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.

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[–] 0 points 1 week ago

Additional thoughts: deepseek is running a 3x profit on their gpu/hours so there is no salvation in a bubble pop (we’re not getting that, the whole us economy is built on ai now so when things go south it’s gonna be commercial and residential real estate and energy conditions that counteract the effects of a pop and lead to much more controlled deflation instead) because it’s already worth it and economically sustainable to develop at deepseek capacity and prices, which if you have not tried it is a fucking hoot.

So anyone telling you to hold on and wait for the pop doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

It was a meme a few years ago but look into public sector work and old obsolete languages. If you have t got a pass through llc and tax id you can use to pick up contracts then get on that. It’s like ~$200 a year and makes you safer and able to mass apply for contracts.

Do not keep trying to do everything by hand. Learn to use some kind of harness in your dev environment. You probably got trained on vscode with its tab completion. That’s ai. You’re already using it.

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