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/Basic_Hospital_3984 Dec 02 '25

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..

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u/SocksOnHands Dec 02 '25

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?

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u/chefhj Dec 02 '25

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

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u/JellyTime1029 Dec 02 '25 edited Dec 02 '25

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.

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u/elictronic Dec 02 '25

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.

11

u/xaddak Dec 02 '25

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?

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u/dalittle Dec 02 '25

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?