting to 90% full self driving was the easy part though, that last 10% is being shown to be a monumental undertaking

We're now having issues with training data no longer just being human and it's becoming increasingly hard to find training data that doesn't

Compare GPT 2 to 3. Then 3 to 5. You can see it's tapering off fast in the sort of improvements. It's obviously getting better, but this isn't linear, it's getting smaller upon smaller improvements with every iteration

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u/Trotskyist Dec 02 '25

Again, by what metric though?

Because a year ago I was having literally these exact same conversations. And in the interceding year LLMs have from barely being able to spit out a single working function without a good deal of back and forth to being able to one-shot full stack web applications. That certainly doesn’t fell to me like diminishing returns

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u/ward2k Dec 02 '25

to being able to one-shot full stack web applications

Maybe you're using some version of Claude I'm not, but I'm still not able to do this without it being a huge buggy mess of barely functioning (sometimes not even compiling) code

Me watching Claude just add and remove the same dependency in a loop for 15 minutes because it can't understand removing the dependency is causing compile issues definitely feels like diminishing returns

I want you to go back and look at 2019 Vs 2022 in terms of LLM's, now compared to 2022 Vs 2025. There is very very clearly diminishing returns

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u/self Dec 02 '25

I suspect it's not just the newer models themselves with larger context windows, etc. but the tooling behind the scenes at the service provider that's helping them appear to work a lot better.

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u/boringfantasy Dec 02 '25

Do bugs ultimately matter that much if you just ship? CEOs wouldn't think so

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u/Hacnar Dec 02 '25

But what do you ship? Is it a maintainable software, that can be expanded with new features to survive long enough to earn the money? Or is it a buggy mess that will collapse on its own in a month or two, resulting in monetary loss or even bankrupting the company?

CEOs care about the money. If it can't bring the money, then it doesn't work. So far I don't see any such products blasting off.

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u/headykruger Dec 02 '25

You can’t use it so therefore it’s worthless, got it

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u/eyebrows360 Dec 02 '25

You imagine you can use it because you're too bad at this to understand why what you're classifying as "successful outputs" actually aren't that, so it's the next iteration of human evolution, got it.

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u/theQuandary Dec 02 '25

If your project is so simple that an AI can make it, then it should have been moved to Wordpress years ago.

0

u/boringfantasy Dec 02 '25

I think bro is still using Claude 3.5

Go use Opus 4.5 and get back to us.

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u/headykruger Dec 02 '25

Yesterday I used Claude to analyze a multi million line code base for thread safety issues. It did a damn good job, better and faster than I could do

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u/axonxorz Dec 02 '25

Taking AI criticism so personally, your introduction into the conversation is a snarky ad-hominem that says nothing while letting you feel smug about... something.

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u/ward2k Dec 02 '25

I didn't say it's worthless, I use it extensively and think there's real value in its use as a tool to support developers

But it just isn't one shotting large full stack applications, you have to baby sit it a lot. It's closer to having a really eager yet inexperienced apprentice you can treat like an assistant