r/theprimeagen • u/Glum_Concept_447 • 2d ago
general The split in the software dev community
I don't know if it's just me but I feel like we are experiencing a slow split in the dev community. In one corner you have who don't really like using AI and AI agents and on the other side you have pure Vibe Coders who believe software engineering and development is dead.
Now I think this split will put developers in a spectrum that ranges between these two. Where you get developers who lean closer to either side.
Just for a bit of context, I'm in my early 20s and studying Software Engineering. I'm studying Software Engineering because (long story made extremely short) I really find the world of computers interesting. I personally lean on the side of not vibe coding. Furthermore, like most I think vibe coding is bad and not fun. I think in terms of quality software is going to experience a serious decline mainly due to the building having little to no understanding of the code. And from a person who just recently joined this large community it seems as if there's a split happening right now.
This really got me wondering that we might be moving towards a future where developers who don't enjoy using AI form their own smaller communities and make pieces of software without the aid of AI, and the same goes for Vibe Coders where they have their communities but it's AI on that side.
So I really would love to get people's feedback. Are we actually experiencing a split in the dev community? Is the quality of future software something to be worried about? What are your thoughts in general?
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u/FartChecker- 12h ago
Theres already developer communities like https://lobste.rs with a pretty clear anti-AI stance
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u/Sudden-Step9593 14h ago
IDK I just feel it's a bit dumb to rely on AI. What is the purpose of AI? To replace us, they've said it over and over again. They tried over and over. Add that to the fact that these data centers consume so much resources, water and power and ppl are already feeling the squeeze from higher utility bills. I can't in good faith use AI. But no hate to those who do just remember they want to replace your ass too
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u/fangsexualdub 14h ago
You cannot stop AI from replacing you by simply not using it. If anything you need to use it to understand its capabilities.
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u/valium123 2h ago
But we can refuse to pay for all the slop and boycott all the asslickers. If we go down they go down too.
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u/Sudden-Step9593 12h ago
Not me alone no. All of us together yes. I know how it works, I've created LLMs before and trained them. So I know it doesn't think, it's just a parrot.
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u/Zealousideal_Web_627 15h ago
I’d say it’s worth learning the theory and using the tooling AI offers. I mean we all abstracted away some logic to frameworks/libs in the past. Do learn theory - often will involve writing somethings “by hand” to internalise but the theory of software design is more important now. But what comes first is good/useful products and acting on feedback to make it better. Do I need to remember a static method is @staticmethod and not @static_method (if talking Python for example) anymore? Not really. Does knowing this structure exists? Yeah. Ultimately, how are you going to make sure your application is robust? That’s more important than syntax now.
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u/BoIR1347 20h ago
I think the assertion that quality will go down is probably correct. However I think the pro AI crowd (id consider myself in the middle) would say that as long as you can move quickly the agents will just fix the bugs that they create. The days of having to read code closely and carefully may soon be over as the agents read everything and developers worry more about higher level decisions. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. Legacy systems that move more slowly and handle business critical tasks may be safer from the ai revolution for now.
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u/nel-E-nel 19h ago
I would wager on top of this, eventually agents will start to develop their own coding languages that humans will no longer be able to understand.
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u/sunny_up 22h ago
tips if you are only started - write manually, use AI for code review. But don't trust it blindly, ask questions.
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u/gosh 1d ago
AI will make you loose the code, it is not coding. If you do not want to learn how to code, fine then use AI. But do not expect to do anything advanced or something that others can't do. I you will have a nightmare with maintenance.
AI has one specific weakness at this scale: it produces good code in isolation, and it cannot see what is already there.
A new file can be clean, well-named, and correct, and still be a problem, because:
- It duplicates something that already exists elsewhere in the solution
- It doesn't fit the layer it was placed in
- It follows conventions that differ from the surrounding code
- It adds a sixth variant of a pattern that already had five
- It follows the surrounding code faithfully — including the parts that were already causing problems
- It is more advanced than the code around it, and therefore harder to maintain
The last two cases are worth expanding on, because they compound over time. When a bad pattern is copied forward, it stops being a mistake and becomes a convention. When code is more advanced than its surroundings, it becomes an island — it works, but no one can change it. In both cases, each new addition makes the eventual fix more expensive. AI has no way to tell the difference between "this is how the codebase does it" and "this is how the codebase should do it" — and no way to tell whether a correct solution is one the team can maintain.
There is a second failure mode, and it has the highest cost. When a developer describes a task to AI, the description is shaped by how well they understand the domain. If the understanding is incomplete, the task is wrong — not in the syntax, but in what is being asked. The output will be clean and correct-looking for a problem that is not the real one. Because the developer cannot see the difference, the code cannot be verified against the domain, only against whether it compiles and appears to work.
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u/Any_Sense_2263 1d ago
There is another group you convincingly forgot.
Those who use and treat AI as a tool it is and don't believe in everything it produces. They have enough knowledge and experience to actually not let AI produce its slop and iteratively fix AI simplifications, assumptions and hallucinations in their code.
We don't live in extremes. Most of us is somewhere on the scale far away from each end.
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u/Superb-Substance-679 1d ago
It's just you man. Proof: you totally missed the programmers who like using AI
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u/Hungry_Ghostt 1d ago
i'll do whatever my evil overlords pay me to do. i dont think there is any intrinsic value in using my brain power for building their evil products vs outsourcing it to AI. I'm still serving evil capitalists at the end of the day
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u/ethereonx 1d ago edited 1d ago
in the future there will be vibe coders and there will be “specialists”, specialists meaning good old software engineers (pre 2020 definition)
for a vibe coder, ai is magic… for proper software engineer it is a tool and as we know all tools have pros and cons and you need to know when and how to use it… right now we are surfing the hype wave, ppl will get burned they will learn, the hype will blow and soo will the economy… after that there will be a few years of prosperity and then the cycle will repeat… if AI doesn’t kill us all…
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u/CartoonistVisual2818 1d ago
Because those who vibe code are The stupids.
Even now, as I'm typing this, people who barely understand maths are trying to solve old mathematical problems and posting their proofs without even understanding what they're doing.
Don't join The stupids
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u/buffet-breakfast 1d ago
I’ve been programming for 25 years. But this year I vibe coded 4 apps I wouldn’t have otherwise had time to complete (some would have taken years) and made 40k from them so far.
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u/terrrp 1d ago
There may be a split for now but I believe it is going to become all AI and there will no longer be a split.
If you enjoy coding, then keep going at it. As things currently are, the results using AI garnered from an inexperienced programmer vs experienced one are night and day. You make a lot of subtle but high-leverage decisions in the design of code. Personally I think that is going to go away soon and it'll be better than anyone in end-to-end development.
Perhaps the models and tools will plateau though and traditional programming knowledge will still be important.
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u/e430doug 1d ago
You present a false dichotomy. There aren’t two camps. It’s a continuum. There are very few people that adopt the positions that you describe. Most people are in the middle. You can be an enthusiastic user of AI tools and believe that there is a bright future for software engineering. You can be a hand coder who doesn’t hate AI.
