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’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.
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.
Is that a bad thing? I always hated scrum. I thought everyone except team leads did.
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.
I still am not a fan of relying completely on another company as we all know that companies have a habit of screwing their customers. Especially when they hold all the power. And we are currently still in the “get your customers addicted” phase.
When that ends prepare yourself for higher prices and lower quality. And they will increase prices and lower quality again and again. And so will the competition.
If you have to rely on llms you should set up something for yourself that they can’t take away, because the enshitification will come and it will hit the companies who rely on llms HARD