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.
It's interesting to hear this side. It sounds like you're experiencing one of the better outcomes, even if it is still depressing.
My experience has been rather different with people being given AI, particularly in larger teams (I work with a few different companies as a contractor). Some people who were already good remained good but now put in less work (which is IMO the healthiest way), some deliver more but I get the sense they're burning out because of the amount of reviewing, arguably one of the least fun parts of development - not to mention the cognitive strain of a rapidly changing system.
But the biggest group by far is the average to straight up bad devs being given the magic wishing hat and pouring out shit like there's no tomorrow with no concept of what is even in their PRs. Especially great when they can just approve each others' slop code. Think UI being marked ready for release when it doesn't actually connect to the backend, just returns hard coded mock responses.
The amount of QA's needed has quadrupled in a team I work with, and they're still overwhelmed (whilst still having more regressions than ever).
The worst one is the "Claude said..." experience. When someone picks up an issue to troubleshoot and the result is just whatever came out of the AI, with the person putting in zero effort to even try to understand it, but then expecting a response/review from someone else, who is likely going to hate their life.
The interesting part is that we're both describing the death of the industry, but yours is death by success and mine is death by failure - both caused by LLMs.
Personally, I'm planning a career change into cabinetry because my job has gone from fun to mind numbing, and I don't think I'd be willing to do the "I'll unfuck your AI developed codebase" career path for any amount of money.
This, this, this. I'm in QA and this has been my last year or so. The audacity of the bad developers to shit out code and then expect us (or anyone) to actually look through their code is soul crushing.
Oh, and as a reward we're being laid off first right now.
Yeah it's not been uncommon for the AI people to blame QA for "blocking" them simply by identifying the ridiculous amount of regressions.
And of course they're under delivering because they're being blocked, not because they can't even figure out how to get the AI to fix the issues without causing new problems.
In my company, there is an executive who is trying to push the idea of them and their team using Claude code to create and push code themselves. They are not engineers. Not even engineer adjacent. Been asking for an AWS account. They don't understand what AWS is. Not even what source control is.
I wonder at what point is it better to just let them "fuck about and find out" - of course after some written down confirmation that they accept responsibility for their actions, which is very likely going to be a catastrophe.
Let them, but insist they should also use Claude to QA their code and thus take responsibility for the whole thing. If they trust AI to be good enough, why not go full circle? That shouldn't be a problem, right?
Joking aside, I know there is a real danger of those people shifting the responsibility for their created code mess downwards to the developers and QA, and when shit inevitably hits the fan they know who to blame.
Man, I feel all that. I don’t want to be fixing up other peoples shitty ai code, even if there is a job market. I don’t want to be fixing security vulnerabilities a bunch of people pushed without thinking things through…
How are you going to change into cabinetry? I’m guessing you’ve been preparing for a huge pay cut?
Yes, most likely I'm going to earn next to nothing for years. Luckily, I don't plan on having kids which makes finances a lot easier to sort out and I have done well with my financial planning.
My expectation is that my passive income from my IT career savings will cover my expenses in 2-3 years more or less indefinitely, and my woodworking will cover my spending above that (so something close to minimum wage, after all regular expenses are taken care of).
That being said, if I still needed money and I didn't already have an established career in IT, I'd probably apprentice as an electrician or plumber right now. IT is just not worth it at the moment IMO.
I'm about to have a convo with my team, which to be clear is a good team. It's going to go like this:
"If I write a comment where there has been a pattern of that same comment more than twice across your PRs in the past month (missing indexes, rewritten code for no reason, duplicate code, etc), I will immediately reject the review. If I have to do this twice for the same PR, there will be accountability. And unlike when something proves a challenge and we are flexible, timelines will not shift if one of these occur."
I personally think this is fair, as we rarely ever put our team into any kind of cram mode. I'm all for heavily assisted dev if it makes life easier, but it should not fall on the seniors to catch the obvious issues.