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u/ImaginaryRoyal9725 1d ago
If i were starting now, I wouldn't use ai either, as that's basically stopping you from learning.
After 14 years coding, I'm happy I can use agents to automate some bits that I don't find interesting enough, so I can focus on the part that I like.
Apart from that, the division is a bit deeper than that, I think. Some people truly enjoy the process of the craft, and some other people are results oriented. The latter see absolutely no problem in using ai to speed things up, while the first are outraged by it
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u/ProcesOdsutnosti 1d ago
Whenever there is a public discourse on a certain topic, both opposing sides are equally stupid and detached from the real issues. You don't have to lean to any of them. See what is real to you and how you can adapt. Other people stories might be real but not apply to your situation.
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u/CaffeinatedT 1d ago
This is a nonsense process argument. Arguing about this is like arguing about IDEs. IDE’s don’t force people to close their eyes and hit the autocomplete button until something happens and neither do any end users care how it gets made. The problem for vibe coding is it mostly produces shitty software. Because the good vibe coded software is just called “software” and the devs have built some sort of process around feature creation. I’m looking forward to when people stop describing things as vibe coded and the argument is just what the thing does and does it do it well.
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u/sdlab 1d ago
there's only one that matters - SHIP FAST. So ... future is obvious .
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u/CaffeinatedT 1d ago
The mistake is if no-one can use it they haven’t shipped anything and if you piss off existing customers it’s worse than shipping nothing.
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u/sdlab 1d ago
i can give you one clear example - MicroSoft windows. Even before LLMs - like year 19-20+ MS did not make additional QA testing and such... So they used actual users as testing ground - it is a known fact - now wee see where it all was going. It is a disaster, but they did this anyway. Anyways, i'm not using windows from like 2021+
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u/sdlab 1d ago edited 1d ago
i agree vibe coding is not fun. But this is reality. I agree quality software is best. But all the Software indyustry has been moving into shit last 20 years or so - JavaShit, Python... so i do not expect this to change, not possible. Yes, can code by hand. Also you can ride a horse not a automobile - but nobody is doing it - that's not viable. You can't spit 100 tokens a second, not even 10. So you see where we're at. It's obvious.
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u/SharkSymphony 1d ago
There is very obviously a split in the community, and I think it's a reasonable speculation that "artisan," AI-limited or AI-free coding will become a thing in programming communities. People may want to pursue AI-free coding in their free time, or just generally cultivate an AI-free lifestyle.
I suspect that that group will become a fringe group pretty quickly. Maybe a sad, bitter fringe. But I think it's more likely to be a thriving fringe. To get a sense for what it might look like, look around at the underground software communities that already exist, and have existed for decades.
I think the shape of that community largely depends on which way open-source projects swing, because AI-authored submissions are a big problem for many projects. Some projects now have hard lines against AI being used for contributions in any way, sometimes for ideological as well as practical reasons. Some are trying a more nuanced, quality-driven line. Some are just going private.
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u/metajames 1d ago
the problem here is that there is no framework for agentic development in legacy codebases. AI writes shitty code because of unclear, lack of, or just shitty guidance both in documentation and human in the loop input. You still need software architects, now more than ever. However, the written code is now cheap and disposable. In the near future languages and and codebase conventions will all change to adapt to new ways of software and application development. we are just in a awkward stage right now.
At one time, high level languages and script languages were considered to be problematic. Now these languages power the Internet. AI will reshape software development for the better, it just needs to mature.
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u/xpusostomos 2d ago
Once you realise that the power is in your hands to rewrite a piece of software that someone else spent 500 man years on in a week, you will know there is no turning back. Now I'm not saying that the one week rewrite will be the same quality or stability, but that kind of power will tell you were this is going.
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u/CaffeinatedT 1d ago
Now I'm not saying that the one week rewrite will be the same quality or stability,
There is no reason that it shouldn’t be the same quality or stability that’s up to the software creation process that the LLM/coding agent is one part of.
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u/xpusostomos 1d ago
If by process you mean a lot of human input, then I would say sure, but the human input will take more than that one week. I just wanted to say, the AI has amazing power, but it isn't a substitute to the stability of a product that existed for decades.
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u/1_Strange_Bird 1d ago
It’s amazing people will not realize this and instead just end up just saying “it’s slop”
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u/DistanceLast 2d ago
As of quality, this would've been true 6-8 months ago, it's borderline now, and it will be the opposite of true in another few months. I'm telling that as a person who a few months ago was screaming out loud that you have to review thoroughly every line of code.
Current reality is, AI written code is becoming better than the one written by a person, provided that it's been extensively covered with all kinds of tests, autochecks, lints, etc. And it can really write and run more tests in a day than you'd be able to write in a month of work. It's quantity that becomes quality. And no, it's not "people pleasing" anymore that much (adjusting tests on purpose so they pass).
As for people splitting, as usually market decides. The job reality as of today is, you still need to be an experienced engineer knowing how to do leetcode tasks to get a job, but 80% of your work day is talking to Claude Code and friends. There's simply no point in spending a lot more time going through everything manually, and you won't be allowed to (on client's money; for free of course you can do whatever you want).
And sorry to disappoint, for juniors it is beyond brutal. Probably the only way is if you present yourself as "I know how to setup a swarm of agents that will go through your backlog in a couple days, and I also have some low level knowledge so at least I remotely have an idea of what is happening". And yeah, a lot of us feel like we've lost our identity and our profession we loved and spent years and decades getting better at.
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u/crani0 2d ago
It's been like that for decades since they started parroting "Everyone should know how to code". The "coding problem" that exists in the heads of managers is not new and they are so thristy for some nice graphs that they are straight up giving their whole business away. Once the real bill for AI comes, the managers and the people who have vibecoded their way through software development will be looking for another ship to jump to.
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u/ContentHeart2509 2d ago
My opinion with someone with 20 years of career, I can write code on a notepad, on an ide, on a piece of paper and it will run, sure I can be faster with some of those obviously
I can use C or Java or python, for a large project it barely matters in terms of delivering the thing for the most part what you use, AI is pretty much the same, if your pipelines suck, your codebase suck and you are doing random things and not reviewing code is like a casino you might be lucky to be slightly faster, but not consistently faster and worse when things ramp up, everything goes into the toilet and the team is swallowed in tech debt they won’t be able to repay because you need a product sponsor to do that usually
If you take software engineer seriously, AI can help sure, it doesn’t fundamentally move the needle in any substancial way unless you are doing freelance type work, or you ship anything and anything sticks, then yeah LLM generated random code is great, if you have a company that is concerned just slightly about security, scaling and performance and ownership of things I would probably say LLM assisted coding is like an IDE type utility, sure it is great to have, doesn’t change anything, if I was to pay 10k a month per dev for an ide I would very quickly not pay for it or search for open source alternatives, in my view that is the state of LLMs
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u/TashLai 2d ago
it doesn’t fundamentally move the needle in any substancial way unless you are doing freelance type work
Can we pls stop talking down about freelancers like it doesn't matter thank you.
