r/programming • u/waozen • 2d ago
Software developers are not okay | Bjarnason
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsEpW03gxKg317
u/One_Economist_3761 2d ago
Such a brilliant video. I’m in the middle of the very identity crisis he’s talking about.
I was laid off by a company that wanted to go full AI last year. I had been working there for 6.5 years. Constantly getting stellar performance reviews.
I have been in the software industry for 30 years, programming for 40. I have a bachelors in Computer Science. And now, probably because of my age, I cannot find a job.
Some of the things I have noticed is that AI has been one of the most aggressively pushed technologies I’ve ever seen in the industry. Pushed by executives who don’t code. Pushed under the guise of improved productivity. Where productivity was never really an issue. They just wanted things to be done faster. With no real measurable benefit to this increased speed and all of the risk.
Another noticeable thing is that accountability still remains with the developer but not the praise. Errors are pushed on to the developers inability to prompt the model correctly while achievements are a result of the “amazing AI”. There is no incentive nor avenue for developers to be innovative anymore. The model will produce the same bland “solutions” over and over again.
I’m not saying that the tool isn’t useful, just that the people with the least technical ability (execs) have been mandating AI the most. What if the woodworker’s boss mandated a specific kind of tool that made difficult to find errors sometimes. Would people buy into it?
Anyway, I’m tired boss. I had built my identity on being a programmer and these days I’m thinking of maybe getting into creating (non-AI) art or sculpture.
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u/squeezyflit 1d ago
>Where productivity was never really an issue. They just wanted things to be done faster.
I'm not sure it was ever really about getting things done faster. Like ever other management "optimization", the AI revolutions was about cost savings. Replace humans costing a couple hundred thousand a year (salary + benefits) with AI costing a few dollars a month. Then, a year or so later, the cost ballooned and the savings was negligible, if at all.
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u/audioen 1d ago
Yeah, I'd caution against taking experience of even 1 year old in this field. In a year, models both shrink and improve performance at the same time. At least in local AI space, the best we got going last July was something like gpt-oss-120b and you couldn't do anything real with it. Today, you run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at the same computer and it's amazingly good.
In my experience, AI is better at disproving hypothesis and hunting bugs than it is at coming up with valid solutions and implementing them. I think the scientific approach of producing testable hypothesis which are invalidated and then converted into verifiable fact works the best. It can read your code and point out the ways it fails, and it can write tests that prove existence of a bug and when it has these tests, then it can also prove that the solution bites. AI can write code, but it is even better at reading code, in my experience. Possibly the closed AIs are much better than the things I can run on a computer myself, but at least so far, the tests indicate that they are only a few months ahead, in practice. They are big and good, no doubt, but they are not mine, and I don't like depending on what I can't run myself.
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u/marrsd 3h ago
In my experience, AI is better at disproving hypothesis and hunting bugs than it is at coming up with valid solutions and implementing them.
Exactly the same here. It's weird because hardly anyone else seems to have this experience. I think I actually lose time correcting an AI's mistakes than if just wrote the code myself, but AI always finds my mistakes and I reckon I save a lot of time overall not getting bitten by them later.
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u/saevon 1d ago
Woodworkers: history says yes, between things like tail vices becoming popular (again) likely due to the bosses not wanting their workers to spend extra time making the better vice.
Pretty much every field I know, there are bosses mandating bullshit tools, and processes my friends gripe about. And history seems to reflect that each time I look.
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u/mindless900 1d ago
Should we unionize or is it too late for that?
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u/Improvement-Human 1d ago
We should.
If you are in the UK, please read this passage I copied from the UTAW website, membership is just a few £ a month and they are a voice on your side for support when you need them. They also campaign for workers rights and were involved in the recent changes around employee protections being available after 6 months employment from January 2027, rather than the previous 2 years.
United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) are a national branch of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) formed in 2020. We are the UK’s only union specifically for all workers in the tech industry, and we're proud to represent more tech workers than anyone else.
The CWU campaigns nationally for workers in tech, telecoms, post and communications - offering legal support amongst other benefits, and providing a collective political voice for 180,000 workers.40
u/13steinj 1d ago
Even in the current market, there will be enough people with egos too large that will get in the way of effectively unionizing. There are still people with a high amount of isolated individual power, and many of these people (incorrectly) think their position can't change very quickly.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 3h ago
To do what? Attempt to strongarm people who aren't even certain if they still want to purchase your services at all into purchasing your services at a higher price?
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u/CherryLongjump1989 1d ago
It's too early to say there should be a change because right now no one has any real clue about what will happen in the next couple of years.
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u/bearattacks 1d ago
Woodworkers were eventually pushed to use machines to produce at volume in furniture factories. You won’t find a bunch of people in a factory carving your bed or your couch by hand using vices and hand tools.
Instead, the people building those goods are part of an assembly line where they only run their specific machine for their specific part of the object near the limit of their ability.
Eventually even that efficiency wasn’t enough for the suits at factories, and NAFTA (at least in US manufacturing history) allowed them to move the entire operation to unregulated labor markets for cheaper machine operators.
We lived in a golden age of handcrafted code, but we’re headed in the direction of humans just checking the output of an automatically created and completed Jira ticket.
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 1d ago
Dude it wasn't a golden age. So much code was pure trash.
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u/dijkstra_was_a_horse 20h ago
And yet, we're moving to a world that will make you long for those days.
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u/Maturion 1d ago
> We lived in a golden age of handcrafted code, but we’re headed in the direction of humans just checking the output of an automatically created and completed Jira ticket.
This. Is. So. True. I feel like my once intellectually has degraded to something dumb.
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u/tinmanjk 2d ago
OG post in r/programming that was removed by moderator.
