My career is already impacted by others using it, whether I use it or not. Those who rely heavily on LLMs produce worse and larger code, and those relying on it heavily are not the best in the first place. It's turning -1x developers into -10x developers on account of them causing additional cognitive load on everyone else.

As for me? I don't have FOMO. If I'm right and it's a bubble that will collapse, then I'll be better suited to weather it. If I'm wrong and LLMs are all they're cracked up to be, then I will be able to get up to speed quickly.

I can't stop management from purging, but management can't stop me from being one of the few people left whose brain still works and will still possess the skills required to put out their goddamned dumpster fire once the inevitable finally catches up with them.

They're going to have to beg real hard, though. The kind of begging that has a lot of zeroes before the decimal point.

I’m a DevOps engineer (about 15 years) and in a previous life was a software engineer (15 years before that). My employer is pushing hard on AI so I reluctantly started using Claude at times. I must say that I’m fairly impressed when it comes to relatively easy tasks. We’re a large AWS user and have developed a fairly complex in-house set of python tools that encapsulate things like Terraform and Ansible. We have about 15 or so AWS sub-accounts that span logical groupings, so our IAM configuration alone was fairly complex.

I was able to point Claude at our IAM configuration and tell it to create a set of policies/roles to allow a host in one environment to access resources in a read-only manner across all our accounts. Since I’m not an IAM expert it would have taken me a few hours to figure out what it did in under 10 minutes. Two of my team reviewed the proposed changes and were perfectly fine with them.

I’ve also had it write python scripts that do things like call AWS APIs, collect JSON results, and compare it to contents pulled from a git repo of configuration data.

For relatively simple tasks like these it can be a time saver. But you still need to sanity check everything it does. I’ve seen it skip steps (like not applying IAM policies to all our accounts), and when you point it out it will apologize and fix things. But it’s that sort of failure that makes me still be wary of AI. Like why only update a subset of things and fix it only after I point it out? “All” means “all”, not “some”…

For more complex things I’m still very reluctant to trust it. When it comes to that I may use Claude to encapsulate a few API calls, but then I’ll rely on my own expertise to add in all the really important logic.

I'm already watching some of my colleagues' brains turn to mush by just blindly doing whatever the slop machine says. I don't want to lose my skills in the same way. Years from now, I'll be ready to retire while the technical debt piles up to critical levels, and demand for skilled and experienced critical thinkers skyrockets; then I'll have to make the hard decision of leaving the rat race to pursue my own interests, or going back in for one last job for a massive payout.

Or I'm completely wrong and I'll just be deemed a grumpy old relic by then, and I'll take my severance and it still won't be my problem any more.

My company started providing every programmer who wanted it with Github Copilot in like 2023, iirc. I declined it (we were still allowed to decline it back then, sigh). My process of thought was that it takes almost zero skill to "learn" AI tools, but once they're part of your workflow you become reliant on them and your actual rate of learning stalls. I still wasn't particularly experienced or good at programming back then (only started my IT career in late 2021) so I wanted to heavily invest in myself and level up my skills as much as I could.
Fast forward to today, and there is a significant skill gap between me and the coworkers I was on par with when Copilot was introduced. I'm still not some kind of superstar programmer, but when it comes to my specific niche (React/Typescript) I'm considered one of the go-to people to consult within my department. Meanwhile some of my colleagues still need almost weekly reminders to use let/const instead of var (yes we have a linter, but they accidentally turn it off sometimes...).

About a month ago management started hard-pushing their AI bullshit. Everyone is mandated to install and use Claude Code. So.. I did. It took me maybe a day to learn, most of which was spent fiddling with IntelliJ (I took the chance to migrate from Windows IntelliJ to using its Linux build within a WSL, it's such an improvement!). I did all the mandated Claude tutorials and everything I got out of it is more resentment for my coworkers. This tool really is made for total morons. Even the "advanced features" like writing custom hooks and subagents or connecting to custom MCP servers are just so... stupid. If that's the most complicated thing they do on a day-to-day basis, I am very much not surprised about their brain atrophying.