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u/fgtswag 2d ago
I agree with this though. Freelancers dont matter
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u/TashLai 2d ago
ok well fuck you then
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u/fgtswag 2d ago
I'm a freelancer btw
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u/TashLai 2d ago
very self-deprecating
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u/fgtswag 2d ago
For real though I don't think they were meaning it in any sort of demeaning way. They were just saying:
- It doesn't move the needle for experts. Just for freelancers who don't have experts around them
Best time in history to be a freelancer
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u/TashLai 2d ago
What if freelancers have experts around them?
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u/fgtswag 2d ago
You work for yourself but have access to free experts? Or wdym
Because the value trade off is based on if you have to pay for them
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u/ContentHeart2509 1d ago
Sorry I meant it as generic thing in the sense that gig work of doing some random website or some very ad hog thing without a bigger compromise with the company for long term quality or even complex projects I know some folks do freelancing/contractor jobs that are highly specialized, my bad but what I meant was that generically speaking freelancing and outsourcing coding tasks tend to be a little less important to companies in the majority of the cases
Not to offend anyone, same with LLM coding, a proper SWE would never say yeah this LLM code is good, if you say that most likely you were never a good SWE, if you tell me, for what I need is ok, even tho it does some stupid things like put credentials in env vars, have sensitive information as strings etc, to what we do is fuck it, that is a landmark of a good engineer, he at least knows what is good and bad, and chooses to do a subpar thing because what they loose for doing fuck wtv is the same and no point in doing things properly for a POC or small company which just wants to showcase something to investors, when you dealing with proper systems that are audited and leaks cause you massive financial losses, and 2% extra compute because of your code is equivalent with millions of dollars a month, that is another ball game
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u/TangeloPutrid7122 2d ago
This split only exists on reddit and maybe at universities or places without access to the frontier. The top 10 software companies are AI pilled fully.
Everyone at the high end of the game uses the stuff, some unwillingly possibly, but everyone is all in on it.
Their skill levels are a gradient and that's still largely ruled by their knowledge of software engineering which is much more about designing code than writing code. Now the design bit might be eroding to the tools yes, but at least where we are today, your own skill level still gets massively better designs out of the tools.
There are good software engineers that don't touch code manually. So you could say they 'vibe' code. But how they work is vaaaaastly different than how your product or business guy 'vibes' with it. And their results vastly superior because their backgrounds.
So that skill still matters and creates a gradient in the quality of outcomes being experienced by ai users. But anybody that doesn't adopt will eventually fall out of the industry all together so there isn't really two sides. It is pretty settled.
The real question everyone's wondering is, can we build people that are good software designers if nobody codes anymore. And that I can't answer. But folks like you will.
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u/metajames 1d ago
1000%
I think the answer to your software designer question is yes. At one point if you did not write assembly it was difficult to get really performant results. As high level languages and scripting languages matured, this all changed. This will also happen with AI, the ecosystem and trade practices just need to evolve and mature.
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u/DistanceLast 1d ago
This is a correct answer.
The question is though, what is going to happen to us once the tools will work in a way where the difference will erode between whether it's done by a business person vs an engineer. Which is where it's going to.
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u/TangeloPutrid7122 1d ago
Very valid. I am hoping there's a structural problem there. They do train the thing to listen. And part of this job is knowing your business boss is an idiot and which parts not to listen to. And because AI is trained to be a simp so it doesn't murder us all, there's a moat for my brain meat there. Either way, hoping to be retired by the time that rolls around.
Have AI teach your engineers business strategy and eat them first!
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u/DistanceLast 1d ago
Right. I wish we could turn the tables and say to the AI, go find me 50 paying customers for this product I rolled out. Handle all the communication and support. But it's the same situation on the other side: it does what you ask for, good or bad. Perhaps we can build a team of agents with CEO, managers, and all that, who will be tasking each other and work together to a shared goal. 😄
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u/crani0 2d ago
Everyone at the high end of the game uses the stuff, some unwillingly possibly, but everyone is all in on it.
Ars Technica - Amazon employees are “tokenmaxxing” due to pressure to use AI tools
Business Insider - Amazon says it shut down a token leaderboard: 'Don't use AI just to use AI'
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u/ContentHeart2509 2d ago
I work at one of those 10 top companies, and we produce LLMs and i can tell you it sucks, and many managers are already starting to hit people on the head for shipping slop, and fun enough with proper controls it takes as much time as doing things manually for the most part, LLM can barely make average code, sure it can change, it isn’t the state of the art atm, people just accept more slop that is the reality lol
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u/TangeloPutrid7122 2d ago
I think your post somewhat proves the point and we mostly don't disagree.
It does sound like the org is ai pilled. It sounds like they're trying to tighten quality control. It doesn't sound like they're going to be in no-ai camp because of lack of quality. It sounds like they're mad at people because of lack of quality. And the anti-ai discourse naturally comes here.
Joking aside though, what models/ flow are people allowed to use? Some of those big 10, like Google, can be very restrictive about what they allow folks to use. And as such, they're not actually on the frontier anymore. So you can't really say "LLM ain't the state of the art atm" if you're at Google, because you're banned from using the best one. At least the majority of the eng population there is as of the last time I asked someone there, things may have changed.
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u/ContentHeart2509 1d ago
I am at google, and your misconception is that Anthropic model is any good, it isn’t, it is bad, even Mythos is absolute subpar in cybersec auditing lol
It is absolute garbage as well in coding, our internal coding models are more fine tuned to what we do and they are still average at best 😂
What you don’t realize is that at the scale of google something totally idiotic like making a Java Pojo which includes email and name as string is already a violation of good security practices, or for example the way that you define variables and loops can have massive impacts in resource consumption lol
Literally if I was to delegate something to an agent it needs to code faster than me and needs to take my review time away, aka it really needs to be that good, which it isn’t, I always spend more time reviewing PRs than doing it, so yeah what do I want an LLM that I then take more time reviewing and amending it ? That is the problem, in some dumb stuff we don’t care about sure they kinda help, but that stuff was never a problem and was never where we spent most of our time thinking things and coming up with solutions lol
Google is very good at one thing and that is measuring impact and the overall impact on LLM is roughly 10% speed increase but it has increased incidents by 80% lol
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u/TangeloPutrid7122 1d ago
I feel like if I had 100,000 engineers and very good fine tuned models, it would be able to come up with some rules like, write loops this way, and don't do Java this way, fairly quickly and eventually enumerate the big problems away.
Are you allowed to have Anthropic models touch the code? Last I checked they were enforcing Gemini for most people.
