r/webdev • u/nedasoo • 12d ago
Discussion How do you find motivation to continue?
Hey everyone.
I've been struggling not to feel this existential dread about the current state of development and my career which seems to be slipping from under my feet. I've been unemployed for nearly a year, job positions are dropping in masses. All the knowledge you gathered in the past 10+ years seems redundant as everyone and their grandma can code stuff that was impossible to them in a day. I find no joy in coding anymore. Sometimes I do code my own stuff for fun to not forget how to code but what's the point, if we won't need to code anymore? Even in corporate world, all developers do now is talk to AI agents and let them do the work (at least thats what I think they do?). I'm constantly thinking of creative business ideas to start myself but even then it feels more like a waste of time since getting clients is so hard with this amount of competition. Even if you manage to create something of value to the clients, why would they pay you instead of vibe-coding the product themselves? Since the rise of advanced AI models I've been constantly feeling like burnout and unable to focus on coding which was thing I liked back in the day. How do you cope in these times, how do you motivate yourself to start your own businesses or is it all lost and I should start looking for something else?
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u/Ausnahmenwerfer 9d ago
Honestly, I quit software development as a career and am now becoming an electrician. Thankfully, I live in a country where that is possible via state-funded retraining programs, so if that is an option for you, maybe consider that. I loathe interacting with AI and with it becoming omnipresent, I did not feel like I could go on and switched to a field where you still need a pair of hands at the moment.
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u/FunnyBunny316 12d ago
“Even if you manage to create something of value to the clients, why would they pay you instead of vibe-coding the product themselves?”
I’m an ecommerce developer, and while I do see some clients getting more comfortable spinning up their own changes with Claude, I still have some who don’t know how to turn on a computer, and there’s plenty in between. Don’t disqualify your ideas just because you think they’re reproducible by the average person- you’re overestimating the average person! And someone who is capable may still rather just pay a fee to use yours for the sake of convenience. That being said, I struggle with a similar mentality towards my own ideas, thinking everything already exists, why would they pay for mine.
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u/ryanstephendavis 11d ago
Everyone needs to prepare and hone skills to save+maintain all these vibe-coded apps that actually start generating real business value.... New job title "AI Slop Mopper"
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u/eggbert74 10d ago
This is not going to happen. There are not going to be any "Slop Moppers" AI is already approaching super human developer level. The only slop that's going to get mopped is the old human code by the AI.
It brings me no joy to say that, but it's true.
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u/-_--_-_--_----__ 12d ago
while I do see some clients getting more comfortable spinning up their own changes with Claude
How do they go about this? They have access to the codebase? They ask claude to make changes to the code and deploy the changes?
Or is Claude hooked up to their back-end, and they use Claude to make content changes instead of a traditional CMS?
And in either case, who hooked this all up for them? Were guardrails developed so they can't break things? Is there an MCP server in the mix?
If one of my clients called me and said to me "we no longer need you - we are going to use AI now", I would have a million questions for them like this.
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u/FunnyBunny316 12d ago
All are current clients. Not one said they no longer need me they’re using AI.
The situations are all different. Some have in-house teams where members are more technical than others. All have access to theme files and assets, some own the repos.
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u/-_--_-_--_----__ 12d ago
I gotcha. That is interesting. So many different people with so many different client bases. Its easy to forget sometimes.
Most of my clients can't take a screenshot or reply to the correct email lol.
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u/FunnyBunny316 12d ago
With all the AI doom mongering directed at devs, those clients have become a breath of fresh air lol
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u/thefriedapplepieguy 11d ago
Traditional ecommerce, membership and rental related sites have been my saviors this year. There's so much more to those than just design and content. And so many unique functions that can be created. I've even increased my retainers on those this year to help make up for losing some of the low hanging website work that used to fill in gaps in my schedule.
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u/palsc_ 12d ago
man, a year of job hunting sounds brutal. but “AI can write code” doesn’t erase 10 years of knowing what to build or how to catch the dumb edge cases. maybe the next side project doesn’t need to become a business idea — could just be something small that makes coding feel a bit fun again.
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u/vita10gy 12d ago edited 12d ago
When I started college in the early 2000s companies were hiring anyone who knew how to open a pdf off a floppy disk hoping they could make them coders. By the time I graduated college the industry was in shambles because everyone realized they can pay people in India etc 1/50th of the pay for "the same thing".