Anyways, I am now also the go-to person my colleagues approach when they need help with their Claude setup. Because the guy who self-identifies as competent in AI topics just straight up lies way too much, as he can't handle being perceived as anything but extremely smart and competent (which just wastes everyone's time, since finding issues is way harder when he insists his first hunch is always the 100% correct solution and doesn't admit it when he makes a wrong assumption).

I'm very much not worried about my job security (someone with the capacity to actually understand the code they write is much more valuable and harder to replace, plus I hold a lot of knowledge about our existing product) but I'm certainly having a hard time applying for new jobs. Recruiters and managers really are stupid enough to think that using AI requires any sort of deeper skill, so putting AI on your CV as a skill is basically required nowadays (I still refuse to do it). And the AI bros whose applications I'm competing with are just much more comfortable with lying about their actual coding skill and competence, so on the first scan my resume does end up looking worse than theirs. But I have absolutely crushed every interview that I was actually invited to, because faking technical skill in actual conversation is way harder. I'm not too pessimistic about my prospects of finding a new job, even if the market definitely sucks right now.

Engineers avoiding its use and solving problems personally are playing the long game. They know that the current LLM tech will collapse - probably due to rising fees and the need to keep growing - and people will be ill-equipped to dig out from under the technical debt -- a very real problem.

I am in charge of policy related to Ai at work, but under different circumstances than most. The people above me asked the question, can we use Ai in a way that adds value to the product? My response was let's test out a couple of options and make policy based on the results. We gave everyone access to Copilot as we use JetBrains products and I asked every individual what their results were after a month. Four people found that they were able to work faster, the rest said it slowed them down and the hallucinations outright fucked their shit up.

At first I couldn't get a grasp on how this sanely work for a whole company implemented in a one size fits all manner. Then 2 of the people who used LLMs that were Jr.s left the company. When they had to transfer ownership of the internal projects to other people. I realized the mess inexperience devs with LLMs could do. They left behind untouchable code. That's when I figured it out, the other two people were Sr.s and you need to know exactly what you are doing to get a net positive from LLM coding.

All three of us were doing slight variations of the same thing, which was very telling of what is going to happen to software over the next year. We would never touch an agent as they just inject flaws and bugs into the code base. We all found Tab complete to be useful enough to leave on, but noted it was worse that worthless quite frequently. What we were all doing was using it as a cracked out search engine through the chat features. Rarely would we accept offered changes directly, but we would manually type sections adapting them to fit better in the code, the way we all used stackoverflow 5 years ago.

I am not saying inexperienced dev can't use LLMs effectively. You just have to know exactly what you are doing. Now the others come to me talking about MCP servers, agentic coding, whatever new snake oil is being sold to us. Now I am trying to convince these people, who initially rejected LLMs, that they are being gaslit by salesmen into thinking that LLMs are useful.

If it happens, I will pick a new career. Maybe something in waste disposal. I have a lot of experience with trash from interacting with management.

Not even slightly. Any engineering business going all in on AI is heading down the shitter fast so it's a useful canary for the competent people on the payroll.

I'm lucky to be in a sector that's generally too well regulated for slop to filter through, but we're already seeing fixer upper jobs come in from firms who picked a cheap contract from some AI-first start up and now needs someone to make their new equipment actually work and up to code.

In most cases it'd be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.

The industry has become toxic because of it, I'm out

100% of the job offers I'm getting right now mention AI use. In my current job as tech lead, part of my responsibility (as in part of what I'm evaluated on) is to require AI usage and measure productivity gains/losses.

Things might flip in a year or two but for the time being I think it's pretty clear that refusal to use AI is going to have career implications.

Not really. I’m not really using LLMs (yet), but I’m not too concerned. If they purge me, they would’ve done it regardless of my LLM use.

