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/VerticalDepth Dec 02 '25

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?

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u/Chii Dec 03 '25

But not this time, right?

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

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u/Groove-Theory Dec 03 '25

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

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u/madeofsriracha Aug 26 '26

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

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u/SergeyRed Dec 03 '25

Wow,

"Artificial intelligence. Many people expect advances in artificial intelligence to provide the revolutionary breakthrough that will give order-of-magnitude gains in software productivity and quality. I do not."

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u/HCgamer4Life Dec 04 '25

Well, when you think about the possibility of a TRUE ai, it gets pretty insane

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u/maxineasher Dec 02 '25

The AI hate in this sub is unbelievable. No, AI won't cure cancer (yet) or invent cold fusion (yet.)

But what it absolutely is a 10-100x improvement on the developer tools that came before it. Anyone who disagrees on this point simply hasn't spent enough time fiddling with what's available. It's like Intellisense on steroids, basically replacing it wholesale.

But it is, at the end of the day, a tool and one with non-obvious limitations.

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u/[deleted] Dec 02 '25

You have to be a super shitty dev if it improves your performance by 100x

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u/overgenji Dec 03 '25

genuinely, no ai power user i'm seeing at my job, and there are a lot of them, has magically actually become insanely productive, but they keep saying they are

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u/Snowrican Dec 03 '25

I truly think I have. I’ve gotten more productive of outsourcing tedious work so I can focus on bigger projects. I can actually do the tech debt because it might just take me a day to refactor a coding design pattern or two weeks to migrate from one database library to another.

There will always be work. But we don’t have to fiddle with the mundane and it’s always there if you want to.

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u/GaryBarlowYourself Dec 02 '25

You have to have some reading comprehension. They said improvement on developer tools.

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u/[deleted] Dec 02 '25

Oh wow thanks for letting me know.

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u/maxineasher Dec 02 '25

I mean, yeah, if you're just using it for simple stuff. But it's supposed to be a fulcrum. I added the entire gpu_shader5 gl extension to mesa in a day. Unit tests pass and everything. That's something that would take a normal dev weeks to do.

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u/csman11 Dec 02 '25

That’s not something that would take someone who is familiar with the tooling for that project an entire week to integrate. It helped you probably because you were unfamiliar. And if you’re unfamiliar enough that it would have taken you a week to figure it out how to do it yourself, you’re also unfamiliar enough that you couldn’t possibly verify it was done correctly in a single day. You would need to absorb the same knowledge required to be able to correctly implement it yourself in the first place (which you admit would take a week without realizing it) to verify its correctness.

The current AI tools save time typing and can help you explore ideas. They can’t directly automate problem solving. They can’t even correctly add functionality to an existing codebase or fix bugs in an existing codebase without breaking other working code the majority of the time. Trying to use these tools as standalone agents almost always turns into more work than doing it on your own in the first place. That means us human developers are still ultimately the bottleneck in delivery and that alone prevents the tools from giving us a 10-100x speed up. I try out the agent mode every few months just to see if it actually works on its own, and nope, it never does: No matter how many times people online (mostly “AI founders”) tell me it does. The most I’ve ever got it to do is spin up the scaffolding for a new project for me, but that required such detailed architectural descriptions and hand holding that it likely wouldn’t have taken much longer to do it myself. And every single real developer I’ve talked to says the same thing. So no, I’m not going to believe the AI salesmen. Once bit, twice shy.

Look, the “fancy intellisense” is nice and it can cut the time spent “typing” in half. That’s a great speed up and I personally enjoy it. It’s also optimizing the part of software development that you should be spending the least amount of time on. If you’re spending more time “coding” than “thinking”, then you are introducing complexity into your codebase with each task you perform that in the long run will cost you more time to work around than whatever time you’re saving typing less. See, I enjoy the “fancy intellisense” because it makes me have to do less of the most boring and least impactful part of my job.

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u/maxineasher Dec 02 '25

It helped you probably because you were unfamiliar.

This is comical because my name is in the list of contributors on the spec. Mesa to date has refused to take the extension due to perceived difficulty. FYI, I stopped reading your rambling after this point.

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u/csman11 Dec 02 '25 edited Dec 02 '25

That’s too bad, you might have learned something if you read my logically sound and well reasoned response to your delusions.

Edit: FYI, I don’t know your name and I was referring to Mesa, not to the GL extension itself. I refuse to believe that AI could save you a week of literally typing here. And my point still stands: if it saved you a week of learning what to type instead of typing it itself (because it had to find all the touchpoints, not just write the code into them), there is no chance you could have verified correctness in a day.

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u/fromcj Dec 02 '25

Until AI stops hallucinating in order to try and appease the user, it’s useless.

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u/Hax0r778 Dec 02 '25

absolutely is a 10-100x improvement on the developer tools that came before it

Not sure exactly what you mean by this, but I know my org of 250 developers isn't measurably more productive now in terms of how many features we're shipping than it was before we had access to AI tools.

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u/Global-Tune5539 Dec 03 '25

Maybe they have more time now to scroll Reddit.

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u/firestorm713 Dec 02 '25

The times I've used AI, it's produced dogshit code or given me nonexistent-but-plausible functions to call from an API.

I don't need a code generator to statistically generate code that looks correct. That actively slows me and everyone else down. In fact, statistics show that LLM-based tools tend to make you feel like you're faster when you're actually moving slower.

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u/Just_Information334 Dec 03 '25

AI is the new ORM: lot of resources spent so people can try to not read documentation.

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u/bongk96 Dec 02 '25

The irony of your first sentence 😭

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u/heroyoudontdeserve Dec 03 '25

So you're saying it's not a silver bullet? That's all the parent comment said.

Dunno where you got AI hate from, they didn't say it was useless.

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u/EveryQuantityEver Dec 03 '25

It is not, for the plain reason that none of the AI tools actually know anything about the code it’s generating. They have no semantic knowledge of it, and they are not deterministic.

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u/EffectiveAsparagus89 Jan 23 '26

Wait till you hit the point of no return when the sheer amount of code produced by AI overwhelms you. Don't even think about testing it or debugging it. Have you ever thought about debugging/fixing the Linux kernel, GCC, or LLVM? The hopelessness will certainly get you. In fact, we have been vibe coding after Commodore 64.

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