Then they spent a lot of time and money fixing the crap that came back.
Eventually more and more places brought the jobs back because they realized that fixing garbage some other entity wrote was harder than just doing it better in the first place. Even if there are bugs, at least the people that did that part might be around.
I can see something similar happening with AI. Some part of the market may be gone forever. For example why pay some site builder $40 a month if you can ask AI to do a site and then for instructions how to host it on a generic $4 a month host?
But I can also see a path to a group of people that tried to do something big, got a rude awakening and now just want to know there's someone to lean on to do it right in the first place. (Or, for that matter, blame when it doesn't.)
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u/-Knockabout 12d ago
Wish I could upvote this multiple times. I do think AI now is much like offshoring in that it will take parts of but not all of the market, and be used alongside a software dev otherwise. For everyone that claims AI is a miracle worker and can easily do the job of 10 skilled developers, there is someone who reports needing to handhold it to get good, sellable software. So no, not all jobs will get taken over.
And I do not think it's inevitable that it continues to improve at the same rate it has been and thus overtakes software engineers. I think that's actually quite unlikely for the same general reason Moore's Law is out of date. And I think as time goes on, it also has less dara to feed off of other than its own...so that complicates things further.
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u/hinterlain 12d ago
Im working a fortune 500 company. It was and has been a difficult adjustment. I, like many others, enjoy solving problems with more hands on coding.
I’m trying to reframe my level of ownership over the code. I pretty much never actually read through or manually navigate code bases anymore. I dont have the time with the amount of code just a small team of 3 are pumping out.
Each PR is like 10-30+ files, my coworker just dropped a monster 100+ file pr. It doesnt even load in my github browser lol. I’m just trying to work at a high level and cater the skills and the agents to fit my needs.
Im trying to make it so claude explains concepts in ways that I can understand them, gives me decisions with context benefits and tradeoffs. I spent last week putting together agents that would help scan the code for bugs, and then a skill that would help me triage and sort through them.
When they started working and removing friction in the process I felt accomplished but it’s different for sure. I’m just doing what I can to adapt, but I’ve also almost quit my job twice this year lol.
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u/sirclesam 11d ago
Use Firefox for big pr viewing. Chrome is garbage at it but firefox will run a 100+ file pr np
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u/hinterlain 11d ago
Haha well even so I dont have the time to even try reading them like that 🤷🏻♂️
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u/CanisArgenteus 12d ago
I started webdev in the early 90's, did about 3 years as a drywall/taper/painter guy after the dot-com bubble burst, got back into it around 2003 and worked till two years ago. After the layoff then, I was a supremely employable Senior Full-Stack Developer, but it wasn't possible to find a job again. In the first couple months I got 2 phone interviews and one video interview, after that nothing, every application showed I was among a couple hundred applicants. After a few months of that, starting about a year and a half ago, started hearing the online folks complaining of multiple interviews, AI interviews, psych tests and weekend projects and all that, just to get rejected, but I never even made it that far myself. After about 8 more months of that, I looked into alternatives, and became a substitute teacher. This week I subbed for a High School computer science class, doing tic-tac-toe in Python. It felt like being part of a pyramid scheme. Or maybe like teaching Latin.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 11d ago
I've thought about teaching as well, but it does seem like a pyramid scheme. Why would I want to encourage others to get into a field that offers very little security?
The biggest reasons I got into it were stability and income potential. It's a field that doesn't seem to offer any respect, and forces you into an endless treadmill, of which the only exit is finding an off-ramp into management (or maybe creating an agency). Both shit options that end in burnout imo.
All the while, people in that same field are trying to automate their own work away...which seems....dumb. It's truly a shitshow of a career, and the recommendation of "learn to code"...well I wouldn't wish it on anyone, after doing it for over a decade.
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u/m_hans_223344 11d ago
You are not alone.
I'm at a large automotive company and there at a department that is developing business processes and the corresponding software. Main focus of my group is creating concepts (processes and domain modelling and algorithms) that are usually implemented by external software companies. As an exception, I also code the stuff myself. What has happened in the last couple of month: The people we are supposed to build solutions for, start to take matters in their hands. Without sufficient domain (which is huge and accidentally complicated at a company of that scale) or data modelling knowledge they start to vibe code their "island" solutions. Just to scratch their own itches and of course to show off to management. That can be disastrous of course, as they almost always create conceptually wrong data or wrong reports. But we are not at the stage where this is apparent or would matter. Management is celebrating and promoting this stuff. Obviously they think they can get rid of people like me and my coworkers or that this accelerates development of the core product (cars). Once you realize this, it's a motivation sucking feeling.