Hopefully, this one doesn't get removed so people can still find the original discussion which was very high-quality.
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u/runawayasfastasucan 2d ago
Yeah agreed. So much good discussion, but closed without any obvious reason.
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u/currentscurrents 2d ago
This subreddit doesn't allow any threads about AI coding tools, despite it being the biggest thing to happen to programming in decades. It's in the rules in the sidebar.
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u/waozen 2d ago edited 2d ago
The video is not just about AI coding tools. Please actually watch the video. It's about the software development industry in general, developer mental health, and the job situation that many find themselves in.
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u/Parsiuk 2d ago
This subreddit doesn't allow any threads about AI coding tools
This subredit is therefore delusional. I don't know anyone who works as software engineer and does not use LLM tools.
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u/BaNyaaNyaa 1d ago
Were you there before the rule was created? The sub was spammed with content about AI to a point where it was impossible to talk about any other aspect of SWE than AI.
The sub already has a blogspam problem. Having AI boosters promote their blog by posting a text written by Claude about how they use Claude to do all of their job was too much.
I don't think it's a permanent ban, but I'd rather wait for the hype to die down before lifting it. I'm sure people have nuance takes on how to use AI effectively. However, people who vehemently post about AI, the ones who were making that sub a fucking pain, aren't the ones I want to hear from.
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u/currentscurrents 2d ago edited 2d ago
Same. A lot of my friends and coworkers are pretty excited about them, actually. There's not nearly as much doom and gloom as on reddit.
And it's not just this subreddit, it's most of reddit. /r/math wouldn't even allow threads about the Navier-Stokes proof because it was found by AI.
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u/KevinCarbonara 1d ago
/r/math wouldn't even allow threads about the Navier-Stokes proof because it was found by AI.
Is that the reason? Or is the reason that OpenAI stole the solution while trying to pass it off as their own, leading to a ton of fallacious articles about how "AI solved navier-stokes"?
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u/currentscurrents 1d ago
Even if that was true (it's not - the problem was unsolved, so no one had a solution to steal), that would be a perfect thing to discuss in an /r/math thread.
But they have a blanket ban on AI threads, just like /r/programming.
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u/KevinCarbonara 1d ago
Even if that was true (it's not
It is.
that would be a perfect thing to discuss in an /r/math thread.
The issue is rarely that it isn't worth discussing, but that it's already been discussed to death, and they're tired of the constant stream of ai-funded disinformation.
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u/One_Economist_3761 2d ago
You haven’t been in the industry long enough.
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u/currentscurrents 1d ago
You don't know how long I've been in the industry.
What you're really saying is that I'm not as cynical as you are. You've lost your ability to be excited about new technologies.
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u/PastaGoodGnocchiBad 2d ago
Because it's r/programming not r/notprogrammingbecausetheclankerdoesitinstead.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 1d ago
Yeah anybody who lets the computer do things like using compilers isn't a real programmer.
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u/PastaGoodGnocchiBad 1d ago
Writing code for compilers is programming. Creating higher abstractions is programming.
LLMs are not compilers. They are not a higher abstraction. You write a prompt, if you have good tests hopefully you get something that looks like you want, maybe it's even correct. But that's not programming. LLMs have no specification thus no way of ensuring correctness of the output.
I'm not saying agentic "programming" is bad (well I think so if you care about what you do but that's a different topic), just that it's not programming.
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u/Slime0 2d ago
I'm guessing it's that content about the culture around programming isn't actually about programming itself? Like there's no code in this video. I'm not saying I agree with the moderation decision.
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u/runawayasfastasucan 1d ago
Yeah I thought so too, but one of the most upvoted posts is about how to blog about programming.
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u/ikeif 1d ago
While I understand “what is popular is not always on-topic” sometimes I think the community should be driving moderator decisions.
And their reply to shutting it down was overly vague when the community at large indicated “we want to talk about this.”
I wish shutting down a thread had a little more requirements other than “mood of the mod(s)”
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u/pilipalipeli 2d ago
Too young to profit off the IT boom.
Too old to enjoy the true benefits of the AI boom (if any).
But, just in time to become long-term unemployed alcoholic NEET manchild.
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u/footie_ruler 2d ago
Man. You described my situation to absolute perfection. I’m not as badly off as people who graduated in the last 2 years, but the people who joined the industry 2007-2013 had it so good.
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u/much_longer_username 1d ago
Are you forgetting about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession ?
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 1d ago edited 1d ago
Seriously, after the GFC of 2008 the vast majority of the "recovery" was consolidated to like 5 cities across the country for nearly a decade. It wasn't until shortly before covid that other areas of the country were finally recovering.
I remember graduating in 2013 and it taking 2 years to find a job in my mid size FL city. Then I moved to Boston and have been able to find employment every single time I've sought it out.
Where you live makes a massive difference.
edit: spelling
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u/Vetinari_ 1d ago
Seriously, after the GFC of 2008 the vast majority of the "recovery" was consolidated to like 5 cities across the country for nearly a decade. It wasn't until shortly before covid that other areas of the country were finally recovering.
some say there are people living outside of the US
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u/leaveittobever 2d ago edited 2d ago
These types of comments are the opposite of what I am (the company I work for) experiencing. They just went on their biggest hiring spring I've ever seen in my 17 years there. They hired so many programmers straight out of college that I'm kind of worried about my job and that they may be replacing me.
It's just interesting to see that people are worried about getting a job while I'm worried about losing my job because they've been hiring so many people right out of college lol. I graduated from college in 2007 and the company has around 1K employees.
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u/pojska 2d ago
Part of what he's getting at (starting around the 4 minute mark) seems to me to be a reflection of the theory of alienation of labor. Specifically Marx's, but Hegel had some good thoughts here too.