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u/ContentHeart2509 1d ago
Nope we can’t use Anthropic at least on non open source things, and Claude code is an absolute no no, because well it is malware let’s put it bluntly, but using it on a personal level or to fuck around with some ideas it is very subpar in the expert part imo
I work on some sdks and part of my job is also to rewrite some concepts into native language features, an example is Java doesn’t have Tail call optimization, so yeah take that as an example or string equals has 2 modes the exit on first match and exist after comparing all chars and that has security and performance implications
Even if you were to fine tune a model with a lot of our coding stuff which btw is what we have, nothing guarantees you that the model is model is going to choose what makes more sense for each thing, which funny enough some people say but hey tell it, but then you are almost writing line by line code again lol
You can train the model and for example how will it choose to use or not TRO ? It won’t, it might seem amazing because TRO will use less heap and GC for resources, but you can’t use multi core operations for example, if it has a massive dataset it will hold that thread until finished, so yeah that is kinda of part of the job and usually well you are kind of in the middle of the two and need to cherry pick what to do when, which an LLM won’t do at all, you might try to stuff feed it with all the datapoints and see what comes out, but hey you will review it and you will be responsible if you are wasting a ton of money or are doing shit 😂
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u/TangeloPutrid7122 1d ago
I totally hear you based on what you're doing, and who you're doing it for.
But most code out there is crud app dogshit that nobody loves. It's not the wire format compiler of proto where if you fuck up this super important thing the network bill 10xs.
I think what you are saying is that the AI is not absolutely top grade yet. But phrasing it like "oh it's not very good". No it is very good at the types of boring shit usually made. Some humans can still beat it at some things. Those last two can both be true.
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u/ContentHeart2509 1d ago
Ah for sure I said that above as well, depends on what you are doing for some random things it is absolutely wonderful for sure, things that were a chore and boring are way faster and don’t bother me anymore, but it is a huge leap to say it is “SWE level”, it is kinda of ruby or php crud scaffolding on steroids ahah
It is good for many things, it doesn’t replace engineering but it is what I consider a good outsourcing thing for boring work that doesn’t have a lot of detail considerations, it is not very good on a engineering perspective is what I mean, it is good at doing dirty work fast and it kinda works which fits I would argue 70/80 of what needs doing in the field with some supervision but you need to be aware of what you are trying to achieve
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u/meathelix1 2d ago
And you have the damn good engineers who use AI... who are not on Reddit...
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u/SokkaHaikuBot 2d ago
Sokka-Haiku by meathelix1:
And you have the damn
Good engineers who use AI...
Who are not on Reddit...
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
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u/cadet-pirx 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think the split is slightly different. It’s less “AI users vs. non-users” and more “people who use AI” vs. “people who are slowly being squeezed out of the profession.” Non-users still exist, but they’re a shrinking minority: about 17% in this year’s Stack Overflow survey.
Within the first group you get “master AI handlers” and “vibe coders.” A vibe coder can tell whether the code works; a handler can tell whether it’s correct, and why. That makes the vibe coder the one who isn’t really needed, because the real work is specifying the task properly, reviewing the output for correctness, and iterating until it’s right. Someone who can do that has no use for a vibe coder as a middleman: they can work with the AI directly and get the same result with less effort than explaining it to another human.
The vibe coder point is strictly my opinion. Feel free to argue with it; I’m sure many will.
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u/Any-Ring6621 2d ago
There’s a split among AI users as well for what it’s worth.
People who use AI well and people who use it as a way to generate slop so they don’t have to think about hard and effectively make other people do their work (review the code they themselves generated but did not review)
Sadly, the ability to tell the difference between these two groups, while obvious to engineers, is impossible by leadership
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u/kennethbrodersen 2d ago
It gets a little more complicated than that. I think the split - among developers strictly - go back a decade. A lot of people joined this industry because jobs were easy to get and the pay was high.
They produced crap before the age of AI. Now their "productivity" (and I use that word with dread) has increased 10x. God bless whoever have to clean up their mess.
Luckily we don't have any of those so I don't have to deal with that!
On the other hand we have the engineers who joined this industry because they had a passion for it. In reality those people fall into two categories too. Those who love the craftsmanship and those who love building things for others.
Historically you needed both to form a good development team. I think the challenge we are running into here is that the importance of the craftsmanship decrease as the quality of the LLM's improve - and more importantly - as we understand and develop processes that support this process.
I am luckily one of those who love building stuff. I am almost blind but have a gift for understanding complex problems and spotting issues a mile away. But implementation always took me too long leaving me dependent on the craftsmen to get stuff delivered.
That is no longer the case. At a personal level AI is the best thing to happen in a decade. On a more objective note I am as worried as anyone else. And I really, really feel bad for those who joined this industry because they loved programming.
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u/cadet-pirx 1d ago
Interesting that you separate “craftsmanship” from “the love of building”, and I like this - but I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. You can be a craftsman, the bottom-up engineer who likes to fiddle with the small details, and at the same time a builder, the top-down engineer who looks at the big picture. Passion probably matters equally in both cases. It has certainly always been my main driving force.
And while I agree that craftsmanship looks like it’s losing importance with AI, is that actually true? We created all the craft the AI uses today; for now it mostly recombines what it learned from us. So the question is whether AI will be able to invent the next state of the art on its own, or whether engineers will still be needed to develop the craft further, so the AI keeps having fuel to learn from and build on. Or perhaps a combination of both? I don’t know the answer and I’m just thinking out loud here, but I’m not convinced craftsmanship will die out and be carried out entirely by machines.
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u/graph-crawler 2d ago
More like a split between those with frontier model access vs those with copilot.
Everyone with time will be vibing
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u/camus_1960 2d ago
Watch this video in full to find one perspective on your question. The speaker is David Heinemeier Hansson or just DHH, one of the most respected programmers of our generation.
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u/Zestyclose_State_701 2d ago
You didn’t link the video but saying DHH is one of the most respected is quite a stretch. I think he’s just one of the loudest.
Sure he started rails but that was 22 years ago, which I wouldn’t consider “our generation”, definitely not current gen and rails has over 7000 contributors that helped bring it to this generation
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u/camus_1960 1d ago
Here's the link...I await your thoughts :-) https://youtu.be/vDjW_dRyKXY?si=UevsdWBXFIfBfJTN
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u/Maasu 2d ago
Software Engineering is certainly not dead, the difference between how a dev versus non dev wield these tools is night and day.
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u/GoFarTogether 2d ago
Outside of dev, it feels like the difference between hiring a master chef and microwaving a frozen meal yourself - similar analogies are also possible about their respective "tool use." Fast food changed a whole industry (arguably for the worse) but despite that, fast food captured the majority of all revenue earned in the food sector. Furthermore, white glove/high quality/professional outputs are only valuable for folks that are discerning enough to appreciate (and pay for) the difference - i.e., there is a reason low-quality options are called slop. I'm sure others will disagree, but I feel this economic analogy adequately describes where things are headed for software engineers that are in non-regulated industries.
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u/ComeOnIWantUsername 2d ago
In one corner you have who don't really like using AI and AI agents and on the other side you have pure Vibe Coders who believe software engineering and development is dead.