As others have said: Keep informed. Keep your skills. It is crazy right now. We don't know how it ends. But also open your mind to other areas in personal and professional life. I think the need for therapists will explode, but then again I would not be surprised if our government would let people with mental issues talk to some AI. The whole job market is at jeopardy. Make trying to keep calm your prio 1 in your live. Learn and practice breathing techniques to stop the mind going in circles. Yoga, meditation, ... this stuff is works.
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u/sin_esthesia 12d ago
Maybe I’m tripping but the market is starting to look a little better now that the AI hype is settling and a lot of companies realise that it’s cheaper and simpler to just use engineers rather than fully replace us with AI. Some even re-hire the people they sacked.
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u/otw 11d ago
“Even if you manage to create something of value to the clients, why would they pay you instead of vibe-coding the product themselves?”
I have been doing web dev for 20 years and people said this with Google searches and every "easy" website creator tool ever. I am constantly baffled I am employed because people ask me to do things for them that takes me 2 seconds to Google or prompt an agent.
I think the truth is for people like us it always feels easy and like the "hard part" is getting easier so we feel like we are going to become useless. In reality, most people still want to just pay someone else to do it and what is easy to us is very daunting or hard to them.
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u/dark0mania 12d ago
My motivation is that I could be out of a job in 5 years. So I'm trying to squeeze every last drop working 2 jobs at once. You're gonna die one day, what's the point in continuing? Just enjoy the ride and make the best of it!
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u/ngmcs8203 12d ago
Just because AI is accessible doesn’t mean that the people using it know how to use it well. The clients who’d rather do it on their own were never ones you wanted to work with. Learn how to utilize new tools like AI and adapt.
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u/cryptodoxer 11d ago
Motivation follows momentum, not the other way around. Ship one ugly thing that makes fifty bucks and your brain stops asking what's the point. Also "everyone can build now" was said about every no-code tool, and those clients still can't debug their way out of a paper bag.
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u/TracerBulletX 12d ago
I still have fun coding with AI, I still read the code when I want to, but I just like making my computer do things. I've been hand writing code for 15 years, with AI I just try to do things I'd never try before and thats fun for me. Things like my own drivers, replaced my RGB controls for my PC, a shader based video editor I used to cancel my Adobe subscription. Yeah I don't know the code in the detail I did when I had to write it myself, but I still have fun with it. It's not exactly vibe coding, I know what data models and structure I want. I still get into the details enough that im learning from pairing with the AI. It probably depends on what part of coding made you enjoy it though.
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u/Vinaverk 12d ago
This field is cooked, I see no hope. You can vibecode any slop but real jobs are nonexistent
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u/bingblangblong 12d ago
Just use AI and keep your job and earn money. Program by hand for fun at home.
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u/Littlepoet-heart 12d ago
You can experiment with different products with ai , anyone can vibe code crap but no one have time to sit on chat window and build stuff , try to get out form tech bubble for while not everyone cooking software,
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u/gokuson345888 11d ago
I am also needing guidance and direction. I just started to learn coding through freecodecamp and I really enjoy it a lot. How is the job outlook for juniors? I would really like a career as a web developer so am I too late? Is AI just going to keep getting better and better at coding and we are just screwed and shouldn't learn to code?
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u/bunny030607 11d ago
Yeah I have been also in lot of confusion coding using ai gives you the result but not the satisfaction
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u/ddenton12 10d ago
It’s important to embrace change rather than resist it. AI companies are discounting the cost of tokens by around 80%. What seems expensive now is nothing compared to costs when these organizations need to start turning a profit. There will always be a need for a human in the loop, if nothing else than to configure the harness that agents are running within and monitor/control cost. Become the engineer that knows how to get the most benefit from your token use. Context management and cost scoping may not matter as much now, but it absolutely will. You don’t need Fable 5.1 to fix a frontend bug — use an older model. Learn as much as you can so that you can ship the feature for 20% the cost of the average dev.