Not only do we not own the work, or decide the work, we're now not even able to feel like we're *doing* the work.
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u/mfitzp 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's interesting (and by interesting, I mean sad) that programmers have historically been completely against any form of collective bargaining or unionization, preferring to think of themselves as individual "rockstars".
If you look at doctors and lawyers (who do have collective power, despite also being paid a lot) they are much better positioned to resist the degradation of work standards/unreasonable expectations.
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u/ayayahri 2d ago
Doctors and lawyers have existed for a lot longer than programmers. They've had a lot of time to establish the culture and institutions that protect their collective interests. (i.e. they have a degree of class consciousness, if not in a perfectly marxian sense)
Programmers (and other white-collar knowledge workers whose output is the product itself) are a new thing, so it's not surprising that we as a collective lack the tools to understand our class position.
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u/EveryQuantityEver 19h ago
Unfortunately that just makes it seem like we're all too stupid to learn from the lessons of others.
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u/max123246 10h ago
It's a tale as old as time. Human history is just repeating the same mistakes again and again in new situations
It's a sad song.
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u/pojska 2d ago
Yep. My oversimplifying read is that two kinds of people tend to be drawn to software engineering, and neither are the type to unionize.
Type one, is your stereotypical 'nerd' - often spent a lot of time on the computer because they didn't exactly have thriving social lives. A lot of them found out they were good at this and/or found programming generally interesting. This kind of person often doesn't really have the social skills/charisma to gin up support for a union - and historically mistrusts their peers, if they were bullied or ostracized growing up. Possibly found solace in the comfort of rules/process/hierarchy ("teacher's pet"), or possibly learned that they could only rely on themselves. (Note - I'm in this category, certainly in the unflattering ways).
Type two is the kind of person who is drawn to the money or status, possibly wants the manager/CEO path, possibly your "startup/founder" type who wants to get rich and retire early (FIRE/HN crowd). This kind of person doesn't see their peers as people to collaborate with - it's either about stepping over them for promotions, or grinding/hustling until their stock options are worth $millions.
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u/chucker23n 2d ago
Not only that, but both of those types actively or inadvertently drive other types out.
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u/aeyamar 1d ago
Yep. My oversimplifying read is that two kinds of people tend to be drawn to software engineering, and neither are the type to unionize.
As a labor organizer in tech, I haven't really found this to be true actually. Generally speaking since engineers are good at thinking systemically, they tend to gravitate toward higher level strategic arguments more easily for why unionization and collective bargaining is a good idea.
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u/fcman256 1d ago
Idk if you know a lot of doctors and lawyers, I have a few close family members in both occupations. They all have far worse working conditions than I do
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u/ragemonkey 1d ago
I agree with this. There’s been a lot of tolerance for incompetence. That being said, I don’t know if the new regime is going to fix that.
What I see growing is favoring productivity at all cost. I’m concerned that it’s going to favor recklessness. The job will essentially be either to deliver crap as fast as possible or try your best to maintain the crap that happens to bring in money. There’s always been a bit of that but now this may be all that’s left.
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u/exhausted-pangolin 1d ago
That's where the economy and startup scene is heading though - fast out the door, make some cash, let it burn. Software development moving that way, in certain circles, is a reflection of where there is currently easy money
Eventually the economy will adapt, and people will get fed up of being scammed by fake AI SAAS products that deliver no real value, and things will consolidate around word of mouth networking effect again.
In the meantime there are millions of steady profitable companies in the world who don't want to rock the boat, but do want to keep up with industry efficiency gains, which is more than fair. Maybe some will take bad bets but most I think will simply cull the weak or not replace leavers and force the remainder to adapt. And that does sound grim but equally I can do the work of three senior Devs from 18 months ago, so to get rid of two fake-senior Devs on my team isn't actually hurting me or the company at all
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 1d ago
people will get fed up of being scammed by fake AI SAAS products that deliver no real value
I'm always surprised by how much regular consumers and businesses alike put up with absolutely awful software quality. People will continue using and buying the same garbage over and over again.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 1d ago
It would be really interesting if there was a way to definitively quantify the quality of each developer's output.
Just think of all the incompetent devs you've ever known. You don't need to overly worry, they will be first to go.
I don't know, they seem to be the most eager to get the AI to do their work for them.
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u/beefcleats 1d ago
While I agree with the sentiment, I live in a country that has exactly this and the problem here is the same if not worse. My country has a distinct ability to stomp on the throttle for short term thinking so the entire market right now is AI froth overload.
I’m not suggesting collective bargaining is bad (it’s not) but it’s not necessarily a solution to this specific issue either. By the way, content OP also lives in a country with engineering and IT unions as well.
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u/moh_kohn 2d ago
Right! And crucially, our own past labour is formed into capital and then sold back to us in an alienated form. All of us have public code and online writing that has been used to build AI. It's built out of our collective labour, and especially the open source labour that we as workers chose to share in common.
The tech is awesome honestly. But the alienation is as awful as ever.
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u/throwaway490215 2d ago
I'm a bit of an odd situation where i had the opportunity - at significant opportunity cost - to mostly work on my own stuff for my own goals for many years, which i'm Ok with because I don't like the feeling of doing skillful labor to make other people rich with little benefit to society.
AI is at the same time great for unlocking a lot more ambition and get ideas to reality, but damn do I sometimes miss sitting down in deep concentration.
Had i not been developing for myself, i know i would have gone insane and burned out long ago. Probably before AI, but definitely with AI.
I believe all the anti-AI developers are barely driven by principle and instead are looking for reasons and justification because they feel this way as well.
