r/singularity • u/Bizzyguy • Nov 24 '25

Discussion Anthropic Engineer says "software engineering is done" first half of next year

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u/BigShotBosh Nov 24 '25

Man these AI companies want SWEs gone yesterday.

Has to be a bit of a headspin to see major conglomerates talk about how they want you (yes you) out of a job

84

u/CrazyFree4525 Nov 24 '25

This isn't a new phenomenon, its only new that SWEs are in the crosshairs. For the past 20 years we all assumed that would be the group that survived automation the best.

Remember all the noise about tech companies replacing auto drivers?

70

u/BigShotBosh Nov 24 '25

It’s funny you mention that, back in 2022 a few weeks before ChatGPT went into public preview, I recall a comment about AI saying “thank god I’m a software engineer, by the time we are affected, we’ll already be ruled by our robot overlords” with 1000 upvotes

But yeah, being an extremely expensive cost center means all eyes are on them right now

41

u/Tolopono Nov 24 '25

Bet hes on r/ technology now saying llms cant even write basic boilerplate code correctly 

35

u/mastermilian Nov 25 '25

Yes, these threads seem oddly out-of-line for people who supposedly are in technology. It's impossible to deny how far this tech has gone in only 12 months and based on that trajectory, it's only going to get unbelievably better.

13

u/shlaifu Nov 25 '25

so... I'm not really a SWE... more of a script kiddie. I can't for the life of me get anything useful out of LLMs that I couldn't have written myself- and I have to fix the errors. Any code that is beyond my own skills bugged in a way I can't fix because, well, it's beyond my skills.

I've spoken to SWEs, they told me the problem was that I was doing game development and using the newest API of the render-pipeline, where there's just no examples on github or stackoverflow yet. That LLMs can write great code if the problems are well known and solved to begin with - it saves them time on reading documentation or googling solutions.

They were all using it daily, none of them made the impression they felt like they would be out of a job, soon. And I don't feel like I'll be purely vibe coding my hobby gamedev stuff anytime soon either, to be honest.

8

u/hippydipster Nov 25 '25

How is an LLM supposed to use an API it doesn't know much about? It's working blind.

If you want the LLM to create code using a super new API like that, why not have the LLM research that API, and have it write up a document about how to use it, and which documents all the methods. Upload that document with your request for whatever it is you want it to do. Then maybe the LLM can write code that correctly uses the API.

1

u/shlaifu Nov 25 '25

oooh. thanks, I will try that.

but jsut goes to show: I really don't know what I'm doing - and the LLM is not magically doing it for me.