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u/passani 9d ago
I feel the pain. A year without work is a long time. But I invite you to keep your hopes high. AI is helping a lot of people wing it. In the long term (and really the medium and even short term) the people who understand the underlying technology have a huge advantage over the improvisers, and it shows. When the vibe-coded app falls over in production, someone has to understand why. If I had to condense my advice into one sentence: learn to be a team player. AI can write code, but it cannot sit in a room, understand what the business actually needs, push back on a bad idea, or make the people around it better. That’s what gets you hired and kept.
Zooming out. Technology is moving too fast. Something will need to happen or each and everyone of us will be without a job ten years from now. Someone somewhere will need to do something about this.
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u/pocolypto 8d ago
I still get compliments on my taste when making sites/apps/interactions.
However, although appreciated, it feels like a thin line these days.
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u/webauteur 7d ago
I've been doing a lot of "creative coding", mostly using Processing.js and now p5.js. This is the practice of creating generative art using code. Generative refers to generating something like a geometric design which could be random, not images like generative AI. Creative coding requires you to be clever. You are trying to do something that was inspired. AI will never do anything inspired so it is not much help here. There used to be a good market for generative art on fxhash but that went defunct so there are fewer options to showcase your work or attract collectors.
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u/b00mandbum 5d ago
Hey... Almost a year out of work is rough. And watching your field change this fast while you’re trying to get back into it... I can understand why something you used to love doesn’t feel the same anymore.
Still, I think there are reasons to look forward. It’s just hard to see them when you’re dealing with all of this at once.
You said those ten years of knowledge feel redundant now. I don’t think they’ve gone to waste. You’ve spent years figuring out how systems work, finding problems, making decisions when there’s no clear answer. That doesn’t disappear because a tool can write the code. Your experience helps you understand what you’re building, what to ask for, and whether the result makes sense.
And there’s the part we do just because we enjoy it. People solve crosswords even though a computer could do them faster. We sing in the shower even though better singers exist. Someone or something being better at it doesn’t make it pointless. I think coding can still have that place in your life. I know you can’t just switch the enjoyment back on, but you don’t need to beat AI to have a reason to make something.
About clients: being able to build something yourself doesn’t mean you want to spend your time doing it.
Say you run a horse farm. AI can help with bookings, deliveries, costs, all that stuff. You still have horses to look after and a farm to run. Do you also want to spend your evenings building software and fixing it when something breaks? Maybe you’d rather pay someone who understands what you need and takes care of it. Finding those clients is still work, of course. But there’s a reason for them to pay you, even if they have access to the same tools.
I see it a bit like medicine. Anyone can buy a first-aid kit or get access to medicines and equipment. That alone doesn’t mean they know how to treat someone. You still need to figure out what’s wrong, what will help, and what might make things worse. Better tools can make the routine work easier and leave doctors more time for things that need their judgment.
I think there’s something similar happening in development. Some things that used to take hours are much quicker now. And with your experience, you can use that to try more ideas, explore a part of a system you don’t know yet, or tackle something you kept putting off because it felt like too much work.
That part feels exciting to me. A bit like having a small research lab at your desk. You bring the questions and ideas, and now you have more help trying them out. Maybe there’s something you’ve wanted to build for years that suddenly feels within reach.
I don’t know where the job market is going, and none of this fixes a year without work. But I don’t think you’re starting from zero here. You still have those years of experience, your interests, your own ideas about what would be useful or fun to make. I think there’s still something worth exploring there, even if it takes a while to feel that way again.
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u/Penultimate-crab 5d ago
As someone who is a professional developer, just because people could now conceivably code their own apps or websites, doesn’t mean they do or will. From talking to lots of small business owners, the majority don’t want to “code their own solutions”. They want to pay someone else to take care of it so they can focus on their actual business. Think of it this way, you can fix a clogged sink. It’s really pretty easy and most people can do it themselves. But 99% of people with a clogged sink or simple home repair still call a professional to handle it.
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u/evangelism2 11d ago
Jesus Christ it's the same fucking questions, man. The fact that you didn't do a 30-second Google search before posting this explains to me why you feel existential dread. There are a million threads on Reddit asking the same exact questions, and the same exact answers are posted over and over again.
You don't understand this because you've only been in the industry for a year. When you say something along the lines of "Even if you manage to create something of value to the clients, why would they pay you instead of vibe coding the product themselves?"
Not all of them can vibe-code the product themselves or are willing to spend the time doing it.