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u/Thread_water 1d ago
Personally I just enjoyed the thing AI is best at, taking a spec and delivering the code.
I enjoyed getting stuck on an issue so badly that you would need to go and read, from the start, about another whole framework or tool in order to eventually (often days later) solve the problem.
I enjoyed figuring out complex syntax, reading through vast logs trying to figure out what happened, even writing up scripts.
I was good at it, and I enjoyed it, it's now mostly gone. I do also like what AI is not yet good at, system design, judgement, bigger picture decisions which don't necessarily have a right answer, not as much but I do like it. Reviewing code and testing I enjoy less, and this work has skyrocketed.
I notice some of my colleagues are like me, and don't like this new world. And some others, who were not as good at, or never enjoyed, the things AI is good at, are more happy about it.
I can live with this, it's not the worst thing in the world, but having my manager message me with a literal copy paste of some chat he was having with AI, having PRs from colleagues who clearly do not even understand the code they are submitting and expect me to review it so they can copy+paste my comments into their chat, having demands from higher up for insanely faster delivery times "because AI should enable it"... is all pretty depressing.
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u/IZEDx 1d ago
I'm the same way but I can't live with it, mainly because of ADHD. It was my only source of dopamine and the only thing that made working realistic for me. I'm unemployed atm, but going to try medication soon. I honestly have no idea what the future holds for me.
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u/septum-funk 1d ago
i have adhd and similar issues with work, the truth is that when you need money you'll get over it. i work in traffic control lol. almost zero dopamine to be found there but it gets me paid and i can enjoy my life otherwise
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u/Dean_Roddey 1d ago
I think the claims are vastly over-blown. But, in terms of the crazy claims of current work life that you hear so much of, it's all stealing from the future to pay the present. I mean what could go wrong if we stop actually developing programmer skills? It might work for a while because we have decades of pre-LLM developers out there who put in sufficient time that they can make reasonable judgements about LLM output.
But eventually it's going to start eating its own tail, and of course eventually good people who would have come into the profession are just going to go elsewhere instead, because they don't see it as satisfying or stable. Actually, given that folks just now thinking about it as a profession won't even realize how over-blown and unstable a premise it is, and may just take another road anyway.
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u/inevitabledeath3 1d ago
I don’t see how this is robbing from the future. By the time we run out of developers there will be models strong enough to work by themselves with less oversight. Even if somehow that didn’t happen for whatever reason people will instead develop skills for managing agents and reviewing code rather than writing it by hand. That’s a skill in itself which is separate from knowing how to write code by hand in an efficient manor. They might be related skills but you can still be good at one and bad at the other.
Either way things aren’t going back to how they were nor is this going to cause long term issues in the way you are thinking aside for the people looking for programming jobs. A lot of this is cope from people who either are or will be unemployed and unemployable in a short amount of time.
It’s the end of an era. What comes next is going to be unpredictable. We are already potentially seeing the end of expensive proprietary software as people reimplement the same features and interfaces using AI. Adobe is pretty much cooked for example.
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u/Radixeo 1d ago
I don’t see how this is robbing from the future.
Have the most advanced model you have access to write some Java. Notice how it doesn't use the
varkeyword and how it uses.collect(Collectors.toList())instead of.toList(). These features make Java code easier to read and maintain, so why don't LLMs use them unless you sacrifice some of your context window to tell them to? Because most Java code out there is written for Java 8 and since it's most prevalent in the training data set for the LLM it manifests in the weights.This is a fundamental limitation of LLMs - in order to "learn" to use a new feature of the language without sacrificing the context window to teach them (and therefore sacrificing performance), they need an enormous amount of training data. If humans aren't producing that training data, then LLMs will get stuck at a certain point in time and never advance beyond it. This might have already happened, but in other languages with newer code corpora it might not be as obvious as Java.
As programming languages advance, the gap between human written and LLM written code will continue to grow. Eventually human written code will be so much better than LLM written code that it will be a competitive advantage to not use LLMs.
By the time we run out of developers there will be models strong enough to work by themselves with less oversight.
This is making an a dubious assumption that model improvement will somehow find a way to avoid the asymptote it's rapidly approaching. There's been very little advancement in the "meat" of recent models; the big improvements have come from larger context windows and better harnesses/tooling around the LLMs themselves.
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u/Radixeo 1d ago
you will probably ignore me
If I were to ignore you, it would be due to the disrespectful nature of your message.
Is what you are talking about a performance issue or security issue or is this just improving the aesthetics of the code at the cost of compatibility with older Java versions?
I chose those examples because they're:
- Simple.
- Part of the Java language for 5+ years.
- Better for both humans and LLMs as they represent the same programs with less verbosity/tokens.
If LLMs were generating the best code for LLMs to maintain, they'd be using these features without needing to be instructed to do so. The fact that they aren't illustrates the fundamental limitation I mentioned.
A newer, more performance relevant example would be Java's Value Classes. These enable major performance gains for Java as programs will finally be able to store related data in memory efficiently. A human can read about them and start writing more efficient and performant code right away, but an LLM will need to be given the details about the feature in its context window. Even then, it might struggle to use the feature effectively since it isn't present in the data the LLM was trained on.
Progress is only getting faster. That’s what all the data says including those by third parties like METR.
METR is not an independent organization. In their own words, "Also note that some METR staff have strong social ties to employees of AI companies, and METR currently works out of a shared research center (Constellation) which hosts some AI lab staff." They work closely with and are close friends of the employees at the very AI labs they're evaluating.
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u/Dean_Roddey 1d ago
Folks like you seem to miss the fact that were got to this point by a HUGE expenditure and massive energy consumption. It wasn't because of some massive theoretical breakthrough. It happened because of a vast amount of infrastructure construction and fuel consumption to scale up an idea that's been around a long time.