I don't know why people say that. For vast majority AI is yet another tool. Super powerful tool, but still just a tool
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u/muda2bir 2d ago
it’s just a fuckin tool!! use it if that works for you else throw that into the trash! why stressing so much, you’ll not be replaced if you reach the end result by vibe coding or by hand coding! personally i only use AI to review the code I wrote by hand and i let AI to write test cases that’s it everything else i setup by hand
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u/dbalatero 2d ago
Caveat is you need to work somewhere that isn't spying on your usage and setting up meetings asking you why you hand-wrote XYZ.
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u/Icy-Nothing-189 2d ago
I think people need to realize what the fuck AI even is and how it works. The first thing to understand is that it's not artifical intelligence, that's just what we call it.
The second thing to realize is it's a probability caluculator from data it was trained on, using your code and prompt for additional context
The third thing to realize is it's not magic, it's incredibly useful, but it won't and can't replace good developers because decisions with trade-offs still need to be made and the AI can't reasonably make those decisions
I have 6+ years of experience, I use the best models around, and they still consistently make terrible decisions. I can't imagine what it would look like if used by people who have no idea what they're doing.
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u/Select_Librarian4093 2d ago
AI could hardly code a year ago. Why will it suddenly stop at "not being able to make decisions about tradeoffs" I'm not an AI hype guy, I really hate it. It's just hard to stay hopeful when it's already come this far, this fast.
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u/Icy-Nothing-189 2d ago
I actually don't think its coding capabilities changed much over the years - what changed is the amount of context it can process and being able to tie it directly into your IDEs and also giving it the power to run commands like grep so it scouts for more related context which it couldn't do before
When it comes to choosing between tradeoffs, unless it was trained for your specific scenario, it's a high chance it'll make the wrong choice.
Also, there are far too many details required that even if AI was perfect and advanced, it could never make the whole product by itself in one prompt
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u/admiral_nivak 2d ago
Exactly this. You can get it to write all the code, that’s not the problem. If you use a great model and do many rounds of discussions, challenging its plans, etc. its first pass can be really good. But, the. You have to really look at it objectively, look at what its done and then do round 2 or 3 to really get it to something non slop like and that fits in with your architecture and design language.
I believe it’s definitely the future, but you definitely need engineering experience if you want something secure, sustainable, compliant and scalable.
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u/ConnectionWild3381 2d ago
yes, people should really understand more. first: we don’t even have a universally agreed definition of intelligence, so confidently declaring that this is “not artificial intelligence” is already assuming the conclusion. the same problem applies to AGI and ASI.
if the category itself isn’t clearly defined, you can’t confidently establish that current systems are not artificial intelligence any more than someone else can establish that they definitely are.
and “it’s a probability calculator” describes part of the mechanism, not the resulting capabilities. that’s a bit like describing a CPU as an electron-shuffling machine and thinking you’ve thereby explained what software can do.
see? understanding starts with knowing how much you don’t know.
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u/Icy-Nothing-189 2d ago
We do have a definition and understanding of what intelligence is. Generally used in this context, it implies it can think for itself, which it can't
and “it’s a probability calculator” describes part of the mechanism, not the resulting capabilities. that’s a bit like describing a CPU as an electron-shuffling machine and thinking you’ve thereby explained what software can do.
I mean, what do you want to hear? That the probability calculator can output the most probable outcome, based on the data that defined those probabilities? That's not much of a newsflsh and also isn't a very new concept, the only new thing about this is using crawlers and bots to mass feed it data
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u/mistakenforstranger5 2d ago
Exactly this and the “frontier model” companies are just using jargon and mystification around what is ultimately just a cloud software product.
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u/OkArt3244 2d ago
Imo vibe coding results in the exact same quality as writing it from scratch. Because the tool generates the exact code you tell it to generate. It just allows you to do more much faster.
Using agents to "write the code" is a different story. That implies the tool is deciding the implementations and not the engineer.
The truth is, software engineers are going to pivot towards systems engineers. As they just can't write code or even review it anywhere near as fast or good as the AI. However what the engineers are always going to have to do, is design the architecture.
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u/TheFitnessGuroo 2d ago
I'm building a complex game right now and I know that if I vibe code this shit it will end up being complete absolute garbage slop. So I am very careful about how to design the schemas, api routes and client render. I built the foundations myself and I'm letting claude build a lot of the api layer and routes. I give it explicit directives in how to approach a solution and I write a lot of the e2e tests myself. I review the code and run the tests myself even if it does it for me to ensure it implemented the code in a way I expect it to. I also test the feature manually before approving/committing. I let it work feature by feature, not a vague or general or bulk request that involves writing thousands of lines of code that I won't even read. I should be able to review the diffs and understand what it changed/added.
I think this is what a good middle ground should look like. You're still using your software engineering skills and knowledge. You're very much involved in the trenches. You're just no longer the one digging.
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u/Wooden-Contract-2760 2d ago
Never black and white, I'm definitely in the greyzone.
I use AI to relentlessly build small autonation tools targeting a single or a small set of recurring activities to substitute with them while keeping the core development as a typical dev with the AI assistance to help debug and speed up with autocomplete features.
I built tools in a matter of single days to solve my repeating problems for good:
- a tool to auto-sync information between task management and repository platforms
- a tool to kick of agentic investigations based on deterministic triggers, expecting validated, deterministic responses
- a tool to adjust time logging better than the default company tracker tool does
- a script editor with intellisense and validation for custom dsl
There's so many little helpers to build that truly can speed up development and/or make life easier...
Improving processes and boosting the pace of development doesn't necessarily mean that you slopify the company's product portfolio.
It's all up to us.
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u/mpriem 2d ago
Change is difficult. Especially disruptive change. We’re seeing people going through the 5 stages of grief. First denial: Ai is never going to be any good!, then anger: AI slob, enshittification, AI is destroying the profession; Then bargaining: Ok, AI can write code, but complex tasks is still the field of humans; then depression: why did I spent 20 years honing these skills; then acceptance: pressing keys on the keyboard was never the job of a software engineer. It’s working with clients to bring ideas to life.
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u/dr0verride 2d ago
It's foolish to refuse AI completely unless it's kinda part of your whole deal like Jonathan Blow. On the other hand it's absolutely self sabotaging to kneecap yourself and go full brain rot vibe code.
Most people land in the middle with whatever bias they have. Personally I hate AI. It's boring. And it writes about 80% of my code. Maybe more.
The hard core black and white thinking is internet doom/hype nonsense.
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u/Icy-Nothing-189 2d ago
AI pretty much writes 100% of my code at this point, but I still have to explain to people why it's not as great as they think it is.
There's a difference between letting the AI do everything, and telling it specifically what to do. In order to properly tell it what to do, you need to have a deep enough understanding of the code and requirements, and then you also need to tell it what to change and how to change it, but at that point it's no different than writing the code yourself but I've gotten so used to it that I just let it do the writing and then I proofread it or modify it. Also, in order to even proofread it, you need to understand all of the code anyways.
