Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
I still try and do some coding by hand. Agents have improved massively and they’re now really capable but I can’t see how anyone is going to fully automate the software development process. If there’s even the slightest chance that an agent can go off track and cause an outage, you’ll need a person to sort it out. If nobody can understand the black boxes that these things make when unattended, who’s fixing that shit? I’m yet to work for a company that is okay with a production build being down for any period of time.
There are companies running the narrative that their developers don’t write code anymore but unless they plan on fully automating the process and taking humans completely out of the loop, I don’t see how that is sustainable. There will be a point when developers realise they have no future at your company so they’ll leave, taking their knowledge with them. The bridge between your software and your business is now an LLM. That’s a huge amount of trust to put in something built on probability and has a limited context window.
AI isn’t disappearing but at some point there is going to be some high profile events that even the CEOs can’t ignore. Their job is money and if something in their business is losing them money, they will change it. That could be outages, customer dissatisfaction or their development ‘team’ is now costing them a fortune. It just sucks that we have ride this shit out.