Fuck AI

Well, just today I had 3 meetings with different AWS techs about why a policy wasn't working or why users couldnt use certain services. Turns out all of them used AI to generate the aws policy they tried to use and the policies were wrong. The techs were rookies and lacked the understanding needed to correct the code. I was able to fix each and rewrite policies by hand.

Now when I and the rest of my greybeard generation start to retire, the rookies coming in will not have the exposure to code, policies, etc that we had. The knowledge gained from trial and error will disappear with the retirees. That's when the crisis will really begin. When we in the know will not be around to correct the rookie mistakes.

This is the exact same thing that happened with luddites, which today we know as 'idiots who oppose technological progress' thanks to capitalist propaganda.

It was never about efficiency, quality, quantity, or accessibility. It's almost exclusively about getting people to stop doing things for themselves, and instead rely on expensive machinery owned exclusively by the capitalist class for everything.

Most average people used to make and fix their own clothing, which meant they had little need for corporations that produce the same clothing, but lower quality. So capitalists forced everyone to use machines, until nobody remembered how to make clothes without them.

Same with software, languages, and a lot of other skills and office jobs right now. Educated people who know how to do stuff are not only unprofitable, but also dangerous. Make them all use AI until they forget everything and have to rely on megacorporations for the tiniest thing.

This is all the more reason to keep reading books, learning, DIY as much as possible, coding your own software, and even learning stuff like woodworking, sewing, farming, etc.

Being educated, informed, knowledgeable, and skilled is among the easiest, but at the same time most effective acts of resistance.

Do not let them turn you into mindless slaves.

Keep holding on. LLMs are still in the operate-at-a-loss-to-control-the-market stage. Once they start charging the real cost, human software engineers will be more in demand. That and refocus. All of human history is careers reinventing themselves as new tools become available.

Here is a new mission for all the Post-LLM-Depression existential crises developers:

Community Computing.

Use your skills to build a network with big tech alternatives for your community! Federate your network with other likeminded people’s networks. Restart the internet with real people without bots, ai agents, or advertisers.

Don’t quit your passion! Use it as fuel to motivate yourself and help others move away from big tech!

In my experience that's only been the case for functionally non-unique software.

At my job we write software that's effectively unique. There isn't a pattern to fall back on.
It makes a lot more mistakes very frequently, since the nature of it keeps trying to guide it to the known path. It's great for debugging since the manner that some check failed is chasing through known logic, and it doesn't matter that it doesn't see the existing code as probable or fitting a known pattern if the shape of a switch statement is still the same.

In my personal projects I've even run into issues getting it to do stuff like vulkan synchronization barriers in a way that doesn't continuously devolve into what you see in tutorials, with an ultimately unstructured pile of adhoc resource allocation and barriers.

Tbh I legitimately do not buy this. I use the best models, top of the line harness and the code still sucks it sucks less granted, but it's still just not good lol.

If I'm ever in the situation that "typing the code" was a bottle neck instead of figuring out what to type then I know I've fucked up somewhere.

The worrying part for me is how the fuck do we keep people knowing good code and architecture and able to review the output without practicing the art for a couple — or three — decades, first? It just won't happen, and then the new generations of "devs" won't have done any coding, basically, and they won't have learned anything the hard way. Security issues are going to be a nightmare in the future, no?

It will cause a massive loss of human knowledge, nobody would learn how because it's just a prompt

And it's not only for coding. Yesterday I was shown that because they probably stole a lot of parametric designs Claude can even do 3d files from photos and quotes, it spits out an openscad file and compiles it. I was shocked, it added chamfering and small details, from a rough sketch photo. Who's going to learn how to use a cad program if it can be done in 3 minutes from a prompt? And the process of learning taught you all the quirks , but in the future who's going to be a pro?

I feel like I see one of these posts every three months or so, and it's just beginning to feel like meaningless doomposting, like the boy who cried LLM.

I don't care how carefully the code gets reviewed, you don't know it as well as if you had actually written it, and that will make all the difference three months from now when someone discovers a bug in your code (there's always a bug in the code), or when the customer comes out of left field with a feature request that you didn't forsee and isn't easy to just add in (the customer always wants what you haven't accounted for).

Don't give up hope. Don't let the clankers win. Continue to hone your craft. We will need senior devs more than ever after the AI bubble pops.