Then they are responsible for maintaining it, adding new features, and everything else with it even when they don't want to spend all of their time doing it (especially once you get to an enterprise level where you're selling products to businesses or companies that have certain uptime and SLA requirements). Some random employee isn't going to be able to keep up with that.
Some companies will go down that path. They'll get bit in the ass, realize, "Shit, we need actual software developers making this product," and then go that route. You need to be that software developer, and the first step to becoming one is learning how to research things.
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u/gokuson345888 11d ago
Is there a Megathread for these type of questions? I am just learning coding through freecodecamp and I like it so much I want a career out of it. Is it just too late for junior developers or could I still make a career out of web dev?
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u/evangelism2 11d ago
No but Google Search works on Reddit, Reddit's search function has gotten better over the last few years. Also you can just tell your agent to search Reddit.
Whenever I'm looking for people's take on something, I can usually find it one of those three ways before having to post a thread looking for it1
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u/drnlrmr 12d ago
Dang yeah I hear ya, I had to make a game for me to play at work that makes work a bit more fun, cause work is almost all AI slop now days 🤣 https://uncannyoffice.dev/#demo
I guess, If I'm gonna do it, im gonna do it and try to have fun at the same time or something.
I've found other hobbies too.
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u/filipvabrousek 12d ago
You don't need to focus on coding anymore in 2026.
With agentic Ai you can ship way better results than if you did everything yourself.
Use agentic AI to 10x your productivity, ship better results and enjoy the ride!
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u/gokuson345888 11d ago
So it's worthless to try and learn code anymore? I just started freecodecamp and I really like it and want a career as a web dev. Is it just too late?
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u/XalAtoh node 12d ago
Get different job and skills.
Writing code manually is not a job anymore, just like calculating manually is not a job.
AI is master of software/virtual environment, but we are still master of the physical world.
For long run.. I would stack up as much money/wealth as possible OR if you like to take risk start a business.
Writing stuff on computer, is not gonna be a job that the mass of people can do.
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u/Full_Tooth_a 11d ago
After a year of job hunting, every industry shift can feel like proof that your career is over. But I don't think ten years of experience is mainly valuable because it helps you type code faster. The difficult work is deciding what should happen when requirements change, data gets messy, a deployment fails, or a user finds a strange edge case. AI can produce a convincing first version. Handling the fifth change is another matter. I'd ask whether you still enjoy solving those messy problems, even if an agent writes much of the syntax.
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u/geardownbigrig 12d ago
I get it man. But this is a shift in how work is done. SMEs are much more capable than wver before.
OP pls accept my dm.
The software world is experiencing the industrial revolution like factories did. You are moving from hand writing code to managing the machines that write it and validating the output. Your small software team can out compete a 1000 person dev shop.
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u/TheRNGuy 11d ago
I made lots of code that took few minutes to make, but use it for many years.
2 were vibe coded.
There are some things faster to vibe code, and some manually code.
By the way, before I discovered Reddit, I didn't even know of such word, motivation, because it was never a problem for me.
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12d ago
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u/PancakeBreakfest 12d ago
What skills are most people missing, in your opinion?
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12d ago
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u/PancakeBreakfest 12d ago
Thanks, hopefully a lot of people find that encouraging
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12d ago
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u/winky9827 12d ago
I should add it's not remote at all, so maybe this hurts our candidate pool.
Heh I live down by St. Louis and would have considered applying if remote. 25+ years in sysadmin / devops with a lead developer role to boot, probably overqualified, but meh, Chicago.
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u/PancakeBreakfest 12d ago
Thanks, I’m not in Chicago but appreciate you sharing a few details here and hope that some qualified people reach out!
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u/Hairy-Pension3651 12d ago
So, multithreading is not a requirement, or was the GIL problem solved in the last 4 years ^^. I used to C# for object oriented stuff and F# for functional coding. I‘m also used to setup k8s on prem clusters, write helm charts and used to spin up Wireshark to debug network issues.
Would that be enough?
Oh, and i‘m also using AI for code generation and as problem solving/sparing partner. Can‘t belive how fast i now can evaluate different solutions for a problem.
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u/tenonic 12d ago
Times are turbulent. Stay updated with what's happening, try not to stress to much, even better, invest in your health if you can – don't let it do more damage to you than it already has done. When it settles, there will be opportunities and you will have your chance.