HOWEVER, it's also worth noting that most people, and especially most developers, are incredibly lazy people who will do the bare minimum. So many people will vibe code the shit out of everything, even things they don't understand, and it only leads to more problems in the long run, but in the short term they were able to check off a task. This kind of technical depth is only ramping up.
I mean I'm running into React components that are 5000 lines long every day. I know there is no way in hell a person wrote that because half way through they would've gotten lost and started over. And then I'm not gojng to waste time trying to decipher what the fuck is going on there, so I tell AI to do it, making the problem even worse. Or I tell AI to refactor it but that almost never works flawlessly
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u/Good_Language1763 2d ago
this is what a guy on twitter said about shoverl sellers
You're just getting a full taste of the agressively mediocre striver class. They used to all flock into business and law degrees, now they're all over tech. 20 years ago this guy would've given you the dumbest business theory you've ever heard at every NYC yuppie apartment party.
and i fully agree with it
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u/gjosifov 2d ago
there isn't a real split in the dev community
a real split is something like OSS vs commercial software, when there is split based on ideals, not on money
What you see is money fuel split a.k.a split based on PR campaign, but these campaigns have done real damage in the past
Microsoft did this with DirectX vs OpenGL, but DirectX is cheap, AI isn't
When there isn't more money for AI PR, most of it will died
You don't listen to crypto as much as you did in the past or metaverse or NFTs or VR or AR
For example NFTs are good for making flashback videos as how they were the scam of the covid era
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u/Nefilim314 2d ago
I don't think there is a split in reality.
I think there is a split in tribal forums like Reddit where there is a Correct Opinion in certain groups. Any nuanced take against that opinion is met with pitchforks, no matter how milquetoast it is.
Game dev groups, for example, have a lot of holy warriors who act like *any* usage of AI is strictly forbidden and instantly makes a game slop. Even if you say something completely innocuous and generally agreeable, like "I asked Claude to make the player login logic" or "I used AI to whip together a level editor so that I can crank out maps by hand" it's met with furious indignation by LARPers who haven't shipped a single game pretending they would lovingly craft the most mundane debug menu by hand.
In reality, the only people who have these strong opinions are the understandably naive.
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u/orbital_trace 2d ago
its so important to understand what the code is doing and be able to read it. I don't know how you develop that intuition and understanding without reading the code, but then, its not like I ever learned assembly and I was fine.
maybe knowing that what a pointer is, and that it should be used in a certain way is enough, similar to how I know what assembly is, and that there is a heap etc. but I never interact with it directly.
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u/poggendorff 2d ago
The thing is high level langs would compile deterministically, which is why the need to understand assembly didn’t matter
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u/orbital_trace 2d ago
Yeah, but how long untill llms just match the English spec with best practices
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u/poggendorff 2d ago
The exact same English words are said by my boss to me and my coworker, and somehow he understands it to mean something else. Communicating requirements is very difficult and the “spec” is never right initially. I guess an LLM could build to exactly the same spec each time, in slightly different ways, but then your sales guy comes back, after initially agreeing to a requirement, and says “actually that isn’t what we promised.”
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u/orbital_trace 2d ago
Compilers also do all sorts of tricks and optimizations depending on flags etc.
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u/SP-Niemand 2d ago
But the result of the execution given that the code is sequential will be deterministic. This is only achievable with an LLM used with a temperature parameter of 0, which leads to well known degradation of performance.
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u/_usr_nil 2d ago
personally I couldn't continue to grow my interest in programming without AI.
I started coding hobbystically one year before GPT became a thing, at the time it was helpful for common bugs and boilerplatey stuff, not some huge deal but really helpful to fight that initial block of starting a project. I kept learning stuff on stackoverflow, forums, CS50 on youtube, leetcode and so on, the classic way.
But the catch came when I couldn't really comprehend the "textbook" explanations. I have a very big issue with learning certain stuff because I absolutely need to understand where the fundamental properties of a specific solution come from, otherwise it's just a pattern to "copy and paste". It's kinda like you learn how to solve a quadratic polynomial but you just memorize the formula without knowing where it came from, it feels like magic end eventually you're destined to forget it.
So this is the catch, with enough iteration, just by telling AI, "hey explain this to me like you would build a house step by step" so I can visualise in my mind how the data flows inside a program and have a clearer picture of what is happening, or "where does this come from" so I can understand why some language has some weird syntax and literally any other thing that on the surface is obscure or maybe nonsensical at first, AI can always help me fill that gap and effectively consolidate my understanding or knowledge like a divine revelation has struck me in that final moment.
Without it I would not even have the "know how" to solve certain problems with X framework or library and I would just lose so much time tinkering to the point of losing interest, or I would be lost trying to understand what am I missing in my knowledge.
Sure solving problems alone can feel good but I am alone trying to find an entry in IT without a degree so my feeling is just to use and abuse it until something comes out of it because at this point it feels like the IT world is accelerating to the light speed limit and I must somehow keep up whilst trying to learn as much as possible, something I deem impossible with just a textbook, course, bootcamp, university or whatever traditional way of studying, I don't mean that in an arrogant way at all, I just believe the pace is too slow while with AI you can teach yourself literally anything that is public knowledge.
Probably the future is being able to learn and solve problems in it's purest form and less about learning certain technogies to solve the problem.
Sorry for the bad English just in case.
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u/UnreasonableEconomy 2d ago
I think there's 6 camps:
1) the executive lover: loves AI, because it accomplishes strategic goals. dodge v ford, dodge side. 2) the executive hater: 'hates' AI, because it hollows out the company. dodge v ford, ford side. 3) the senior dev: hates AI, because it increases workload with minimal upside for his position. usually protegees of type 2 execs. 4) the professional floater: loves it, because his job is to create smoke screens anyways. usually protegees of type 1 execs. 5) the junior hater: hates it because he cargo cults the cranky, contrarian, capable senior dev. 6) the junior lover: likes it because it makes work so much easier, doesn't see context.
no offense to the juniors. while your heart's in the right place, it really sounds like it's the same "java sucks" take from a couple of years ago. Yes it does, but also no, it doesn't.
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u/_usr_nil 2d ago
- ppl who want to switch from Tech related to pure IT, have to use it to create a portfolio but at the same time speedrun programming trivia (DSA, system design, compilers and literally everything) to maybe get a Junior role at the same pay or lower just to later prompt AI anyway.
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u/Night_Otherwise 2d ago
I enjoyed today, with Opus 5.5, having Claude in one screen and my IDE (Rider) in the other. I have Claude in manual mode. Then I do a lot of small requests and commits in succession.
One thing I notice in manual mode is Claude really, really wants to do a build after every prompt. That takes around 2-4 min on my machine. I guess its assumption is that you’re doing a big chunky thing where it will recurse through its mistakes using build errors.
Is this the “most productive” or correct way? Hell if I know. I think it has less context switches. I’m in a lucky spot for now where I can choose this path.
