I’d like to hear from professionals: Is AI really a technology that will significantly reduce the number of programmers?

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BruteCarnival@reddit

Personally I am a strong believer that AI is only good for smaller tasks and helping out. So it’s really just makes you more productive when working in large codebases.

I believe there are a lot of executives boasting about replacing devs and how much faster and cheaper things are doing them with just AI. So currently jobs are being replaced and teams downscaled.

But I believe in a few years everything is going to start falling apart because of people overusing AI and introducing large amounts of tech debt without having experience devs ensuring everything is plugging together well. And companies are going to start mass hiring again to fix everything.

AI is a tool that makes us more productive, not a replacement for experienced developers.

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fonaldozero@reddit

I'm on a small team, everyone is super AI adopter, but I came to the same conclusion as you. I maybe have to say that the AI delayed my problem in 1-2 weeks, since I was relying on docs ( I didn't used the libs before so I had to learn and fix to the new update), The moment I stopped using and tried figuring out, took me less than a week... And I had other problems with super good libs which don't have any docs about somethings and AI could not find too.

My conclusion is that, if you are trying to do something simple, blazing fast, AI is better than you. But if you need optimization, know where to find a bug or anything more complex, you using it makes you less productive, atleast this is my experience...

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simonbleu@reddit

People forget that seniors devs are not replaceable, and that to get a s senior you need a junior to have a job first

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spiderzork@reddit

And I would go as far as saying even junior devs aren’t replaceable. AI can sometimes make you a little bit faster, but you really need experience to be able to catch the AI mistakes early.

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NAEEMP@reddit

My company pushes AI use heavy. I spend as much time fixing it as I do writing better code.

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Saeur@reddit

I am on a team of 13 people and watched multiple developers going from saying this to being amazed at how good the tools are.

There are a number of reasons you might have issues:

bad models -- The cutting edge models are REALLY good compared to stuff from a year ago. e.g. GPT 5 vs 5.2 felt like a huge leap. ON top of that, developer tools using the models have improved a lot too -- self-reasoning cycles, sub-agents, etc.
closed-minded dismissal based on initial results -- I know it's a contentious topic, but these things are tools and just like you had to learn to code, you have to learn to use them too. There is skill to prompting agents in a way that works within their limitations. For instance, there is a huge difference between telling an agent to solve a problem, and writing out a very thought out design spec on how you want to solve the problem, and giving it that. One time, I had a very hard time using AI to debug something generically, but once I wrote out a good 500 word prompt detailing the investigation loop and (very importantly) telling the AI to keep a living document of progress and constantly refer back to it, it actually succeeded. I gave this same prompt template to other devs on my team and they were amazed at how much better it worked.
development strategy -- projects which can be test driven have much better results with AI, versus something where the AI can not run its own tests and iterate to achieve a correct result. Multiple iterations have always been a reality of development but AI is a much better force multiplier when it can iterate on itself. If tests aren't set up, or a project just isn't feasible to be test-driven (e.g. gameplay scripting) you will see many more dumb mistakes from the AI which it would normally iron out through testing and iteration.

No-Method1869@reddit

From the hardware side, AI is ridiculously expensive. Not only are the initial hardware costs high, but the clusters are super complex to manage. Way out of the reach of your average IT department. The management seems like a cost companies aren’t considering, they’re just counting on it getting better over time. I don’t see it, we’re producing throwaway hardware for it. It’s not designed to be repairable or debugged properly like some of the embedded controller and telecommunications hardware I’ve worked on. I don’t see this changing anytime soon either, hardware companies are used to short term upgrade cycles now and they want to keep design and production costs down as much as possible.

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pin00ch@reddit

This is an excellent view. It's is way to expensive and will likely get much worse. The cost of using AI on an upscaled bases likely will be higher than staffing a Dev studio.

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NoIncrease299@reddit

And companies are going to start mass hiring again to fix everything.

Yep. This exact thing happened during the big off-shoring push in the 00's. And considering how much more tech is involved in our lives than back then; the scale will be even bigger.

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Dairalir@reddit

It’s going to be even better, cause if AI has been replacing junior devs, none of those juniors are becoming seniors. Us senior devs are gonna be worth a pretty penny in 5-10 years

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SardScroll@reddit

Honestly, I don't think the layoffs have anything to do AI; that's just the narrative.

I think the real reason is interest rates. When interest rates are low, investing money in developer salaries makes good sense. When rates are high, it's less so, especially for longer term or speculative projects.

If it continues at the current pace—that's a big if. We're already hitting training data exhaustion and diminishing returns despite crazy investment / spending in this space, the classic sign of an S-curve starting to flatten. Not saying it hasn't been/ won't continue to be transformative for programming but technologies almost never continue to linearly improve like this forever

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Silcay@reddit

Are the diminishing returns with us in the room now? https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1pr2ybr/claude_45_opus_achieves_metr_time_horizon_of_4/

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Old-Type-7221@reddit

Benchmarks don’t necessarily prove that an AI model is actually capable. Models can be trained on data that closely resembles benchmark datasets, which can inflate their scores. Scoring high on benchmark performance doesn’t always mean it will work well in real-world scenarios. There have been concerns about models being optimized specifically to perform well on popular evaluation tests e.g OpenAI and Grok.

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InVultusSolis@reddit

I agree with what you're saying, but I think people forget that this technology is still in its infancy and will be far more advanced in a few short years.

It was in its infancy in the 1950s, in fact. People were playing around with modeled neural nets way back then, but only now do we have enough computing power available to actually run them in a somewhat coherent manner. However, their limitations have also been surfaced and I don't think those fundamental limitations are going away any time soon.

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33RhyvehR@reddit

Bro says "I have magic way to bend windows to my will" I say What if there are no windows But dw, the worlds not ready yet.

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No_Prompt_5141@reddit

"AI is a tool that makes us more productive, not a replacement for experienced developers"

*Yet.*

Yeah, I've found that ai is good if you write something like give me a function that takes in these variables and returns this. Anything more than that and it can lead you down the road of despair.

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malthuswaswrong@reddit

Personally I am a strong believer that AI is only good for smaller tasks

I'm a strong believer that every big task is nothing but a series of small tasks.

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braincandybangbang@reddit

You say this as if things aren't holding on by a thread now.

This past year half the internet has gone down every couple of months as a result of either Amazon, Google or CloudFlare going down.

The internet has been a patch job from day one.

The idea that an overworked, burnout, human coder is always going to be more reliable than AI is humans desperately trying to cope.

Do most humans verify code by reading it line by line? Or does the computer test it by executing it?

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InVultusSolis@reddit

This past year half the internet has gone down every couple of months as a result of either Amazon, Google or CloudFlare going down.