For me, what’s important is that I can stand for the code I write, which I can only do if I have been an active part of the journey. When I’m in a meeting and anyone have a question about the software, I should be able to answer on the spot. Is this new feature easily feasible, or is a risky rewrite required? Can’t do that if my brain haven’t participated in the code.

I’m still one of the more productive members of the team as well.

Only some of my time is spent writing software, but from what I've seen my colleague contribute who uses AI, I'm not worried long term.

My colleague can produce lots of code quickly that does pretty much the right thing. But they don't fully understand it (though they don't admit that), and I've basically had to rewrite it all as I've added new features.

My concern is not that I will suffer from inferior production of code by not using AI. It's that I will suffer from upper management dictating what tools should be used, without any understanding of the issues or consequences.

Not a dev myself, but I happened to see sitting near some the other day and got their take on how they use it.

They seem to be throwing mundane tasks such as creating a project plan at it. My guess is it spits out something and they treat it like a template and edit it until it says what they want.

They also seem to be throwing their tasks at the machine and then editing what it says to fit their environment. The one said they have several terminals open and they have them spit out code, have the other check out, and the others are reviewing what he is adding.

Being a scripter, I personally think it would be a lot of work to accept the code if it isn't flowing the way I expected. If I did start accepting it, how long until I give over my trust to the machine? Will I lose my own voice? How long until I stop relying on my research and just take what is handed to me?

AI is not the end all be all. Its 1 tool. Its really good at comparinglarged data sets. Astronomers have been using this tech to continually analyze changes in the sky for a long time and its really good at it.

But AI is not inventive or creative. It regurgitates soluyions, and not always correctly

Management is paying for my AI use. After a month or so they noticed I hadn't activated my account yet, so I did it. Haven't ever used it. Management is happy.

I see some coworkers doing a ton of work within a day for some PoCs and that sort of stuff that I would never be able to do in the same time, but when it comes to actually fixing issues and completing tasks on average I'm still faster than everyone else.

Management really wants to push me into using AI, but I genuinely haven't found a use for it. It can't handle complex things, trivial or repetitive things don't need it, and I have two decades of content that no AI could ever reproduce.

do you fear your reluctance to use this technology will impact your career when other software engineers will use it in their work?

no. because eventually what goes up, must come down.

I'm currently working on a team that is trying to unfuck some dumbasses slopware. so far been at it for about a year. it's going to be at least another year before it's unfucked.

while all this is happening management is pushing for AI to be used in daily operations, so the sty continues to grow and grow. at this rate I'll have a job cleaning up slopware for the rest of my life.

LLMs analyze ok, but are absolute shit at development. this is because LLMs cannot "think". there's zero cognitive abilities from an LLM. they just do what they've been told, full stop.

Yes and no.

Yes becuse our new C-suites are pushing it heavily and my boss (who only cares that we use AI as much as we need to not draw ire) has warned AI usage is a tracked metric that may be used for perfamnce reviews, bonuses, promotions, and raises.

No because I know my immediate chain of command does not fully believe in AI or are skeptics, and when the bubble bursts the price per token is going to slyrocket. Suddenly minimal AI usage as a tracked metric will probably look pretty good.

Either way once I've finished up certain things I intend to look for a new job. I love my team but I fear the writing is on the wall, and even if they try to reverse course I'm skeptical that the company will be able to.

Not sure how we portray work... But I'm willing to do annoying things for the right amount of money. If you pay me, I'm gonna use your AI, code in PHP or Visual Basic 6, store the code on a Windows file share instead of a version control system... Whatever you like. Just need to compensate my hours. I won't necessarily like it, or show a lot of motivation...

As someone who does not use ai for development but have worked with others who do, it feels like I was still using it.

I had to look at the code they produced (because they obviously didn't) and phrase my review so that when it's ran through an LLM it produces the results I needed. It was just an extra step.