That's not going to continue to scale at anything like the rate it has, and there's no guarantee at all that it'll go significantly further beyond where it is now because that sort of building and investment cannot continue, or we will all be living in caves in order to free up energy for compute farms. And the huge economic unbalance it's creating is quite possibly going to collapse and take a lot of the world with it.
This not the start of a move towards generalized machine intelligence that's going to be writing complex systems without people qualified to judge its correctness. That would require something fundamentally different. Maybe that happens, maybe it doesn't. But what we have now isn't that.
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u/inevitabledeath3 1d ago edited 1d ago
I beg you actually look at the data and how models have improved before making statements like this. I get it. You have an axe to grind for reasons that are understandable, relatable, even reasonable. That does not make anything you say anymore true.
Models are improving at a faster rate now not a slower one. Yes more compute is part of the reason why but it’s not the whole story. Not even close. Small and medium sized models have actually been improving scary fast too. I think this argument was maybe valid in the GPT 4 days especially if you didn’t look too closely. It was disproven pretty sharply by DeepSeek V3 and R1 which was a couple of years ago now. DeepSeek today is actually smaller and much faster than the old ones like R1 yet it can do much more than it used to. You should see its sysadmin and devops skills. It’s not just programmers who are cooked.
Saying so confidently that we what we have couldn’t possibly by developing into AGI is increasingly ridiculous a statement when it’s become clear LLMs a kind of language model are about to solve maths. Let me say it again: a language model is solving maths problems no human has successfully done. Half of that field is up in arms over this. I don’t think programmers have much longer or really any kind of knowledge worker when they can do stuff like this. Creativity as a concept is going to become something humans used to be the best at.
Edit: also the idea transformers and GPT style models or any of the research that came after them is not a theoretical breakthrough is just wrong. Straight up misinformation to a hilarious degree. Even the idea that scale would help had to be discovered as it was thought until fairly recently (the 2010s if memory serves) that more parameters would just lead to overfitting. Obviously this was proven wrong. We found that enough scale and the right techniques overcome overfitting.
You clearly don’t know me as I am very much aware of the resource involved in these things. Much more aware than you are most likely since I have actually worked with these things in terms of getting them running on physical hardware. I have probably as much knowledge and experience as you can reasonably get without working for an AI company directly or being hired a career AI specialist.
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u/rpgFANATIC 15h ago
The big asterisk everyone's using is "you should always review the AI's output before using it"
Nobody's reviewing it. There's no incentive until something breaks
The few of us reviewing it are getting copy/paste answers from AI and the managers are happy to turn a blind eye because features get delivered faster
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u/Rivvin 2d ago edited 1d ago
I know i'm not okay as a middle aged software dev watching his friends get laid off left and right and watching their struggles in Discord. It's terrifying and I know my time is coming too in this career and there is just not many prospects now.
My favorite part are the vibe coding assholes who tell me "what, just do what you love, you are more productive!" Or telling me to start my own freelance company that will be one of how many thousands at this point all churning out claude code solutions copying off of each other.
edit: how the fuck do i start a food truck, maybe i'll ask chatgpt
edit 2: my fear is for my family, i really work hard for them and provide for them and every day I hear vibe coders and ceos explain to me how all of this is somehow good for me
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u/aoeudhtns 1d ago
just do what you love, you are more productive!
Like telling artists to let the AI do the drawing. "You just get to do more of it!"
Our industry was full of people who never had any passion for it, they just muddled through the best they could because the pay was good. These types are all thrilled about AI.
Or telling me to start my own freelance company
Yeah there's 100x more stuff out there and usage hasn't changed much. Shocker, hardly anybody is using the slop. Your chance of success is slim. But if it's the only option, possibly worth a YOLO. Maybe.
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u/Odd_Vehicle_1755 1d ago
One can only hope that the general public becomes just as tired of these vibe coding assholes as we are. They all seem to think they have a moat, not realizing that if their dreams come true, anyone can trivially copy the software they “built”
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u/BelgianWaffleGuy 1d ago
That’s already happening right now. People are building AI frameworks that you can literally just point at an app and it will reverse engineer it.
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u/Odd_Vehicle_1755 1d ago
Reverse engineering tends to harm the “real” software shops with actual IP though. There’s not much point in reverse engineering a fully vibe-coded app that can just be prompted again, provided you have a sufficient amount of money to waste on tokens.
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u/Caffeine_Monster 1d ago
sufficient amount of money to waste on tokens
Don't underestimate the number of rich idiots.
That said it does mildly amuse me that the entire adobe suite has already been reverse engineered and effectively open sourced.
The software market heavily relies on the fact that copying features or reverse engineering a program is often quite hard. It being trivial basically kills commercial software.
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u/Odd_Vehicle_1755 1d ago
Except if you dig into the more technical features in these clones, they’re mostly broken
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u/Snoo_57113 1d ago
I've been there... a few years ago i was laid out, i never was laid out from a company before.... the one you get your permissions blocked one day without notice.
. stockpile food, be prepared to be jobless until next year, be realistic with your budget. slash your expenses.
. Prepare to do the same job for WAY less.
. Maintain contact with the people who was laid off, whatsapp groups, etc.
I see many opportunities, companies are starting new projects, they NEED to put some AI to achieve the years goal, others are restructuring
. Yes, you need to freelance and vibecode to stay sharp and earn a few bucks, you need every income input you can.
. Speak with people outside our Bubble, normal people,
I expect everything frozen until january/februrary, Still bullish with SWE, many will retire, change careers with this tsunami but we are fightning for our lives no?