This is because of companies relying on a small number of providers to handle certain needs. DDoS protection is hard, and CloudFlare promises to fix it for cheap - use them! Hosting your own servers in your own building is hard, so let's pay Google and Amazon to do it for us!

The internet has been a patch job from day one.

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fuzz3289@reddit

in a few years everything is gonna start falling apart

Much less than that, not only because of AI slop but because of massive supply chain attacks.

Cursor has gotten hit directly by 3 already this year where it’s installing malware via NPM in agent mode and they just released an update where agent mode is on by default.

AI slop is becoming a huge problem, but I think the more immediate threat is devs who don’t know what they’re doing running non-deterministic 3rd party attack vectors on machines with direct access to source code all the time

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Distinct_Prior_2549@reddit

I don't think companies will mass hire to fix anything, frankly. They'll just have one guy do the job, and hire the next guy when the first one burns out.

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cbdeane@reddit

I don’t think it’s going to be all of a sudden I think it’s just going to gradually pick up over the next couple years, it won’t be at the gold rush levels again though. Realistically a bunch of people that have been unemployed a while aren’t going to make it back into the workforce, they’ll need to find something else before they have a chance to get another job so the applicant pool will also shrink.

I do think that ai making people more productive will also drop entry level salaries. With how many applicants there are for work I’m surprised we aren’t seeing more lowballing tbh.

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crispysockz@reddit

Yes it will, I know how to code but so I know how to fix stuff and what to look for when things break, but I just built and website and a scraper that would have taken me days, in just a few hours.

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Saeur@reddit

I have been a dev at Microsoft for almost 10 years now across different parts of the company and I think it could go either way. AI Greatly multiplies a single dev's capability, but it also multiplies a team of devs. Everyone being more productive doesn't necessarily mean business should scale back and fire people.

Smaller teams still need a baseline # of specialists to work.. can't scale them back as much.

But perhaps in practice it will result in some de-bloating of larger teams. Particularly managing legacy code and documentation just got a lot easier recently. MS has internal-only models with insanely large context windows that can ingest a LOT of info and learn very quickly how a codebase works.

But I don't think AI will be fully automated running a codebase and making PRs (sounds like a recipe for disaster), it's just more like you will have individuals able to own a much larger portion of code than before.

TL;DR

I think macro-economic factors (AI bubble) will dictate which way it goes. AI mainly multiplies a dev's capability to do research and implementation, but it can't just do their job for them at the moment.

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Ok_Maintenance2251@reddit

I am glad that AI has come.

I am running a small company that sells some boring, old school POS systems. I am not startup. I never get funding, I'll never dominate the world with my softwares. I know my limitations. But I am a profit making company. I know real world requirements. To work with us you must understand a business workflow, you must understand taxation systems deeply, you must have deep understanding of accounting. Most junior developers cannot figure out these type of applications in first 2-3 years. I've been coding myself for last 10 years. Now finally I am glad that AI has come. It does not write good code, or cannot re-write my existing feature, but It helps me when I am stuck somewhere.

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Chhr05@reddit

Viewing this in the grand scheme, AI essentially came out yesterday. It's being used by the largest, most successful companies to all but replace junior positions in their companies (50% drop since 19' -from memory, probably more now). It is also being used to seek and correct bugs when senior level employees have an issue doing so. And, when it does complete tasks, how about speed? Humans are not remotely close.

It came out yesterday. Of course, eventually, AI will replace these positions nearly entirely. Anyone who says otherwise is either delusional, in denial, or halfway through their education program in software.

The time to stop this was nearly a decade ago. Humans don't choose to slow down, especially in tech. Is what it is.

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ShoulderHot7822@reddit

AI is helping us in all possible ways, building tools like 8080.ai are making it possible to move from concept to MVP incredibly fast, from idea to live application/website within few minutes!

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Spiritual_Lunch1600@reddit

Right now ai is used to assist devs. We use it to automate certain tasks in our ticket system or imaging system for helpdesk and desktop techs. It will eventually get to the point where it will be able to completely replace most devs. Its going to happen. Right now we need to dbl check the output from Ai to check for mistakes. But again Ai will evolve to check its own work based on the companies security policies etc etc. We have helpdesk techs that use it and have made live changes to our ticket system. Which is kind of crazy. This wasn't even heard if 5 or 10 years ago. I just want more time off personally I'd like to enjoy this thing called life and currently work just keeps getting in the damn way enjoy your career

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Silent-Natural-575@reddit

Tôi không biết giảm không chứ giờ tìm việc khó vãi. Còn ai nghĩ nghề IT còn hot thì cứ việc nhào vô thử

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codesbysj@reddit

My thoughts:

building systems using AI now works, After some years the company will recorginzed thas not scalable so use of AI will reduce.

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rco8786@reddit

I use AI every day and have for quite a while. Both for coding/work purposes and implementing AI-backed features in our product and internal tools.

TLDR - No it does not actually replace programmers or people.

It's excellent at one-off tasks (scripts, data processing, etc). It helps me get myself "unstuck" on hard problems or ramp up on some new tech or framework.

It's incredibly fragile. You can't trust it to do anything remotely complicated, and you can't even trust it to do one-off tasks unsupervised. Introducing a layer of non-determinism into your software is just....ugh. There's a reason we've been so laser focused on deterministic logic, reliable test suites, repeatable builds, etc etc in this industry. AI is fundamentally non-deterministic, which breaks all of those paradigms.

So basically it is *fundamentally impossible* to build reliable software that uses AI in any way, because there is inherent, unavoidable unreliability baked into LLMs.

NOW, that doesn't mean AI is good for nothing. Not every task done by a computer needs to be fully deterministic (and sometimes non-determinism can be a feature).

Some technical things AI *is* good at:

- Basic data analysis and/or data generation. There are many things that previously would have needed a dedicated ML tool that AI can just do if you ask it.

- Unstructured document parsing. Humans make errors here too, so there has always been some inherent expectation that a PDF/HTML translated into structured data could have mistakes.

- Writing deterministic code. Yes, AI is pretty "okay" at writing code...much like a junior engineer. That code will be deterministic, it just might not do the thing you actually want it to do, or architect it in a way that is satisfactory, so you have to either a) not care or b) still have a human engineer around to babysit it/modify the output to something acceptable.

AI is a tool that is useful in the hands of a programmer who can write good code to start with, but produces rubbish code in the hands of someone who cannot tell the difference.

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terpcandies@reddit

Have you tried using AI to build a program? I don’t know a lick of code. I have been using AI to build mini programs that fix specific problems I have. The off the shelf solutions are either expensive, overkill for my needs, or don’t solve my niche issues.

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MrPeterMorris@reddit

I have, yes.

My 30 years experience enable me to see why it is awful. I assume your leech of experience prevents you from seeing the same.

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terpcandies@reddit

I am saying that you may find the code rubbish, but when used correctly by an inexperienced person, it can still solve their problems and lead to the desired outcome.