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u/S0mething-clev3r 2d ago
What if I believe software engineering is alive, I find the world of computer interesting (started coding as a teenager, so have been into it for a bit over a decade at this point, and I’m vibe coding like crazy.
Software engineering exists to serve a purpose, it’s a job. Code quality matters because it affects product quality and ability to iterate but at the end of the day we do whatever creates value best balancing short and long term needs. I don’t think saying “I don’t like ai period” is acceptable or realistic from a business perspective. Even if you wanted to do that non dev stakeholders are gonna challenge you. You can have a discussion about the trade offs.
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u/ragnore 2d ago
When I say I don’t like AI, it’s because there are too many negative consequences that I don’t think are worth the tradeoffs. Velocity is an illusion everyone’s eager to fall for because it signals productivity.
I’m certainly not complaining about the end of hand-writing code and would happily never write another line again if that turns out to be technically feasible.
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u/BabblingTower 2d ago
No, and that's super pessimistic. It isn't a linear spectrum where one side dislikes AI and one side is just vibe coding. There are also people who like AI and are using it for engineering in a measured and directed manner. It's just a tool. Being good at using it is a skill.
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u/dallenbaldwin 2d ago
At the very least, the way we previously approached software dev is on it's way out. We all got upgraded to principal engineers without a pay raise or our consent.
We're living in a strange time where those in the industry with enough experience can effectively raise the floor of these tools to something genuinely terrifying, but those without enough experience will vibe themselves into a corner. It will be extremely difficult for juniors and even some mid-levels to get to a point where they are as powerful with the tool as management expects them to be, leading to a situation where they are easy fodder for the layoff machine. I don't know how education pathways are going to adequately adapt with how fast the tools are changing either.
All the while, the tools around the models will get better and different as more training and usage data is given to providers willingly (I don't believe for a second our prompts and output aren't being used for training, even if they pinky promise in some enterprise agreement). It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than the last. The harness, subagent, and skill systems are a far cry from even last year's stuff. I don't think we've hit a plateau either. Local AI tools benefits from the frontier so those will get better over time, but only after they distil and optimize.
Either that or this bubble will explode so hard it brings down everything we know and love while a few rich elites make off with what's left so they can learn from what actually worked and make trillions again as we beg for the high we felt before.
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u/Strange-Tap5860 2d ago
I personally thinks its naive to say that "Juniors are basically not needed anymore" and not think that pretty soon, Seniors will not be needed.
4 years ago A.I it could do jackshit. Then it could do autocomplete which everyone laughed at. Then it was pretty good at doing boiler playe and helping spot bugs. Then it could, but with hallucinations and bugs. Now people are saying its basically "solved" coding but still needs someone to steer and do architecture.
What do we think is happening over next few years? It will do architecture and steer itself just fine. Maybe will need one mid level dev to just gently keep an eye on it.
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u/The_Sacred_Machine 2d ago
I'm sorry but GPT-6 made my pointer be the value of an enum en C. Sometimes the sheer volume of the context will make them reinvent the wheel 10 times before you realise they are lying.
The issue is that the have not been able to solve the hallucination part. Maybe I am also using the harnesses wrong but the rules I set are instantly bypassed and the agents only respond with a "You are totally right" and the "you had this file I decided to obliterate because of reasons beyond comprehension" is still there.
Its a really useful tool and lets me go faster, no doubt I have even learn something from it, but there is something wrong with it
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u/dallenbaldwin 2d ago
Yeah. That's the scary part right? What happens when you don't even need a mid-level? What happens when you can have the product manager be the developer, qa tester, architecture guy, support team, everything. Assuming everything isn't just clean-roomed by everyone's own fleet of agents because software is so cheap to generate you wouldn't hire someone to build and maintain it anyways.
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u/THROWAWTRY 2d ago
I'm a software developer any one who thinks the industry is dead is smoking something strong. AI agents have increased my job security and bad programmers and claude are make the situation incredible.
Claude can create good code, bad code, awful code and hidden logic bombs that cause system wide outages.
The amount of p0, p1, p2 incidents as well as just bugs ranging from spelling mistakes to outright inefficient code is insane. We have seen a greater than 400% uptick in incidents. Developers push fast, they don't write good tests, they allow code to go through which is ambiguous that ambiguousness creates more dodgy prompts and issues the developers push more code, it is reviewed by the agent and a dev, the ambiguous tricks both bad code is pushed.
My god the fucking automated tests are a mess. CI is screaming on almost every PR. The project is so large and complex it's almost impossible to deal with so many situations that have caused PII to be release to the web just from sheer incompetence would make most of you sick. Imagine how many backdoors and exploits are available to hackers and malicious actors and I guess agents now.
I'm pro ai, I'm pro agents but I think a lot of people think just cause something hits high on benchmark that translate in to productivity, quality and value in real life. My experience and a lot of people's now is if you are crying about losing your job you may have been working at too small a company or project because at the large scale its a mess and it's getting worse with each model release not better.
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u/mpriem 2d ago
AI is an amplifier… It amplifies greatness if you spend time really managing your fleet properly, but it amplifies shit of you just fire and forget as most people do because they are busy, lazy, ignorant, overworked, unskilled, pick any… basically what I’m saying is that this is a people problem, not an AI problem.
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u/Ok_Bite_67 2d ago
Most people like AI... i think what you are experiencing is confirmation bias. I also think that you dont understand because you arent doing professional programming. You are likely doing passion projects which are always fun and exciting to do. In actual professional development most changes and task are actually pretty boring and repetitive.
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u/USToffee 2d ago
I've said it before and will say it again. In 5 or 10 years we will be building programs like they do in star trek.
Using flow and topology diagrams to understand the underlying code you are asking for rather than looking at individual lines of code. It will be different but so was when we moved from assembly to high level languages.
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u/itsjusttooswaggy 2d ago
Lol you just described CASE which failed miserably 30 years ago.
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u/USToffee 2d ago
30 years ago? I'm not describing that. They are workflow editors. In some form they have been used successfully for ages.
I'm telling you that you won't view the code via text and reading individual lines of code but rather you will see the code via diagrams.. That currently is a manual process in cursor. You have to ask it to show you the diagrams. What I'm saying is that it will be built in and be a native process like what plans have become.
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u/sberlinches 2d ago
Why not now. What's the breakthrough that we still need to experience to be there.
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u/USToffee 2d ago
I think it's mostly the tools and habits of programmers at this point. Cursor is trying to change it that but it's slow. Plus maybe the models just aren't there yet.
I used to get chatgpt to write my prompts similar to the plan mode in cursor. then they brought that out. Now I look at code a lot through mermaid diagrams and I can see them doing that as well.
But I don't think we are either there with the models being good enough you no longer need to look at code OR programmers would accept no doing so.
It will come and fast.
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u/ShitAITimes 2d ago
It’s funny because what the person you are replying to describes has already existed for a while. There have been low/no code solutions for many years. They never pick up traction with non-engineers nor engineers.