These people have now been laid off, without being replaced so our team is just smaller for the same amount of work. Productivity has gone up, issues have gone down and honestly, it feels like I have less to do.

I think AI still has value tbh, but it can't replace experience and knowledge.

I'm planning on changing jobs this year, and every single job employer wants to talk about LLM usage. As much as I want to refuse, Id rather say i tried it and found it to be mostly useless than say i havent even tried it at all.

Watching the terrible devs on my team just get worse faster was all i needed to see to know that avoiding it would be good for my career. With the true cost of these AI companies finally revealing itself, this summer will be very interesting

I use it for code reviews but that's basically it. Looking at open job postings. Ton expect ai experience. I want to die.

It's similar to being an assembler coder when higher level languages with compilers came. No need for management purging, you'll simply be competing for a smaller segment of assigments.

I don't know of a single developer that has actually used LLM aids say there's no benefit to them. Those that refuse do so for some other convictions and don't really know the difference between LLM aiding in tasks and full on yolo vibe coding.

My take as sr is ai is a tool. It’s important to understand where it adds value and what it’s limits are. Mgt/ mahogany row in some companies think it’s a do-everything technology. Sure it can generate a lot of code quickly but… it can’t architect it’s way out of a paper bag. What it saves me time on is stubbing out/roughing code then i can clean it up as needed. I can hand-hold it and eventually get something decent out of it. It also saves me time when dealing with something i’m not super familiar with. Always check the work but it is nice to say “give me a class/function to do XYZ with ABC” and get something that would take days to research/trial/error etc.
i have yet to have it write something 100% clean/usable off the bat, but it does give a good boiler. It’s also good at generating docblocks that i can go through and touch up. The other thing that it’s been awesome at is generating test/demo throw away code. Stuff i just need to get out there and look pretty for dog and pony shows but won’t be around long term. That has saved me tons of time. So yeah sorry this isn’t exactly what the OP was asking. Bottom line is it’s a tool… i treat it as such. I see value in it. But i’m not worried about being replaced by it any time soon.

I'm kind of torn on this one. The natural problem solver in me is saying AI is a means to an end but not the end itself. I can solve most problems at work with AI but then the process becomes brittle, slower, and much more expensive.

First, in my branch of programming there is only insufficient training data available to make an impact. Second, by now it is confirmed scientific knowledge that using LLMs heavily impacts a humans brain to think. Third, there are so many cases of LLMs producing shitty code that nobody will be able to maintain, this will be a serious technical debt to be dealt with in the future.

No, I have a value driven mindset. If it doesn't provide value for my work I don't use it.

My work will speak for itself over the hype. And if it doesn't? Well someone will

Better broke than a slophead.

I honestly can't believe there are software engineers who think they can just completely ignore this technology and stay relevant.

I'm not an AI bro, I'm not happy with the direction the industry is heading. But saying this technology is useless and refusing to touch it has got to be some kind of coping mechanism. I, for one, intend to adapt and learn how to use the new tools to my advantage.

I'm lucky enough that management doesn't seem interested in forcing devs to use AI (they're pretty hands-off in general) and that I'm a greybeard who made and maintains some pretty fundamental systems in a company that's not very large. So I'm actually more worried about the double whammy of the AI bubble popping and the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The company managed to survive the Great Recession and COVID, but still.

A front end developer friend of mine told me last week that three of his colleagues were laid off because his workplace adopted AI. I don't know the size of their team so this doesn't speak to the magnitude, only to the fact, though.

I sold out and use ai at work. I fucking hate it. Takes all the joy out of the job and makes me dumb(er)

I wouldn't refuse to use an LLM for coding if it were specifically requested by management. I mean, I might advise as to risks, but ultimately, if a business is willing to put their resources on the line as a business decision, then okay, their capital, their call. But I wouldn't personally be spending time on it in 2026 on my own initiative either. Maybe for some special cases that are particularly well-suited to it, like "I need a limited amount of throwaway code in a language that I don't know".