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Repulsive-Radio-9363@reddit

The problem is you have no idea the sheer number of attack vectors that there are on all pieces of the code from the user interface to the database to the server side. There are hundreds of settings that need to be tweaked to every scenario. I can almost guarantee that there are bugs waiting to get exploited in your code on your live server. And another AI online is going to discover them soon and probably plant something into your code. I'm not being hyperbolic.

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More-Employment7504@reddit

The problem is that if there's something wrong with your code the AI won't tell you until you prompt it.

"I just finished writing that for you, job well done!"

It tells you that it's succeeded, but then you have to interrogate what it did and why.

That works fine for short scripts but you scale it up to large projects, projects that have to last for a long time, handle secure data or be worked on by other teams and that's where it takes a certain amount of knowledge to understand the work. You need to be able to challenge what it tells you. Understand the security vulnerabilities it might have introduced. Understand the type of code structure that it's used and why, because a bad code structure could be problematic even for an AI at a later date. Has there been any duplication of effort. How many database calls is it making where, when and how. What bugs exist, if any. What software has it added to your project.

I won't pretend AI is not a game changer. It's incredible, it fundamentally changes the landscape of what it means to write code.

In fact there's no reason why somebody who is completely devoid of technical knowledge couldn't just ask those questions of the AI and start getting answers, but then that becomes the journey to becoming a developer, because at that point you're not just prompting the AI anymore, you're learning to be an engineer.

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Disastrous_Spare_876@reddit

Nope it's not. If you want an example of CEOs when they ignore the fact devs aren't replaceable look at Microsoft and windows 11. They managed to somehow BREAK FRKING NOTEPAD. As of my personal experience with backend... AI made it worse and more tedious for me than just read the documentation and write it myself. It's not replacing anyone anytime soon.

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Business-Librarian59@reddit

No, because AI can't generate anything without a human telling it what it needs to produce. So humans will still be involved. Plus, we will still need programmers to clean up the mess that the code produced. AI isn't perfect, and it generates so much code that a few typos isn't uncommon

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smiladhi@reddit

My true experience
When I joined my company 1.5 y ago, we were 16 programmers. All of use were using Chat GPT to answer technical questions, just like how we used to use StackOverflow. We wouldn't soly rely on GPT, instead, any time we had a boring task like "format date using date-fns to whatever". Instead of reading date-fns docs, we would dump that small request into GPT and get the code and dump it back into our codebase, small things basically.
When Cursor Editor came out, our CTO became really excited, bought an enterprise plan and encouraged ( almost forced) everyone to use it.
We had 20 micro-services and 3 frontend apps, spread across different repositories.
The CTOs idea was to let Cursor see all of the codebase, front and back, all in the same folder, so it can really help you build features end-to-end. To achieve this, we migrated our code to a mono-repo and put all of our UI code and micro-services code into one folder.
It took us a month to achieve that, and after that, Cursor had access to all of our code at once. This was powerful because we could ask Cursor to build an entire feature front-to-back!
Today, it's only me, the CTO and our CEO; everyone else is gone! (Well, except the sales team).

Our CEO watched a Udemy programming course, and started directly using Cursor to MVP his new ideas, instead of talking to a Business Analyst, and then a designer, and then a product owner to finally have a programmer build it. Instead, any new ideas he has, he asks Cursor to build it inside the mono-repo !!!!
So yeh, 15 prorammers, 2 designers, 3 product owners were completely replaced with a $500/m cursor subscription.
Granted, the code that gets generated by Cursor isn't amazing, it's full of bugs, there's a lot of duplicate, but it works! And that's all the company cares about. They never cared about "good" code; they just wanted products to be shipped superfast. It's so funny, Cursor Editor generates the code, we create a pull request, and then another Cursor agent finds bugs on the PR and adds comments to Github, and we copy those comments back to the Cursor editor, fix them, and update the PR. It's seriously fucked up!

Es estúpido afirmar que el crecimiento de la IA será lineal.

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sentinel_of_ether@reddit

Yeah

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-Periclase-Software-@reddit

It can make a good developer even more effective, and thus needing one less mediocre developer.

If you use tools like Cursor, which does have project context, then it becomes extremely powerful when using agents.

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Accomplished_Fix_131@reddit

Venting out my frustration here. At last Friday in a meeting I confidently said I will code and deliver a very big feature (it involves a very new library) on the shoulder of AI by Monday. Now today is another Friday and I am still debugging the code this stupid AI has given me.

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disposepriority@reddit

In real-world development today, is AI actually doing most of the coding?

Maybe in some super greenfield startups? Any serious code base and it's an almost certain no.

And in the future, will programming stop being a viable profession?

How far into the future? Who can tell what software engineering will look like in 50 years, there is no imminent threat to the profession.

Now - if everyone picking up these small tickets simply gave them to an AI, they would not really gain any understanding of either the domain or the code base. The majority of the work has already been done by the presumably more senior engineer who created the tickets/implementation plan - but if he leaves how will this process continue?

I don't make small tasks for juniors because I can't do them - I could probably wipe out their board in an evening. These tasks exist (in the same way "newcomer/onboarding" tasks exist) so people can familiarize themselves with the code base, conventions, and so on.

Don't get me wrong, there are obviously projects that are simple in nature, regardless of size - these are usually handled decently well by AI

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Kaymd@reddit

Thanks for this well-articulated description. It's exactly what most people outside of software underestimate about software development.

The bottleneck in development is usually not the generation of actual lines of code. Mostly the chokepoint is the understanding of the usually somewhat vaguely defined problem, formulation of a plan based on knowledge of the system and familiarity with the codebase, and finally reducing the problem to definite executable step-by-step tickets to be translated into code.

Until AI can do these things, we are not replacing actual developers anytime soon.

If you receive 10 thousand PDF invoices, receipts, and money orders per day and need that data extracted, processed and entered into forms. Sorry bud but AI will give you one shitty script that might be able to handle 1/100th of that workload in a reasonable timeframe.

I don’t think you are considering scalability to any degree.

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berlingoqcc@reddit

Yeah for sure AI will not gave you a performant answer from the start. But it sure can help you a lot getting there if you instruct it and review it correctly.

Not using it would be stupid in my opinion , its one more tool to help and it would definitely help on that.

Also like i use gemini code assist for PR review in github and it will detect any loop deoptimisation.

But if you want we can do a youtube video were you implement it and claude do it and lets do some benchmarking in the end.

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sentinel_of_ether@reddit

I guess more what I’m saying is, a process like that requires governance snd orchestration. AI does not possess those tools and cannot provide them.

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-Periclase-Software-@reddit

I work for a big tech company from Silicon Valley. They bought enterprise access for us so yes it is being used in a serious codebase. Obviously, they didn't fire everyone and expect the AI to do everything. It's the engineers like us using it.

