Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I'll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don't believe me.

Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of "vibe-coding", but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can't spot any although we are looking intently.

And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What's even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would've taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.

I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn't a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It's a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don't know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.

And it all changed so fast. I don't think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

Being able to write code well is a rare skill, and I think that fact contributed to software being rare among career fields in combining high earning potential with relatively few structural barriers to entry. If you were good at coding you stood a reasonable shot of making it in the industry, even if you presented as neurodiverse/queer/non-WASP, didn't go to the right school or any school, had a disability that would be difficult to accommodate in other fields, etc (we were by no means perfect at this, but a lot better than some other comparably well paid fields). And, if you made it in the industry, even if you didn't make FAANGbucks, you probably had enough to live comfortably. There weren't enough of us to go around, so companies had to hire on ability and skill rather than credentials to a greater degree than you see in other fields with similar earning potential.

I think our field will still exist in some form in 5 years, and for senior folks I think the day to day work will probably not feel all that different. What worries me is what it does to the first few years in the field. If LLMs are seen as good enough at writing code, it's harder to justify hiring junior and mid level engineers, and it's harder to argue for hiring as many of them as we might have hired before (in addition to teaching them and helping them grow, we senior folks used to delegate much of our code writing to them). What management expects of them also changes: not to write code, but to grow quickly into someone who can responsibly herd AI. So management will hire fewer juniors, there will be more juniors in the market looking around for longer, and management will find that they can be picky in terms of credentials and still hire people, something they couldn't do as much before. I feel like that's going to yank the ladder up from people who would be good engineers but didn't go to MIT/Cal/Stanford and don't have the financial resources to spend a year job hunting after they graduate college, and sort of quietly gentrify the profession more than it already is. I have a pretty nice life as an adult because of that ladder being there when I entered the workforce, and it makes me sad to think that it wouldn't be if I graduated today.

  • source