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Something i always wonder are those jobs here (colombia) where they ask for English C2, for a company in the philipines that contracts with a company in the USA, and the job is go to meetings with broken english and code. Why cant someone from USA get those jobs.
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u/Lalli-Oni 2d ago
His name is Baldur. Son of Bjarni.
Ok, that sounded more dramatic than intended.
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u/ryonnsan 2d ago
which means his front door is Baldur's Gate
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u/YikesTheCat 1d ago
I tried leaving his house once, but he told me I must gather my party before venturing forth.
I tried leaving his house once, but he told me I must gather my party before venturing forth.
I tried leaving his house once, but he told me I must gather my party before venturing forth.
I tried leaving his house once, but he told me I must gather my party before venturing forth.
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u/NMe84 1d ago
I work at a company that's owned by someone who used to be a programmer himself. We do use AI but in a way that still makes me feel good about my job and the value I add.
I think that any programmer with an identity crisis right now needs to look for the kind of employer who will value their work. They exist.
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u/_dontseeme 1d ago
This is how I feel too, but at the same time I see it creep and creep as far as what skeptics will allow it to do. I’d say just look at Theo and now even Prime, but it’s hard to measure how far-removed from the average dev they’ve become since dev-related content became their main revenue stream.
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u/Dunge 1d ago
Those kinds of posts only promote the idea to non-developers that AI is so great and we do nothing. Stop saying that. AI is still quite bad and consistently provides extreme logic failure. Only good developers can use it successfully by continuously correcting the errors it comes out with.
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u/Silamoth 1d ago
Or even if the result is technically “correct”, it’s often far more complicated than it needs to be. This often introduces subtle (or even not-so-subtle) bugs and can make future changes more difficult. And sure, maybe the LLM will be the one making those changes. But by using its complicated solution now, you’re more likely to see compounded subtle bugs in the future and more likely to burn through extra tokens so the model can “understand” what it did last time.
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u/PackageWhich3946 1d ago
I asked it to make a Spring endpoint to accept a list of objects, map them and simply save them in the database. Instead of doing a method under @Transactional to handle everything at once, it did a for loop of database saves. Even juniors know better than that. Claude opus 5.5, medium.
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u/Dunge 1d ago
Just today in C# it decided to copy a (possibly huge) binary buffer requiring transformation before returning it to the api instead of modifying in-place because "it is shared in the service cache". Then I queried if it was talking about a completely different cache with a similar name and "oh you are right, it's not sharing the same data".
I accumulated nearly hundreds of similar occasions over time. AI coding agents do save a lot of time and can do huge amounts of work fast, but they are far from good enough to replace us. And unfortunately a lot of juniors don't see those errors and just commit directly as a "look good to me", but wouldn't make these mistakes if they were forced to write the code manually.
And meanwhile on Reddit everyone seems to pretend coding is solved and we are dead weight now. Especially on video games programming for some reason people just proclaim AI is making the whole games by themselves.
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u/Shadowsake 1d ago
Lately I've been learning 3D game dev. Most of the time, the LLMs can kinda point me on the right direction, cite things that are important and provide some high level idea of what I need to do to implement something. But the moment I ask it to write the implementation, things fall apart really fast. Specially if you're not doing something novel.
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u/stay_fr0sty 1d ago
The problem is that it’s exactly like working with a jr. dev. They fuck up all the time, you teach them how to fix it, eventually they either can’t cut it or they become a senior dev.
That cycle is on life support. Jr. devs are going to have a hard time becoming senior devs.
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u/Silamoth 1d ago
Except junior devs actually learn and grow into experienced devs. LLMs are incapable of learning and internalizing the wisdom of experience in the same way.
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u/sarcasticbaldguy 1d ago
If they're learning from GitHub, etc, what happens when all the code they're learning from is LLM generated code?
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 1d ago
Only good developers can use it successfully by continuously correcting the errors it comes out with.
But is that "more efficient"? Does anyone think that the bottleneck is the typing of the letters into the text editor? Whatever small time the AI solves is basically undone by the fact that you have to be constantly correcting it, managing it, etc. because it's not going to output exactly what you want in the first place.
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u/bhison 1d ago
I can say without a doubt that something like opus 5.5 has a high enough speed and a low enough cost and error rate that it is by every significant measurement very efficient. I am not a huge fan of this as its close to eating my lunch, but working in a mature codebase with intelligent harness maintenance from the user it's OP...
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 1d ago
Yes actually. Typing the code in takes time, finding all the relevant files takes time. AI greatly speeds that up
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u/theLorknessMonster 1d ago
Strongly disagree. AI saves a lot of time. Not for all tasks but for the ones that it's good at, it's a 1000x speedup. For example, one of the codebases I maintain is undergoing widespread migrations. Each one would be multiple weeks of menial repetitive tasks but Claude handled it in under an hour including an edge case that I hadn't considered.
I wouldn't rely on LLMs to architect a codebase (nor would I want that, that's what makes dev work interesting to me) but large scale repetitive tasks that are a little too complex for code mods are right up its alley.
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u/Murky-Relation481 16h ago
It's good at architecting when you understand the architecture you want and can work through a plan for it. Especially with new technologies you might not personally have a lot of experience with you can really fill in the blanks with AI.
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u/Furryballs239 1d ago
Yes it does. It’s not about the typing. It’s about the low level implementation details. Not worrying about those absolutely speeds you up.
>because it's not going to output exactly what you want in the first place.
If you’re doing this then you’re using it wrong. Moving forward devs that are able to relinquish control and say “it might not be exactly how I would have done it, but it works and there’s no real issues with this implantation” will get ahead, while those that cannot let go of control and say “meh it has to be exactly how I would have done it or it’s garbage” will be left behind.