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braincandybangbang@reddit

Any serious code base and it's an almost certain no.

People really don't care about reality here do they? Anything to deny acknowledging AI's capabilities.

Microsoft says at least 30% of their code is written by AI now. Do they qualify as a "super greenfield startup?"

Google says more than 25% of their new code is written by AI.

No one in here is mentioning Claude Code which works directly with your code databases.

Just people denying facts to try and hold onto their perceived superiority.

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InVultusSolis@reddit

Microsoft says at least 30% of their code is written by AI now. Do they qualify as a "super greenfield startup?"

Google says more than 25% of their new code is written by AI

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denis870@reddit

code database

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disposepriority@reddit

OpenAI said, prior to the release of GPT5, that it will basically be an autonomous coding god - and yet here we are, 3 releases later with all the software engineers still here.

I know this must come as a massive shock to you, but companies can actually lie (stay with me).

Speaking about caring about reality, why don't you just load a big project that isn't a saas landing page and try to get AI to modify it?

Here's a cool project: https://github.com/The-Powder-Toy/The-Powder-Toy

Tell Mr. Claudio to just add some new elements and interactions no? It's open source and you can try yourself!

I'm not even going to comment on "code databases" and just wish focus on what a "written by AI" metric would even mean - is me telling the AI exactly what to write counted because I cba typing it out?

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JitaKyoei@reddit

Google and Microsoft don't know those numbers. They're completely unverifiable and said to sound bleeding edge to people who want to hear it.

Also, you reveal your ignorance with the Claude code comment. "Code databases" is not something anyone with field experience would say, and the idea that Claude code is somehow unique in that is reflective of someone outside the field falling for marketing, not someone with experience using these tools in production codebases.

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BrohanGutenburg@reddit

I think the real threat of AI is inflating expectation of the C-Suite in regards to what kind of productivity is realistic.

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disposepriority@reddit

Right but their expectations can't possibly change how long something is going to take. Even if they unfairly fire dev A because he doesn't meet their inflated expectations, dev B will also not be able to meet them unless dev A was actually underperforming.

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BrohanGutenburg@reddit

I mean, sure. But that still leads to a worse workplace for devs, including the ones that don't get fired.

At the end of the day, the team isn't gonna just say "screw that timeline, no way." They're gonna try to hit deadlines which will lead to overtime hours and a stressful environment

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disposepriority@reddit

That's true yeah, on the other hand I've experienced that happening way before AI was a thing with management changes or good old "shit rolls downhill" situations when some higher-up's plans don't turn out the way they thought they would - so really it's just the usual serving of shit we occasionally get to eat.

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General_Ad_1483@reddit

It will likely reduce a team of 4 programmers, 2 qa and one product owner into a product owner responsible for managing requirements and some sort of AI supervisor that will ensure the quality of code produced by them. SO yes - it will replace about 80% of programmers.

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m_d_f_l_c@reddit

Yes it will, but not in that it will allow a junior to perform like a senior, but in that it will allow the senior to do the work of 10 seniors, negating the need for junior developers at all.

Opus 4.5/4.6 is very good. It is the first model I have used that made me fear for my job.

I do think we are all cooked. Within a year or so I do believe AI will be able to replace almost all developers.

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Zestyclose-Wolf-6219@reddit

I've been coding for many years. Currently, I use AI to answer questions and give code suggestions. I use "Generative AI" occasionally to create small sample apps for prototyping. AI helps me figure out things faster than in the past, however, it doesn't replace coding. Using AI to generating a new app doesn't help much when your maintaining existing code. However, there is a push for Generative AI, but that also requires coding and maintenance. Also, my job now entails - using AWS, Unit Code Testing, Coding, GitHub etc., cert management. So while AI helps, my scope has grown as a result of competition and adding new features.

In summary, I don't see it replacing coding, but i do see competition changing as a result of being able to do things faster. Also see growth in scope of what coders may end up doing.

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Southern_Gur3420@reddit

pix174@reddit

I've absolutely seen it begin to replace entry level jobs. But I think companies are coming to recognize the real value is when it's complimented by an experienced engineer. I was actually just talking to someone about this and came across this snippet. I think it accurately refelcts what I see happening on the ground.

Environmental_Sir_33@reddit

which industry are u planning to move to now?

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BetterMouseTrap99@reddit

I've been doing code reviews for more than 20 years and I can tell you that AI is as good of a programmer as a mid level experienced human programmer. It makes the same mistakes which is usually in the architecture, however I can tell it what I want and it corrects it in a couple of seconds, and there is never a "Ya but". So I have to say that right now professionally I prefer AI over a human programmer, morally not so much. I see it as a code complete on steroids, refactoring which is hard to do, especially with bad naming (one of the hardest things in programming.. and when to validate a cache of course ;-)). It's very good and fast at comments, another things which is great. But if you don't tell it those things it will not do it by itself.

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emphieishere@reddit

The only thing that is noticable for sure is that everybody is trying to discuss it from the standpoint of tech debt, how AI is not really capable of replacing anybody, but rather can facilitate the process.... from the standpoint of developer, but not the perspective of a business owner.
Those, I bet, do not give a single f' about tech debt and how akshualy you could imagine some more neat and slightly efficient code. The time will tell, but the idea is that if AI, even not perfect, even with some unefficient-spaghetti code bla bla, but delivers a product that is OKAY/suitable enough for a certain niche, then AI definetely will kill that niche. I bet some medium website development for average shop in your town is out of question that it can be replaced. OHH, bUt WhAt iF a SerVER wILL CrASh (or anything else insert your option)? if anything, they might just hire a conractor for a short-term, it's pretty viable solution. I believe those contract IT services have been existent all along in the same Sweden for example.
Even if not fully, it certainly will kill many jobs. But often those jobs were fake in the first place. So many developers whose skill is limited to google search.

If you are truly deep into the CompSci, then for now I'd suggest you relax. But those who are garbage maybe should start to prepare

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Embarrassed_Map3644@reddit

From devs perspective, AI isn’t reducing the need for programmers, it’s changing what kind of developers are valuable.

AI speeds up boilerplate and repetitive tasks, but the real bottlenecks in software (understanding ambiguous requirements, making architectural decisions, debugging complex systems, and owning reliability and scale) haven’t gone away. What we’re seeing is that strong, product-minded engineers are becoming more leveraged, not replaced: one good developer using AI can do more, but still needs judgment and accountability. At the same time, demand for software keeps expanding across every industry, and hiring is shifting away from “code-only” roles toward engineers who understand systems, infrastructure, and business context.

This trend to talk about a shortage of seniors is really weird. Someone can just learn senior skills on their own with the help of AI and the bar for juniors will rise tremendously.