Why not?

Software development has a lot of stuff that's asserted to "change the world" come along all the time. Could be new tools, new programming languages, new paradigms, new validation software, whatever.

First, assuming that one really does take over

be it a new programming language or a new editor or a particular LLM generating code

it's typically easier to let other people do the work of breaking the path, since whatever the thing is typically not in a fantastic state. There are problems that are going to need to be solved. Some of those may never be solved, whatever the promises or expectations. And some of the early workarounds may be unnecessary in the long term. The first-mover benefits, on the other hand, aren't likely that big a deal (and I think that we have enough data out now to show that while there might be benefits, as things stand, they aren't that large).

Second, a lot of the time, things that are put forward as being the future are not, in fact, the future. If you sit back and watch, then you don't burn time heading down every new blind alley. If LLM-assisted coding becomes the norm, then five years from now, a lot of data will have been gathered showing that using them in coding produces benefits and what those benefits are, as well as drawbacks.

Specifically in the case of AI writing software, I am pretty sure that in the long run, AI will be writing software at a human level. Same as AI will be doing a lot of things. But I am not at all sure that that it's going to be an LLM of the present form taking the present approach. Also, a lot of the workarounds to learn today to deal with present limitations of the tools may not be the ones needed down the road. Further, those limitations probably vary by tool even today; I'm not very interested in learning how to try to get Llama 3 to do something only to switch to ChatGPT only to switch to Claude.

Another issue is that most current code-generation models run on cloud services, which raises security and dependency issues.

Plus reproducibility issues. Even if I decide that, say, a cloud-based LLM of a particular version works well and the tradeoffs are acceptable and I tune my workflow to use it, then I'm spending a lot of time learning to deal with one LLM. If that particular version of an LLM later becomes unavailable

as has happened to users in the past

then it may be that all the workflow and workarounds that I've developed are more-or-less useless, if the provider decides to alter the revision of the available model or entirely remove it. I enjoyed using Stable Diffusion 1.5, and picked up and developed a number of techniques that work well with it. But those same techniques don't work well with even all models derived from SD 1.5, and if one's using a different diffusion model like Flux, then suddenly all the rules go out the window and one is starting at ground zero.

In the case of Stable Diffusion and Flux, I'm okay with that. I'm not professionally an image manipulator, so I'm not building much expertise on a foundation of sand, and I run both of them locally, so my ability to run them can never be taken away. But that's not true when cloud services enter the picture.

The reproducibility issues might be mitigated in some ways at a business level

AI service companies could enter into some sort of escrow agreement under what an LLM is guaranteed to be available as a service for N years or something, and if they go under some other company automatically becomes a provider, but frankly, I don't think that any benefits now warrant that level of hassle.

My expectation is that existing LLM service cloud providers

which are currently losing money

will, later on, do things like raise prices or otherwise use their leverage to make more money. That is, they are currently in a growth phase, where they accept losses to build their user base. Later, they will shift to a monetization phase. If you are heavily locked into use of that service, they can extract from you up to the cost of shifting off of their service, and you will keep using the service. My guess is that the costs of transitioning off might be quite substantial.

EDIT: Okay, one exception to the "I wouldn't refuse" case. If (a) I were working at a startup and (b) a substantial amount of my compensation were in the form of stock options or similar and (c) I were personally convinced that use of AI-assisted-coding would be an extremely bad move for the company, then I might take a "if we do LLMs, I walk out the door" position, because then it's my capital on the line, not just the company's. Part of the point of equity compensation is precisely to give you a kick in the rear to get you to act as you see being in the interests of the company. That being said, I'd try to talk to whoever was involved in making the decision to use it first in a scenario like that, to try to understand our difference in opinion on the matter, see if it couldn't be reconciled.

Never fear. If I was to apply for a job and they told me "we don't allow AI to be used here," I'd leave that opening available for the software engineers who refuse to use AI.