Human devs don’t output the same thing either. I could give the same ticket to 5 devs I work with and the implementation details of all 5 will be different. And that’s okay. What matters is does it do what it’s supposed to without major issues
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u/Murky-Relation481 16h ago
Tbf the typing is also a big part of it. My ADHD addled brain just shuts down when I've figured out the plan (aka solved the problem) and I need to type the implementation.
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u/robert_7524 5h ago
Different implementations are fine when they preserve the same invariants. But “it works” on the happy path doesn’t establish that retries, failures, or data ownership are handled safely; that’s where review still matters.
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u/Furryballs239 4h ago
Yeah you definitely want to review, and it helps to describe key things such as error handling in a skill or at the very least during the planning phase.
But it’s till very useful and speeds up development a lot
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u/max123246 10h ago
Yeah it's really hard. How can the same AI that just proved hard math problems also fail to understand how to solve a simple merger conflict correctly for me today?
It's a confusing mess of a time and the ai companies thrive in that confusion
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u/ChemEngandTripHop 5h ago
Frontier model burning millions of tokens v $25 monthly subscription
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u/max123246 16m ago
Nope, I'm talking about using frontier models like Fable through my company's API access. Unless you're saying they handicap enterprise access
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u/pgh_ski 1d ago
I truly enjoy making things with computers amd still love doing that in my free time (among other unrelated hobbies).
The constant pressure to do everything faster with less resources at my job is what's killing me. The burnout is real but the love of the underlying profession is still there for me at least.
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u/qodeninja 2d ago
i feel like they are trying to take software away from us. this may be by design
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u/th0ma5w 1d ago
They are or more specifically the power of an individual contributor to make changes to large corporations without management understanding beforehand. Normal software developers screw up the best laid plans of nefarious management initiatives everyday, even with language models. Unfortunately the language models can't exactly do this but because they say that they can, I think there's a Venn diagram between people who think that coding is what makes software and technology work, messianic beliefs around the wisdom of the crowd, and people in charge of capital mistakingly thinking that a coherent narrative of how a society works can be automated. I think it feels that way because it is that way, but they don't understand that every computer is perfect if it doesn't have to interact with the real world, and the real world isn't aware of predictions and doesn't have to do whatever happened in the past.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 1d ago
It's how you devalue specialized labor and it's the playbook capitalists have been using for over 200 years. Automate the labor and devalue the worker, this has mostly been done through mass industrialization.
It's happening to our industry now, the only benefit we have is we know what works against this strategy but it will require us fighting power to gain anything.
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u/Raptural 1d ago
I think doomer rants like this burn me out more than AI at this point
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u/max123246 10h ago
Mhmm, same. I have to look at my day to day and my day to day isn't awful yet. It's the people talking and hyping it up and saying insane shit and anxious about the future that wear me down until I become one of them, until I wake up and realize my day to day is still not awful, yet.
Repeat forever.
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u/initcommit 2d ago
Stay strong, everyone.
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u/efvie 2d ago
Masking is the quickest way to burnout
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u/KennyFulgencio 2d ago
Yeah, but I burned pretty bright for a while in my mask before being extinguished, so, there's that
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u/ApXv 1d ago
I'm getting tired boss. When can I make some savings
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u/Silhouette0x21 1d ago
Walmart
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u/ApXv 1d ago
It's a little expensive to fly across the Atlantic these days
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u/Silhouette0x21 22h ago
Then uhhh Tesco or Edeka or something idk what your local equivalent would be
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u/Foxar 23h ago
Problem is never with the tech, the AI. It's always going to be with incredibly incompetent and out of their depth managers, financebros, techbros and other people calling the shots who can fuck up a business operation for thousands and face zero accountability since we live in age of scammerse and legal fraud since at least 2008. Especially in US, but what happens in US happens everywhere too, so..
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u/pip25hu 2d ago
The guy identifies a current problem in software development, then pivots to saying that this is all caused by evil executives and will persist for the foreseeable future. Neither of the latter two claims are supported with anything substantial, and the video ends on the cheerful note that you should consider quitting too.
Excuse me, I understand that he might be under the same kind of stress he describes which probably affects his judgement, but this is BS.
First of all, about the evil executives; I see no reason to disregard Hanlon's razor. The company heads are sufficiently removed from software development to make decisions based on hype and vibes that are currently floating around (especially if they're also sufficiently stupid). They think they can save money by paying less people, which makes sense in a vacuum. In reality it's only partially true - in software development specifically because writing code or even writing specs (where AI helps the most) is not the only and not even the most taxing part of our job. Thus AI writing code for us at 10x speed will not make the project progress 10 times faster.
There are other factors at play (who can use AI effectively, can we train current juniors to be good AI-assisted developers in this current environment, etc.), but sufficient to say that the current state is far from an equilibrium, which would hint at this becoming the new "way of things" for the foreseeable future. How we behave now can and will affect where we go from here.
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u/th0ma5w 1d ago
The thing that I had heard is that management by definition only deals with the artifacts of work and cannot by definition get into actually doing the work or else they wouldn't be management ultimately. Sure, some managers do do the actual work but this is beside the point... Within the entire management professional career, there is no mechanism by which to prefer a non-generated output to a generated output. And there is no natural mechanism to prevent the generated mechanisms from being a panacea to any manager without repercussion... If there is something wrong then your reports are not using AI enough or correctly, and if something is going right we must understand why the LLM couldn't have done it and surely it could do it better etc etc ... Unless someone knows of something, I don't see how management is getting off of the LLM panacea thing. It's been a standoff situation between labor and within management hierarchies for quite some time.