I’m sorry but a lot of these responses are delusional. Anyone who has seen Claude opus 4.5 create code in a well structured and managed agent would likely agree that programmers have a bleak future. It’s amazing what can be created and how rapidly it can be created with a solid agent coupled with a solid LLM.

All these comments that code needs to be supervised by a person with a fancy title? You need one person with that knowledge to create a solid agent that can execute all the things they are checking to justify their job security.

It can do tasks but not sensible higher level logic coding so as your code base grows it will become increasingly worse with ai than a dev that knows the code and has a hand in building it.

It’s helpful if you also take a step back and ask what should the structures architecture and interfaces look like. That’s where ai falls over partly because the task is give do this, not do this with these parameters.

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mlitchard@reddit

All I know is , after all these years of using Haskell, I’m finally diving into category theory due to its likely value-add to llm usage.

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RMODAD@reddit

honestly, ai is definitely changing the game, but i don’t think it’ll fully replace programmers anytime soon. there's still a ton of nuance and problem-solving that requires human creativity. plus, tools like saicpro help automate stuff but don't do everything for you. coding skills are still super valuable!

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AI won't be able to follow architecture or evaluate its changes. Ai won't be able to make sure the code fits to the needs and integrates to your environment. And if you are not using the major programming languages, architecture models and/or plattforms its gonna be harsh.

everything uncommon, side-cornered, legacy bound piece of software will be out of bounds.

AI shines with modern, up-to-date projects for the latest plattforms.

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deleted_by_reddit@reddit

[removed]

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This is a crystal ball question. I don't think anyone can see reliably beyond a year into the future right now. This tech is changing so rapidly.

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Snoo_39383@reddit

I havent found how to make it write all code but probably some have found a way

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btoned@reddit

Anyone who boasts AI writing code for this or generating an entire app has never used it in an EXISTING codebase.

It's a tool. Generative tech has existed for YEARS for devs. It's slightly more streamlined now but if you think it's on par with even a junior dev you are beyond clueless.

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themegainferno@reddit

I mean it quite literally has already reduced the need. The bar to get into software engineering is much higher than it was before. Even during 2020 -2021, it wasn't uncommon to get jobs just knowing basic syntax of programming languages. AI makes it exceptionally easy to produce code that works, so the jr positions have changed drastically. Jrs previously would cut their teeth writing boilerplate and simple code while they built their experience. That is nowhere near the case in 2025 going into 2026. Effectively, the bar has been raised to be a mid-level developer to get in.

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themegainferno@reddit

🫥👍🏽

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Not a dev but am 25+ year IT, so dev-adjacent, and a hiring manager. I agree with what he says, as does basically everyone else I know who is a pro in these fields. The bar for what I would hire has gone up significantly simply b/c these tools make many things much easier than they used to be.

For example, in entry level IT in the past, you might spend DAYS googling to figure out some obscure error message on a user's laptop. searching through forums, having to learn conceptually new things in a very fragmented way, trying a million random things suggested by strangers to see if one of them actually worked. Even in non-entry level, as a SysAdm, when an error message in a server event log you didn't know popped, you'd spend days scouring the internet to finally figure out the error was actually some obscure bug or policy that's been known for 10 years but never really documented or fixed.

Now, I take a screenshot of the error message, feed it into AI and say "what is happening and how do I fix it" and like 85%+ of the time it will outright know the fix or at least put me on a very close path to finding it myself. If I have conceptual questions or don't understand the fix, I just tell the AI that and have it help build my knowledge along the way.

My job is now way easier which means expectations for what I produce are higher. The bar has been raised.

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emefluence@reddit

I am, and I agree with what he says. Personally I think if it were a competition between me + an AI vs me + a junior, the former would be the more productive combo most of the time, even if the junior was using AI too. I'm def operating at a much higher level than I was before AI. I'm sometimes completing jobs in a day that I remember my seniors pairing for a couple of days on in the past. That's great for my employer, but it doesn't bode well for the juniors pipeline, or even hiring new mids :/

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Creator13@reddit

I wonder how it affects hiring for people like me who only have a 5 month internship of real world experience, but have been programming for decades and fall square in the mid-level range in terms of pure knowledge and skill. So I'm considered a junior especially when it comes to working in teams etc but purely based on skill I'm good for much more than just writing boilerplate and menial work.

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sixtyhurtz@reddit

It can happen. Just don't be picky about the roles you apply for. I went and got a computing degree in my 30s and managed to get a year placement. It took me about 6 months after graduating to get a developer role at a small engineering firm working on a very old system.

If you have the talent and can pick things up, smaller companies give you the opportunity to learn new things and impress other developers, because on a small team there's nowhere to hide.

On topic, I use AI a fair amount to stop myself falling down a rabbit hole and wasting loads of time on stuff. You have to have decent skills to know when it's screwing you over though. Just today I've had to follow up with questions like "isn't this a race condition?" or "this lifecycle looks suss", and then it comes back with a different approach that isn't a not-so-obvious footgun.

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emefluence@reddit

Well it's probably not great, but if you've got mid level skills you should shine in junior interviews if you can get them. Getting your first pro gig is traditionally a depressing slog, and I can only imagine it's got worse. I was in the same position 5 years ago, lifelong coder but with very little recent commercial experience. Took me a clear year to get just 2 interviews, but I aced the second one and went straight into a mid level position. I only got the 2nd interview via a personal connection though. They showed my portfolio site to the head of engineering where they worked and they were impressed enough to tell HR not to bin my application - which is exactly what they will do as soon as they see you've got no commercial experience. Chicken and egg stuff sadly.

So yeah, build and work your network, have some portfolio to show, and don't just go for junior roles if you've got the skills. I think businesses like finding people like us, as they get skilled, passionate people for entry level salaries. Good luck

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mattyb678@reddit

I think AI is being used as another excuse to cut costs and off-shore. I know companies are “replacing” programmers with AI but then hiring 3 devs in Eastern Europe.

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-CJF-@reddit

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Gold_Neighborhood286@reddit

AI still has a long way to go.

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SuchTarget2782@reddit

On one hand, no. Most software engineering isn’t coding - its requirements gathering, design, support, and other stuff.

On the other hand, an entire app team basically shut themselves down today at work and crapped their collective pants because Copilot was “down” (only for them for some reason…?). Which should be a few different kinds of red flags, IMO.

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gm310509@reddit

Lol

On social media, I often see posts saying things like, ‘I don’t write code anymore—AI writes everything.’
I’ve also seen articles where tech executives claim that ‘there’s no point in studying coding anymore.’

While AI can be a useful productivity aid, did you consider that AI might be writing a lot of those posts driven by those who have a vested interest in luring you to their platform? And that they might be overstating their capabilities so that they can flog their services on to people who might not fully understand the implications RN?

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heisthedarchness@reddit

Yes, it will, but not for the reason everyone thinks.