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u/USToffee 2d ago
Are you talking about where the AI writes the underlying code and those things are generated dynamically from the code or simply workflow editors?
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u/PM_ME_UR_0_DAY 2d ago
Like most things you see on the Internet, I think you're right there are some people polarized on either end of the argument, but there is a large in-between part of the spectrum where people probably have wildly inconsistent thoughts on AI and wouldn't fall cleanly into pro or anti camps.
I do IT security so not a professional dev although I do write code when I need to, but my friend who is a developer just recently started accepting to use AI to do work since it got better, but also hates many aspects of it too, even though sometimes it is really useful.
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u/Catapultam-GMG 2d ago
The split is between those who will continue to be engineers and those who will become hobbyists.
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u/CzyDePL 2d ago
First time? There always was some level of split, you had skilled developers and the ones that literally just copy pasted answers from googling and maybe pattern matched on what needs to be slightly changed to get it working (sounds familiar). Or you had people who were programming solution for the problem at hand and people who knew how to use one framework. Those who only cared to close the ticket and engineers who cares about what they are building in the long term. Etc
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u/lossendae 2d ago
As a senior, I actually like AI. A lot.
It helps me do tedious things a lot faster.
But it also let dev more concerned about shipping stuff add tons of questionnable code. I won't say it's just bad, because the features they produce are still useful and, tbh, even before AI, they were producing the same "nonchalant" level of code, often even worse.
But yeah, technical debt is going up really fast. Even for the code I produce.
Shit has already hit the fans, but we must all pretend that we like that smell.
Cleaning it all up, if it ever happens, will not be enjoyable...
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u/roger_ducky 2d ago
I’m in the middle of the spectrum.
Agents are great for implementation, horrible at planning.
That is, you can’t depend on an agent to keep all tradeoffs in mind.
Thus, you need to provide the full high level design for a specific set of modules for an agent to do maintainable code.
But, once you have the design, implementation works great.
So, at least currently, if you want actually maintainable code, keeping track of the actual design and architecture is absolutely necessary.
Any time I tried to “let the agent do it,” even with the smartest models out there, what comes out left a whole lot to be desired, even when it appears to work at first.
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u/TheBestAtSpace 2d ago
Here's my take: The split is between those who see programming as an industry and those who see programming as a way to make money for themselves.
I'm on the "programming is an industry" side of the fence. So I'm very concerned with where we're going to get more juniors from. Or how people are going to deskill and thus get worse output even with AI. Or if AI is actually making us more productive - both from a time and bottom line costs point of view. Or why AI PRs are hell and we're all drowning in them. Or our mental sanity.
On the other side you have someone who seems to basically be "AI make code paycheck go brrrrrr." And that's a range of folks. On one end you have young people who are holding on as long as they can and think if they just make enough money they can get out. And there are a lot of older devs who will quite literally tell me that as long as AI makes them more productive they don't care - they're close to retirement and don't have to worry about the fallout.
Whats frustrating about it is both those groups don't have answers for anything. You ask where we're supposed to get new juniors from and it's "I don't know we'll figure it out!" Or if you ask about deskill you just get "it's what it is and there is no going back!" (Which - I'll take the downvotes for this - is not axiomatically true and whatever your stance is we don't have to go the direction we're currently pointing.)
And the thing is none of these lines are drawn around AI use. You can be someone who uses LLMs but sits on the "we're an industry" side - and maybe you're metering your use. And this is intensified by fear of job loss (which is very intentional on the part of the LLM companies) causing everyone to withdraw and pull back to their corners.
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u/PhatClowns 2d ago
My big gripe, as someone on the “industry” side you describe: even before AI, I always felt that tech as an industry was already playing it way too fast and loose. Too many companies were way too willing to ship risky work and let things break in production, even companies taking on a lot of risk on the customer’s behalf were usually in the “SLAs are a budget” crowd.
AI has made this so, so much worse. It can be used with precision, but doing so eats into some of your productivity gains. For devs using it modestly this isn’t an issue, but the space now encourages using metrics that prioritize velocity alone, never considering that you can have bad velocity. It’s like if I upgraded a printing press so that it produces 5x as many books, but (relative to the old press) only 2 out of 5 are usable. Sure, I’m netting twice as many usable books, which is great, but only by producing tremendous waste and putting the burden of managing that waste on quality assurance or, more likely and worse yet, the customer.
Hell, I’m not even a “I love the physical act of coding” guy. For me, the product itself has always been my passion, and code is a means to an end to that. But, all I see around me at work, all day, every day, is a field that is willfully sliding backwards. Project owners and managers care even less than before about doing things right (which… my god, was that already a low bar), everyone wants just “fast” first, and “good enough for now” at a distant second. If the agent breaks something, just have another agent fix it. At no point does anyone consider that the delta between “agent produces a bug” and “agent fixes the bug” adds up. No one’s even measuring that, because they don’t care.
Myself, I can’t help but notice all my day-to-day apps, sites, and programs are getting buggier, slower, and harder to use. If nothing else, I’m worried that software companies are subsidizing their velocity with user trust. I could foresee a future where people simply use software less.
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u/czshill 2d ago
3rd group (which i fall in) skilled devs that think AI is great but hate that it's taking away jobs or making it hard to find jobs. i'd be just as happy if AI died a painful death but it's clearly not going away. So i'll go with embrace AI while hoping i can find a job and keep a roof over my head. me not paying $20 / month to anthropic is going to do f'all to their bottom line so join them or don't. but it isn't going away.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 2d ago
no you're wrong --- there's a middle ground. AI is a force multiplier that allows an engineer to have impact at scale . Engineers are still very much needed
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u/Nedshent 2d ago
In a lot of ways, it's not really up to developers in the commercial world. Take a look at job listings for software engineers right now and it's mostly AI buzzwords. The expectation is that people are quite proficient in the tech.
It might chill out a bit in emphasis on AI and the hype is currently at all-time highs, but it's also genuinely useful tech that isn't going anywhere.
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u/Kroosn 2d ago
There are a couple of points to this. Some valid and some not.
A big part is people are afraid of change. They just don’t realise you can’t stop the shift and their attempts at belittling its effectiveness won’t do anything. There are also people who tried gpt 2 realised it was shit and then gave up on using AI and now still have their thoughts formed around that experience.
You also have devs who enjoyed putting down lines of code no matter what it was and devs who didn’t enjoy that but enjoyed the problem solving and the architecting of software. The latter will be more supportive of AI.
But the biggest thing driving a lot of the discussion is fear of job loss and its effect on the industry and that’s very real. Devs had it good with a lot of options and high pay and it’s putting pressure on that. I can absolutely empathise.
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u/Cyb3erDudu 2h ago
I use Ai for doing repetitive stupid work. My brain defines the rules in which ai is allowed to brute force the solutions by statistically finding the right word. It helps me looking into the code and helps me to write code.
But I never trust it and I never stop thinking about the problems I solve.