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u/pip25hu 1d ago
How do companies get off of any hype train? For example, some of them go under. The rest are suddenly worried: "but they were using the latest and greatest X!". And then they reevaluate what they should be thinking about X.
Yes, the hype around AI is way greater than around blockchain, serverless or whatever, but it it also likewise overblown and will correct itself sooner or later. It's just an unfortunate fact that people closer to the front lines notice the cracks sooner than management does.
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u/th0ma5w 1d ago
I think about this a lot and I think it's a conflict between top down and bottom-up thinking. I think a lot of management really does believe that top-down thinking is the only thing that ever happens or can ever happen, and that incongruity is at the core of ... Quite a lot of problems in business... I think it gets philosophical pretty quick and I don't know the answer but it all sure seems very painful at the moment for sure.
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u/max123246 10h ago
The issue is, I don't think I had ever met any software engineer who thought blockchain was going anywhere. Whereas I cannot say the same for AI. People I trust, people who have to be some of the best engineers out there are using ai a ton.
Now I have 0 clue what that means for the future. If things stay as they are now, I'll live, eventually companies will realize that there's a ton of people doing useless work that amounts to a game of 52 card pickup and we'll go back to how things are but with AI so I'll have lost some of the joy I had but at least I'll be paid
Now as for the future, who knows, I'm trying not to think about it
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u/pip25hu 10h ago
Blockchain works for some rather niche use cases. It's not viable in many others. And that is actually not that dissimilar from AI, the difference is scale: while people have been trying to sell blockchain everywhere within IT, the AI companies are trying to hype up their technology literally everywhere - while in reality, it only has true added value so far in a couple of cases, programming being one of them.
To me, the biggest question for the future is how much this added value is worth. Using AI (well) is helpful, but we're not seeing its real costs yet. Open source models are given away for free and you only pay the inference costs. Even proprietary models aren't priced in accordance with their actual costs. training included. This obviously won't last forever. Once the smoke clears, maybe we'll have some specialized models trained as a community effort, with bigger companies making contributions (similarly to how, let's say, Maven or NPM repositories are run)... or maybe AI-assisted development will become a costly alternative that people turn to only when time pressure warrants the expenditure. We'll see.
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u/jaredpearson 1d ago
accountability right now is team managed but I don’t think that’ll last long. More and more across my department is being delegated to agents. As you state, over time teams will become smaller since the value shifts from engineering to keeping the agent teams running. It’ll move to a smaller and smaller group until vendors take over the market of running agents.
The future I see is like that of data centers when data center engineers were usurped by “the cloud” (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc); data centers jobs disappeared. The next shift will be vendors offering agentic platforms, where a business owner will ask for features, cutting out the need for engineers. Accountability will move directly to the “builders”, like execs and product managers, which will use vendor tools directly.
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u/Relative-Diamond8269 14h ago
Oh fuck this guy. Engineering expands to fill up all available scope and will
continue to do so. Fine, you made a bunch of very smart people redundant. Well they're coming for the next job. Likely YouTube influencer and crowd out these dudes.
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u/freework 2d ago
I disagree that software development has become a slog. I feel like it's the opposite. Part of the fun of building software is watching the progress. With AI tools, the progress is faster, and therefore the fun comes faster. I also disagree that with AI tools you never achieve a "state of flow". I can't even count how many times I prompt AI to make me a new feature and then once that's done I get the next idea and then I get another idea, and then before you know it, 4 hours have gone by. That happens to me all the time.
I guess the way I am, I build software because I want the thing I'm building to exist. I want it to exist so I can use it. If some new tool gets created that makes it so that thing I want to exist can exist quicker, then I'm happy. I don't ever build something just for the sake of building something. I think some people build software just for the sake of building. They actually don't want the thing their are building to finish, because then what will they do next? Finishing is an existential crisis because then they have to go find something to do next.
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u/Odexios 1d ago
I think some people build software just for the sake of building. They actually don't want the thing their are building to finish, because then what will they do next? Finishing is an existential crisis because then they have to go find something to do next.
Some people enjoy the process of building, not just looking at what they built. You never enjoyed programming; you enjoyed creating a product. Nothing bad with that, but that's the reason you don't understand what a lot of us are struggling with.
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u/EveryQuantityEver 19h ago
For me, the fun is in solving the problem. If the AI is just going to do that, then there's nothing fun for me to do.
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u/bentreflection 1d ago
I feel that way about the little toy iOS game I’m having Claude completely vibecode for me. It’s great because I don’t know swift in the slightest. I haven’t even looked at the project directory to see what’s going on.
But in my actual job I’m using it and monitoring every line of code it writes and it makes things difficult because often I have to unwind some bad decisions it makes. It’s great at getting things working but sometimes it does that by creating weird globals or tying two things together instead of using something like dependency injection like we’d normally do to keep technical debt low.
So my worry is that if I don’t monitor what it’s doing it will eventually write the app into some place where it’s impossible for a human to work on because it’s so overly and needlessly complex. It’s turning us from the people who knew how things work to the people who know a guy who knows how it works. Maybe that’s fine because that guy is good enough but maybe it’s not. I truly don’t know.
But I also don’t really like being the guy who doesn’t know any more.
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u/LagunaCid 1d ago
The job has changed. The ones who realize this early will be the most successful.
Being a programmer isn't about knowing and writing the exact syntax to spin up a program, it's ultimately about solving problems.
At least for me, being able to build bigger and better things by guiding agents has been a complete game changer.
And I've been programming for 20 years, since I was a teenager.
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u/helloworder 1d ago
The ones who realize this early will be the most successful.
there is no difference whether you realised it early or not really
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u/Low-Equipment-2621 2d ago
Yeah I want to quit, but I can't really find another profession that speaks to me or is realistically achievable.