There's a cohort of college students coming up right now who have never had to program a thing. When the AI bubble bursts, they are going to be left without any skill. So they will not be able to enter the workforce as programmers, so the technology of AI will have significantly reduced the number of programmers.

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archa347@reddit

There have always been programmers who copied code with no understanding of what it did or why, and most of them managed to get college degrees.

The problem is taking a different shape but it’s always been there. Even when the AI bubble bursts this stuff isn’t going away. Organizations will become more accepting of the limitations of the tools, and the usage will mature and the students who managed to thread the needle of becoming comfortable with AI tools while still maintaining their own understanding of what it’s doing will thrive.

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heisthedarchness@reddit

Yes, you've always had to weed out frauds, and even that is presently more of a problem than it's ever been. But studying CS at college between 2023 and 2026 is going to simply be a black mark that you have to affirmatively prove doesn't apply to you.

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heisthedarchness@reddit

Don't confuse current AI with future AI. Current AI has a lot of problems that make human contribution important, and the roadmap to eliminating those problems is still unclear. But we will get there. There isn't really any long-term future where humans have some magical role in doing good programming, or good X for any given job X. It's just physically and computationally unrealistic.

On social media, I often see posts saying things like, ‘I don’t write code anymore—AI writes everything.’

Those are people who didn't need high-quality code in the first place. Yes, AI is great at writing a nice-looking webpage about your dog. It's not so great, yet, when you need to deliver that webpage to a billion users through server outages. But don't assume that's not coming.

I’ve also seen articles where tech executives claim that ‘there’s no point in studying coding anymore.’

I daresay the era of career planning is over. There's nothing you can study for now that you should expect to be doing for money in 30 years. Predicting which careers will change the fastest is hard and I don't claim to be able to do that, but the obvious reality is that (1) you will need to be able to adapt, fast, and (2) even then, before very long your ability to adapt will just not be enough.

In the meantime, my honest recommendation is to get a government job if you can. They don't pay as well as the private sector, but they take longer to fire you after employing you has ceased to be efficient.

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JayWaWa@reddit

In the short-term, yes, because the ability to have AI replace huge swaths of low-level devs will make the right people's stock go up a quarter of a point. In the slightly longer term, the reality of AI Being a mixed bag and writing code that is sometimes OK, sometimes trash, is maybe enough to get corporate bigwigs off the hype train. In the long run, who knows? Will gen AI ever get to the point where it's as good as even a mid-level engineer at writing clean, elegant, testable, maintanable, secure code? I don't think anyone really knows at this point, but it's at least possible.

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Tricky-Sentence@reddit

In my workplace, nope. It is beyond being useless - it is actively detrimental. Cannot even use it to autocomplete templates, it will always fumble something. The only thing it is being used for it for looking up basic information essentially, so we can skip googling. For everything else, it is treated like bloatware.

In the future it might become better, sure thing. But I see it as another tool to use, no way will it 100% replace devs any time soon. That would require a truly massive breakthrough. All those vibe coders will eventually end up in the valley of death with their AI generated code, and then the next generation of devs will be needed to clean up that nonsense. So that is where dev jobs will most likely split into imho, a sort of AI code cleaning specialization.

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SillyEnglishKinnigit@reddit

Same in my workplace. Our product is too large and complex to rely on AI for anything more than a tool to help develop faster.

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964racer@reddit

I don’t think so . It will enable programmers to do more .

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DustInFeel@reddit

As someone who's currently learning Rust through and with AI, no.

Why?

Because there can be no AI that explicitly implements what its counterpart inputs.

Where do I see AI making programming easier?

I'm someone who thinks a lot in terms of states, transitions, and properties, so I use AI to model things in Rust according to my ideas.

That's the only area where AI can help.

But anyone who thinks you can just write prompt code and then maintainable code comes out of it, well, what can I say, there's really no helping them.

And they don't understand that AI isn't there to replace work, but only to simplify it.

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33RhyvehR@reddit

AI can generate entire 3D environments using net libraries.

Idk what we need rust for but it's not as big as you think

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WanderingSlav95@reddit

Not really, let's say you want just change some trees etc.. the ai will puke out something completely different from previous world ...

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33RhyvehR@reddit

Sorry by maintained I meant it can be re generated entirely and then poof problems gone cause it updated the entire thing to the newest methods.

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Jmauld@reddit

Many people confuse a software engineer with a coder…

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There are two categories of claims here, ones about what is happening now, and ones about the future.

For claims about the future, the only correct answer is nobody knows. Predictions about the future of an industry are low accuracy in normal times and AI is moving so rapidly as a technology that no one really knows where it will land it 3-5 years. Anybody who gives you confident predictions is either an idiot or a scammer.

For claims about the present, no, engineers are not primarily writing code with AI. All studies that show people are writing primarily with AI all include tab-auto complete in the style of Github Copilot, which is not really 'AI writing code' so much as it is 'AI guessing the next 30 characters'. AI assisted coding definitely is having some impact, but it's hard to assess how big it is because

The research is mostly done by AI companies who are not going to give objective analysis
A lot of the impacts on headcount are driven by execs who may not actually be able to assess accurately how productivity has adjuested

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mredding@reddit

Is AI really a technology that will significantly reduce the number of programmers?

The answer is not yes/no.

There is a segment of the market that is really low value-add, just very basic, dumb business logic.

My brother runs a business, he needed software that could plot out and calculate an area using GPS coordinates from a phone. There's software that does it - specifically catered to his industry, but the cheapest license is ~$500/mo. It's so simple what he needs and what this software does, it's stupid. The commercial software is so god damn simplistic, it exists just to get money from these smaller operations. Because they can.

Well, not anymore. It took my brother 20 minutes of prompting to get exactly what he wants.

There's SUCH a need for such small and simple software, and this market is going to go away. For all the developers out there who were perfectly happy grinding this market, they're all either going to have to climb the value-add ladder, or THEY are going away, too.

As for the rest of us, the primary forces acting upon us are not AI, but economic incentives. We're going through a major market downturn right now, and several factors are coming into play.

First, the American economy is principally service-oriented, and that means a lot of software; the political situation has the US economy in a tight pucker.

So if the political situation changes, so too, will the job market.

Second, the dot-com era finally died when corporate interest rates finally went up from 0% two years ago. FAANG companies were "prospecting" for the "next big thing" with interest free loans - all these years, these companies weren't spending their own money, are you crazy?!? No, they took out a big corporate loan, forked off a subsidiary, and if that didn't generate revenue by the time the money ran out, it folded; if it did generate revenue, the subsidiary folded anyway, and the parent company absorbed the IP.

But now the parent companies have to pay money for those loans, so they stopped taking out loans. The scheme dried up, and all those developers trying to innovate "the next big thing" are all out on their asses.

So if the interest rate changes, so too, will the job market.

