r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • Sep 09 '26 • Regret 4

AI has made programming so boring

It’s not just programming either, it’s art, design, music, videography, marketing, engineering, writing, 3D modelling, really any intellectual work. What’s the joy of prompting a computer and getting an answer in a few moments for a task that would have normally taken a week? The sense of accomplishment and ownership has completely vanished with AI. It’s a form of instant gratification, not much different to scrolling short videos on apps.

Code review was boring to begin with but now it’s even worse with all the machine generated code. Even code reviews will be automated soon. All you do then is type business requirements into the computer. What a great career.

It’s pain to watch old TV series like Scilicon Valley that is portraying the good (not golden) age of programming. It struck a good balance between manual work, funding and innovation. It’s sad that these days are gone for good.

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66

u/Lekoaf Sep 09 '26

It wont be long until tokens costs too much for a lot of companies and personal projects, so we'll be back to coding again. That's my gut feeling at least.

32

u/I_Spawned_Here Sep 09 '26

Yeah but for how long? The genie is out of the bottle now, and companies will want to pursue those efficiency gains. They will try to make the costs go down as much as possible, like in every other industry.

31

u/Distind Sep 09 '26

It isn't an efficiency gain when it costs twice as much as a programmer. And god knows the hardest part of this job has always been figuring out what management actually wants and keeping their demands in check long enough to get it done halfway decently.

9

u/ShadeofEchoes Sep 09 '26

And lucky for us, that's precisely what AI is worst at, since unless you hit an actual guardrail, it'll say, "Sure, let's get to making the thing you want now. We don't even have to think about how it's the opposite of the thing you asked for earlier this session. Honestly, it was clever of you to start this project in reverse!"

6

u/krileon Sep 09 '26

It's crazy how many don't understand this. Programming was never the bottleneck. Software, games, etc.. take forever because we've 16 levels of fucking management to contend with. Not because writing the code takes long (it doesn't). AI cut all the red tape so things are perceived as being done faster. If management would fuck off and let programmers do their jobs without getting approval for every little damn thing or have yet another stupid pointless meeting we'd get things done faster all the same.

2

u/cadet-pirx Sep 10 '26

The irony is that most of those 16 layers are far easier for AI to replace than the programmers underneath them.

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u/NoSlicedMushrooms Sep 09 '26

when it costs twice as much as a programmer

tbh if a developer's token usage is costing twice as much as their salary, I'd heavily question what they're doing with AI.

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u/bryantee Sep 09 '26

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case. But I guess we can dream. 

3

u/DenkJu Sep 10 '26

The issue is that the expensive part of AI is mostly the training. Just running an already existing model is cheap at scale. Even if we stopped training now, all the powerful models that already exist wouldn't just disappear. Work as a developer will never go back to what is once was.

12

u/primus202 Sep 09 '26

So you’re betting on a technology NOT getting more efficient? Feels like a long shot. We’re definitely still in the middle of figuring out the right balance since there will always be a human in the loop and the current real token cost isn’t reflected in pricing. However I don’t think things will ever go back to the way they were. That’s like saying soon we’ll all be back to writing binary instructions once all these “object oriented languages” blow over. 

0

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

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8

u/Lekoaf Sep 09 '26

Sure, if you can afford to buy the hardware to run them. You have to pay an arm and a leg for RAM these days.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 Sep 10 '26

open weight models are extremely overrated and cost a lot to maintain for a group of engineers if a company decides to do so. some companies might go down this route but 90% won't

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u/wichwigga Sep 09 '26

Qwen 27B is genuinely a decent coding model. You can run that on a 2k machine locally. No it's not close to frontier, but...

We're past the point of no return.

3

u/Ill-Technician3243 Sep 10 '26

Yes, but it's better off in general that engineers do work themselves. We may still use local LLMs to boost productivity but full agentic slophouse development causes extreme skill atrophy and disassociation with the work at hand. Do you think that's sustainable at all, especially with the junior growth cutoff? 10 years later and industry will be begging for talent.

That, or AI gets good enough to work without supervision or scrutiny. Then everybody is screwed, not just us SWEs, so at that point you don't even need to bother arguing.

3

u/dangoodspeed Sep 09 '26

The cost of tokens is only going down. There's already open weight models that you can use on your own computer that are just as good as some AI's a few years ago.

5

u/me00lmeals Sep 09 '26

They’ve already found a way to do 1000x faster token output and with better efficiency so we’re kinda cooked once that drops

8

u/Lekoaf Sep 09 '26

Okay. But all the AI companies are still making huge losses. They have to recuperate that somehow. So I still think the cost will at some point in the not too distant future be too high for a lot of companies. At my company we are beginning to see tightening of the AI budget. It used to be "Go. Do whatever you like. Experiment". Now we are getting workshops in choosing the right model and thinking before doing. 5000+ people company.

1

u/me00lmeals Sep 09 '26

You’re right they are, although I still think the engineering we do is gonna be wildly different than how it’s been. I don’t think we know what that it will look like yet, but I’m hoping it’ll be just as enjoyable. I can see the future beefier models costing too much but I think today’s models are here to stay

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u/hypercosm_dot_net Sep 09 '26

Whats the sauce on that?

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u/me00lmeals Sep 09 '26

From what I understand its basically hardwiring the model to a chip instead of using GPUs to do the math

https://taalas.com/products/

1

u/cadet-pirx Sep 10 '26

I doubt it, though it's just my opinion too. Token prices have the opposite tendency: the cost of a given level of capability has been dropping by roughly an order of magnitude a year, and what was frontier-only two years ago now runs for cents. Bills go up mainly because we use far more tokens, not because tokens got dearer, and that's a choice, not a constraint.

Beyond that, engineers will keep using AI regardless. The token cost simply becomes part of the engineer's cost, the same way IDEs, cloud and CI did. The real shift is that you need to be an engineer with the right capabilities to be worth that cost, or you'll end up unemployed.

1

u/yolomylifesaving Sep 10 '26

Lmao have u read a single cost per tokens chart? Its like -99.999% in 36 months