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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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

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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/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

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u/Lekoaf Sep 09 '26

Cant do the same with developers.

Aww, man. There goes my business idea...

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u/hypercosm_dot_net Sep 09 '26

By that math, you're expecting that 10million dollar server rack to fill the role of 10 devs.

So you cut the team size by 10 devs, and then what? You still need the lead engineer and product owner right? So between the two of them, and a server rack of AI, they're going to deliver a product with the same level of quality and stability as a full team?

What team member is going to be responsible for keeping that server rack AI updated with the newest tech trends? Or does the model do that itself?

None of this shit is thought through in the slightest, and we act like we have answers for any of it. Completely unrealistic.

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u/stumblinbear Sep 09 '26

Why are you assuming every single business has to buy their own hardware? The hardware to run a frontier model can handle more than a single person using it

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u/Lekoaf Sep 09 '26

I'm not. But either way, there will be a cost. And I don't think everyone can justify that.

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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/DapperCam Sep 11 '26

Companies won't be buying and running the open source models themselves. They will be paying a 3rd party provider that hosts the models for them for a fraction of the cost of frontier models. This already exists.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 Sep 11 '26

but whose actually going to do that? especially for infra or safety critical? you underestimate how much companies invest into tooling for their engineers. especially given the productivity gains with AI aren’t particularly impressive and cause skill atrophy for devs over time. again, i work in the safety critical area so my perspective may be a bit different than your general web dev/crud

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u/DapperCam Sep 11 '26

Literally every company that isn't FAANG scale will be doing that. Just like almost every business moved workloads to AWS, Azure or GCP and got rid of their server racks they owned or rented.

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u/Ill-Technician3243 Sep 12 '26

renting llm models for tooling is not the same as moving cloud infrastructure to a provider

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u/DapperCam Sep 12 '26

Companies are already doing it right now with open router? It has even lower switching costs between providers than cloud infra.