Third, India is actually starting to get really good. Outsourcing was a big idea in the early 2000's, and the results were... not impressive. The idea was right, but it takes time to mature. Now days, it's very reasonable to open a tech foundry in India. It's cheaper and competitive.

So again, for certain categories of business software, this job market is mostly going away. You really have to ask why WOULDN'T you outsource to India, since the American market is so much more expensive?

Forth, if you are in the US, the Millennials have saturated the service industry. We're the second largest generation America has ever produced. And just as the Boomers took all the trade jobs, we took all the software jobs. It's not impossible to get into, but it is hard.

So is it about tech, or is it about money? Do you feel that an office job is inherently more desirable than labor? I got into tech for the money and hopefully that it would be a career that would last me a lifetime. In hindsight, I wish I got into finance and trading, instead. I don't care what I do so long as I'm earning 6 figures or more. I know pipe fitters making 6 figures, and manufacturing is re-shoring, near-shoring, and returning to the US. The Boomers retired on average 2 years ago. The dirty secret of tech is that there IS NO next big thing, no one knows what to do. The next 20 years in the US is going another way.

AI can't wipe out software engineers completely, because AI cannot generate what isn't already contained in its model. It can do a great many things, find and deduce from patterns and existing information, but if you want something truly new, something never done before, you practically have to write the code yourself, in prompt form. Even then, you can only depend on AI to be a generator - the code still needs to be understood and validated, someone still needs to be accountable for it. Prompters who don't know how to code can't do that. Managers who don't know how to code can't do that, and don't have the professional capacity to do that task anyway. AI suffers from hallucinations and is vulnerable to malicious attacks and poisoning - its weaknesses can't be avoided, they're inherent to the algorithms that define them. They can't write themselves, they can't fix their own problems.

And then there are concerns about IP. AI models are typically trained on OSS, almost all of which have licensing, and AI has been trained ignoring all that. The class actions lawsuits are already pouring in. If you assume ownership of AI generated code, you are in violation of every license the AI ever stole from. Some businesses are very sensitive to that.

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grendus@reddit

So, at the current level, not really.

The big concern is it does junior level kinda-ok-ish. It's good at writing boilerplate code like unit tests, it's good for generating blocks of code that I would have grabbed from Stack Overflow anyways... and that's actually about it. It hallucinates way too often on difficult tasks (I tried asking it for a PartiQL query and it kept adding GQL function calls), and fundamentally doesn't "understand" code. It's just generating what it thinks is the most likely next word.

I think what we're actually seeing is the natural contraction of the coding "gold mine" era coming to an end, with execs using AI as an excuse to outsource and cut staff.

Basically, once AI can replace programmers, AI will be replacing all office jobs period.

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Sileni@reddit

AI is still GIGO.

AI needs a big brother to explain the nuances and biases of the landscape.

In my opinion (lol) too many people with 'believed' information, and not enough people with value information contribute to the source. My conclusion is based social media voices.

If all the 'professional' papers (usually fee based) could be included in the 'source' I would have more confidence in the information.

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perbrondum@reddit

Whenever I complete a new feature for my enterprise mobile solution I give the same challenge to ai. Here’s the challenges; 1. Create a function that given a new event with (startdate/enddate/ duration) and a set of existing similar events and a list of holidays for the region, finds the first available empty time and returns it. 2. Create a speedometer SwiftUI view that given a value of x pct, creates a 180 degree speedometer showing value as a arrow. 3. Create an algorithm that takes a set of transactions for a category with a date and value component and returns the most neglected category, lower value and older dates being worst. All tasks are not complicated and not unique but somehow the current AI platforms get close but fail to complete the task accurately. The level of the code they return is similar to a junior programmer. After two rounds of corrections they get better but not complete and not even accurate. So while you can get some help from AI to solve challenges it is not ready yet.

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Zenneth014@reddit

Okay everyone, repeat after me, “I am good enough. I am good enough.” The amount of imposter syndrome I’ve seen in this industry makes me think this is a lot of insecurity coming out. Anyone who has really worked with AI knows the limitations and benefits of the current state and we know it’s not replacing people. The layoffs are due the monetary investment being redirected into AI and not due to the actual capabilities of the tech. Will it be good enough one day to really replace a human in a technical capacity? Maybe but I kind of doubt it! It can barely do simple math still.

CEOs are convinced it’s the biggest thing because an LLM doesn’t think, it just strings together outputs it thinks will make the shareholders, er, I mean users happy. So maybe there’s some projection going on at the CEO level as well.

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WanderingSlav95@reddit

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_2C2CNmK7dQ&pp=ygUhcHJvZ3JhbW1lciBhbHNvIGh1bWFuIHZpYmUgY29kaW5n

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avz86@reddit

it supercharges productivity for people who know how to use them.

So AI won't replace a full person, but it already makes 1 person able to do the work of 5 people.

And yes, I work in IT and am seeing this already.

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Clean-Hair3333@reddit

It’s a possibility - LLM’s excel at generation from examples. And a lot of application code has been built over the years for LLM’s to learn from.

So in theory a small team of really capable devs can replace a traditionally large team with LLM support.

One problem, that small team of capable devs have to have solid coding knowledge so that they don’t let trash in their systems.

So, in summary AI can support a smaller team of really skilled devs, which can mean a reduced number of devs in general. And the more capable it becomes the more support it can offer.

But for now it’s not good enough to justify a significant reduction in devs, to build proper real world and scalable solutions.

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Zenneth014@reddit

This! By example is huge. I’ve generated code changes that require migration of a lot of similar components to a new infrastructure by creating one change then telling AI to do the same for module x, y, and z. This did require me to match some patterns in the old infrastructure to the patterns of the new infra was being built out but I would’ve loathed doing the migration otherwise. Did this also require the new infra to be well designed by the team responsible? Yes. Do I trust an AI to do that design and not work itself into a tangled mess? No. It helps, it doesn’t replace. At least not yet.

Maybe a big caveat: been doing this for almost 15 years so I don’t really sweat the coding part of the job anymore.

Ultimately, I think the capable people who I’ve met in the last 15 years are either now seasoned enough to not worry or are young and smart enough to adapt. If it comes for me personally in a few years that’s okay, I don’t need the job anymore. For those who do need the job, this is why you need to know more than just how to code. Boot campers don’t really have positions anymore where I work. You need to understand and learn how to change and manage software systems regardless of who codes them.

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DigmonsDrill@reddit

Maybe. Lots of things have made programmers more productive, like open source. Did those reduce the number of programmers?

The short answer is yes.

SillyRab@reddit

AI, as it stands today, is just a tool that makes engineers more productive. Pretty much everyone on my team uses it but I would say it has boosted my productivity by ~10-15%, which while substantial is FAR from a replacement.