As a (not so anymore) newly graduated computer engineer, this made me cry. Whenever I see threads like this the consolation thrown around is that someone with experience will always need to check the code and seniors didn't used to write much code anyways. And juniors are all LLM jockeys anyways so who cares.

Well fuck me I guess, the last train to break into the industry departed 3 years ago when I thought I was learning my profession. A couple months ago I felt principled, I wanted a job where I wouldn't be forced to vibe code. Now I'll take anything.

At this rate even if I do manage to get hired, and even if by some muracle I'm allowed to write code there; the experience I gain from it wont be valued the same as someone who started working before LLMs became widespread. I'm a part of the slop generation now.

Makes me wonder what answer pr people want when they ask if and how I use ai. Do they want me to use them or not? If I use them, I accept that I have no place among the senior developers of tomorrow, if I don't I'm missing on the one skill that companies looking to hire me expect me to have for the sake of something likely to be obsolete.

Maybe I shouldn't have made being a developer a part of my identity while still in university. Is it time to let it go? Accept that I've spent years on something I wanted and believed would lead to a good life for it to just not pay off? That the safest most sensible fucking life choice imaginable just left me unemployable?

Maybe it's for the best, as they say "Don't turn your hobbies into a job". But it breaks my heart to let go. Where would I even pivot here?

Sorry if this was rambling. This is a cry for help

This is how I feel too. I'm in several work chats where everyone seems to be pretending that Claude doesn't have its arm shoved up their ass, wielding them like a puppet.

Several of the projects I am working with are just AI generated. In fact, if I need to suggest any fixes, they will be denied unless it's AI generated.

I'm tired. I'm depressed. I used to take so much pride in solving problems, but all of that is gone now.

I'm going to try to ride it out and see where it takes me, but the work is mind numbingly boring and the trades look better and better every day.

I'm in the exact same boat. I've been thinking a lot about how it's changed the landscape of tech, and ive come to an interesting conclusion so far. It feels kind of like the switch from horse and buggy to motorized vehicles.

But, what's going to happen after these companies bankrupt? Will AWS still host old Anthropic models at an increased price? It feels like when Walmart moved into small towns and sold their products at a loss in order to kill mom and pop stores.

Massive enterprises will cut deals to keep using frontier models, everyone else will have to go back to using their atrophied brains. Those who have the compute will be running local models.

Similar to how employers today ask if you have a vehicle to get to work, they will ask if you have local inference. It hurt, but, I bought an AMD Halo the other day. They turned the information super highway into a stroad and the Halo is my vehicle.

The job hasn't died. How you do it has. Your job was never to write code. Your job was to understand problems and transform data.

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.

I just don't understand why any programmer would let go of the fun stuff. The problem solving, the language learning... It's all just sad. I'll never use LLM to code simply because I enjoy coding.

I'm finishing my thesis in software engineering and at this point it's hard to justify it. 6 years of my life pretty much wasted. At least I don't have any debt

Programming is a use it or lose it skill. Eventually the programming skills of these LLM output reviewers will atrophy to the point where they are no longer qualified to review LLM output. Not to worry, I’m sure big-tech will have a shiny new LLM output review automation for rent soon.

LLMs have made writing code more efficient which used to be the bottleneck but now reviews, requirements engineering, system analysis, architecture and all the other parts become the bottleneck.

This ties also into Jevon's paradox which says that making a resource such as coal more efficient increases consumption. I think this very much applies to software also, there are tons of projects such as creating custom solutions for a client that have become a lot cheaper and will lead to a lot more software being written. If Jevon's paradox holds then we will see increased demand for developers in the future.

The job is changing but there's a very strong possibility of demand for developers to increase. Imagine someone vibe coding their way to a usable product, that guy will need to hire someone. Businesses that used to be in shopify or WordPress get an internal system for workflows bolted on or get a custom website developed.

I myself learned Vim, edited code super fast, wrote tools and abstractions that actually helped and could implement features pretty fast and that skill I honed for 10 years is just not valuable anymore. The other skills such as reading code fast and debugging has become way more valuable though.

It could very much be that now is a great time to learn programming since people are not signing up and even though right now supply is higher than demand the demand could increase substantially as more software gets written. One thing is for sure though, our profession is going to write more code and that code will need maintenance and modification.

here i am in the game industry watching practically the entire industry move overseas. I've given up.