Anyone saying otherwise falls into two camps imo:

People with incentives aligned with saying AI will replace programmers. Think tech executives and AI influencers who directly make money from doing so
People whose programming aptitude is so low that they can't distinguish between the output of something like lovable vs what a professional developer does on a day to day basis inside of a large, mature, enterprise codebase so when they use something like lovable they think "wow devs are cooked"

AI will certainly get better so the stance above might change but the people that believe AI progress is going to be exponential or even linear are misguided imo. It will take another or even several research breakthroughs akin to transformers for AI to reach the level of replacement.

So then we need to ask, will the productivity boost of AI translate to a reduction in developers? I don't think so. I think history has shown that tech company's are fiercely competitive in a race to market domination/monopoly in whatever market(s) they operate in. They will use productivity gains to get more done rather than to cut back on costs.

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danzerpanzer@reddit

I've used AI in the last year to do work that would probably have been done by an intern or extremely junior programmer in a large company. The code it generated was incomplete and wrong in a spot but still a time saver. I think it is improving and will reduce the number of programming positions. How much, I don't know.

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TitiLancsak@reddit

It will replace all of us eventually, probably programmers will last the longest since they're making it

AI will not take your job, but devs who use AI will

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NeoChronos90@reddit

Picture

Ultimately it will create even more jobs, but it will be a walk through a valley of tears until then

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USMCLee@reddit

Yes it will reduce the number of junior programmers (yes I know the downside to that).

Real life example: we had a one of our senior developers create a new website to track PTO and help you determine when you would reach maximum accrual.

It took him about 50-60 prompts to get it mostly functional and working close to what we wanted.

BUT!

It has zero integration. The data is stored in local memory of the browser.

There is no business logic. It is nothing but calculations and graphs based on data entered.

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yummyjackalmeat@reddit

LLM Just generates stuff that reasonably goes together. It's not actually using logic. I work in the salesforce ecosystem and the CEO of that company is pushing using their AI coding agent. It's pretty astounding the stuff it can generate, but it's also astounding that it will go into files make edits that I KNOW will break business, but I only know that because I know what I'm doing. Imagine if mr middle manager just went ahead and pushed those changes to production? Then they'll have to hire back whoever they fired to fix it and lose more money than they thought they had saved.

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tylerlw1988@reddit

AI in its current state is not capable of writing fully production ready code on its own. I tend to use it as more of a stack overflow search engine than anything and even then it's almost always wrong in some way. It does probably speed things up some. This is also dependent on the tech stack. I'm a native Android engineer and I think it tends to be worse there.

The main issue that developers face in regard to AI and in my opinion come from the C suites perception of AI effectiveness rather than its actual effectiveness.

They believe that AI will continue to get better at the same rate and plan the route of the company around that. I am not convinced that LLMs can get significantly better. They do not think, problem solve, or create anything new. A next word predictor can only do so much. Plus the cost around maintaining it and making it better is not sustainable.

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pa_dvg@reddit

We still haven’t seen a solo entrepreneur success story of any real scale. There have been a few “i got some revenue!” Stories here and there, and most companies are using ai to some degree, but it’s hardly a mass displacement.

Adorable-Strangerx@reddit

Is AI really a technology that will significantly reduce the number of programmers?

Maybe, but I doubt.

‘I don’t write code anymore—AI writes everything.’

That's cool but you need to know: 1. What do you want AI to prepare for you 2..be able to judge how shitty the generated slop is 3. Does generated slop adhere to the rest of your project Etc.

Currently when you first prompt "I want device for going from point A to B", and then " I want to do it fast", you may end up with a rocket engine powered bike. Technically it does both, but is it really something that client wanted and would be useful?

I’ve also seen articles where tech executives claim that ‘there’s no point in studying coding anymore.’

From my perspective, we could save more by replacing CEO with AI. There is no point in studying MBA or whatever they were doing.

In real-world development today, is AI actually doing most of the coding?

Some clients have propiertary software and are reluctant to use AI. Imagine stuff like Amazon recommendation engines flying around for anyone to prompt it out. That's a big issue, so either there are restrictions or no AI at all.

And in the future, will programming stop being a viable profession?

I guess yes, the main point is to transform what client want into technicalities. In which language it is secondary.

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sallythebubble@reddit

I am using AI agents at my job, and already can see that it can easily replace junior level developer at this point.

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azac24@reddit

Short answer, no.

Long answer executives are going to try anyway. The biggest problem with AI is it doesn't actually think. It's given a massive amount of data from the Internet and trained on answers other people have given. It is unable to tell the difference between a correct answer and one that is close or just straight up wrong. Basically you can't give AI a list of all the C++ code rules and syntax and expect it to write c++ code.

So will AI write code for you? Yes. Is that code always right? Not always. Does the code AI gives you effectively solve the problem? Most likely not because it's usually not very efficient.

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PutridLadder9192@reddit

I have found it can do things in multiple ways and it randomly will decide to do a very poor job and then other times it does it better by default

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VariousAssistance116@reddit

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Alternative-Pen1028@reddit

It will reduce the amount of non-qualified people for sure. The IT sector has grown too large because it was easy to enter. The demands were low, and a lot of people who entered the industry are remaining low skilled even still. Thousands of products are so poorly coded you can't even imagine. Basically we were living in the world of software made with AI for the past 20 years, with only difference AI were real people getting paid. Now AI can do the same shitty job.

The industry will transform, the demand in skills will grow - AI will become tools. So no, studying is required more than ever now. But it has to be very fundamentally oriented. Understanding the security side and performance optimizations etc.

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Intelligent_Bus_4861@reddit

Personally I dont think so but it's hard to say because we do not hire people Its the hr/managment that handle those stuff. If they believe that AI can write junior/middle level code for 100$ they will not hire people, they will just give seniors a coding agent and call it intern or whatever, but they will need those SE coding is not the only thing we do.

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StudySpecial@reddit

in the short term - yes ... in the medium/long term, who knows but probably not

the problem in the short term is that the sudden introduction of AI has made all the existing experienced programmers significantly more productive, so there is less need to hire or back-fill with more junior programmers

but the amount of programming work in the world is not constant ... if programmers are more efficient, one possible outcome is that the whole economy/industry expands to produce more output... so ultimately the end result of increased productivity could be a similar number of employees but significantly more output

also in the medium term, the lack of junior hiring currently (and consequently no pipeline to train up more experienced programmers) could lead to a shortage of experienced people down the line

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ImGeorges@reddit

I do use it and it writes about 60-70% of my code, but its been React sites for Proof of concepts (I work in the R&D department)

It can be great to speed up writing simple logic, but is not in a stage to significantly reduce engineers. It's not capable of maintaining complex scalable code.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years it gets way better than what is doing today.

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zubeye@reddit

I don't know.

even ultra smart people are just guessing.

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BroaxXx@reddit

lol no.