I am for some reason reminded of glass making by this. If you wanted glassware a long time ago it came from people that made it by hand, the glass blowers. Industrial methods were invented and made a big chunk of industry obsolete. But years and years later some people still want to know how to hand blow glass, learn how, then market it to people who want hand made stuff. It is pretty niche, but does still exist, and the factory made stuff does not compare.

Keep your skills sharp, we're going to need people like you when it all implodes.

The problem with all of this is that nobody understands how the code actually works anymore. Yeah the focus has shifted more toward design which may not be a bad thing but the underlying functionality is just totally not understood.

I work very low level embedded stuff, and over here LLM still can't do shit, outside of some very specific applications, and everyone pro enough could do it just as fast anyway. However, I do witnessing the death of profession here too, people practically over the course of a year stopped being able to think for themselves. Most of the people are doing debugging through LLM, asking it the most benine questions.
At this point, I just wish I will die before the total collapse.

I'm gonna try to not make this a pro-AI comment, but I'm still going to try and offer you a glimpse of hope as a fellow person who used to handwrite code for a living and sometimes still does. Unlike a lot of other people using AI, I only really started using coding agents a few months ago when it was clear they're getting pretty good.

We are all just considering design and architecture.

So you now get to think more about the what and the why, not the how. Not ideal if what you want to do is solve clever technical problems*, but on the other hand, code was always a tool to build solutions, not an end goal unto itself. In a software project, code is the beams, the nails, the planks and so on. You, an architect, design houses. The house won't exist without the minute details, obviously, but what the customer needs is a well laid out solution that is also executed well, not just extremely well sanded supported beams.

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.

Is that a bad thing? I always hated scrum. I thought everyone except team leads did.

We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.

That part sucks. But I feel like the more senior you get, the less you were always able to avoid reviews. As an absolute junior, I did 0 reviews. Later on, I spent an hour or 2 a day doing reviews after about 3-4 years... But I've also seen people with 15 YoE doing mostly code reviews all day before AI was a thing.

* There are still projects where this manual management is quite necessary. Look at ffmpeg, they use inline assembly to eek out extra performance. Super high performance projects in particular, will still need manually written code for the foreseeable future, even if AI can help you profile things quicker, etc.

"Computer" used to be a profession.

Might be the same with "Programmer". But also, it's usually called Software engineer or architect for a reason. It's not only programming. Like you said yourself you are still doing stuff or not? So its more like your profession fundamentally changed or to put it positively it rapidly adapted to new technological developments.

OP, im really quit sympathetic to you here. I'm among the knowledge workers who haven't been fully replaced yet, but I've done some of the training meant to replace me. It'll be a little while, but not that long, before I'm nearly unemployable.

The only solice here is the gift of limited forewarning. We can see the writing on the wall. Cobblers, per an example in another comment, didn't see it coming. We have precedent set, including manufacturing sector jobs outsourced to counties with cheap labor, to look at, only 30 years ago! You can fight it and hope to be within a small group of privileged few who knew the right people, or you can tell your kid to pivot now and get ahead of the decade of tragic and sad "wha-wha-whaaaat?" that will inevitably follow. It's not an easy choice.

I'm not sure what records and stories exist from these past eras that we can read and apply to now. Maybe a book of those tales is an opportunity for catharsis and reflection in the current moment.

All I can do is wish you luck and good judgement as this brave new world forms around us.

Fucking hate that this is what the industry has become. I got into programming when I was like 12 and now that I've recently graduated it's all fucking dead. At least I can make my own stuff though... I just can't live of off it however.

I really worry about this. It is not my area of expertise by any means. I assume that it is acceptable at coding because the people making it have shoved every line of code they could scrape from the internet (and probably other places) into it. So it can reproduce approximate code to do anything that has been done before. But I worry it can't do anything in a new way. It can't innovate. If no one is writing code that is able to actually think about the code and understand how code works, then we as a species can't innovate anymore either. If it all goes LLM, then we've built every lego shape we will ever make and anything we build from now on has to be able to be built from the bricks we already have.

I worry we are watching the early stages of a technological dark age wash over society.

Yeah LLMs sure can code but it is really a soul crushing experience. You can use AI to learn technical things much faster than before (provided you occasionally cross check fishy claims) but then it also feels like "what is the point if AI can do it 100 times faster than me and only requires design handholding". It is like playing a game in god mode, fun for a couple minutes but really boring afterwards.

Nevertheless I will still be doing advent of code on my own every year as long as it exists. People who use AI to solve the problems there can eat shit, thank you very much.