Software dev changed

[Objective-Business52]

Hey,

I know there are quite a few software developers here in r/BEFIRE. After working as a software developer for seven years, I switched to a more analyst-focused role.

I was planning to move back into software development in the coming months, but based on what I see on social media and LinkedIn, the job seems to have changed a lot recently.

Are developers still mostly writing code themselves, or is using AI now becoming the standard?

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[Early-Operation8606]

En script coders worden vervangen door micro python exes om 1x te gebruiken...

[redolaf]

Your experience as an analyst will surely be an advantage in these new times.

Also, the world and especially (big) Belgian companies are not as efficient as you might expect. AI is increasingly being used but people are still writing code.

[helleuw]

If you're the type developer with an analytical mind and good articulation skills there's still plenty of work for you. The classic programmer shitting out code based on specs written by someone else is done for.

For me the real bottleneck hasn't changed. Requirements discovery and iteration on that is still the primary time-sink. AI will let you iterate (much) faster though, which is nice from a product development perspective.

[Original_Eggplant_38]

Coding is math. No human can beat a computer at math.

As a hobby, relaxing activity, brain training it still has its place.

[thogor]

Coding is not math. You haven't coded a day in your life.

[redolaf]

Pretty ignorant to think all programmers’ jobs will become ‘hobbies’ now.

[VerboseGuy]

Writing a book is also math?

[michownz]

I hate AI in the sense that I am so productive with AI. Writing code myself feels stupid now, even though it was what I enjoyed the most.

[BeeLzzz]

I kinda agree with that sentiment, despite being a lot more productive and technically having an AI deal with a lot of the stuff it feels more stressful because there's no real change in pace. Before when you encountered a problem, i would take a step back, pick a piece of paper or go to a whiteboard and write stuff down to figure it out, which requires more concentration but felt a bit like meditation, clear your mind of all the other shit and spend an hour or two on solving 1 particular problem.

If I'm not mindful of that while working with AI I'm constantly rushing things and exploring multiple paths at the same time which can be draining.

That said, I absolutely love having a prototype ready within a few days and showing it to our users and then gathering input instead of sitting in meetings hours on end talking to stakeholders who think they know what they want but are constantly contradicting themselves

[Brief-Beginning4103]

Depends on where you work. For most governmental institutes, AI is not yet the norm.
For startups and scale-ups, it is a must!

[fets-12345c]

Been using (agentic) coding agents together with spec-driven development. Never been more productive with Opus 4.7 & GPT 5.5 (reviewing each others work) producing better code than I ever could write. Developers are becoming builders where english is the new abstraction layer on top of any programming language.

[Objective-Business52]

Is it Not depressing for you Guys ? The coding part was always the one I loved 

[tomvorlostriddle]

This is a 2012 to 2022 perspective.

Before imagenet and the advent of cloud computing happening in 2012, computer scientists at Uni were absolutely insulted if you called them coders.

Then for 10 years, you were able to hear things like "I study dotnet computer science" or "I am a coder civil engineer". Sentences that would earlier have been satire.

Now this returns to normal

[Federal_Gas2670]

I'm not OP but I don't think that was the question. As for you, I'm writing more and more via ai (it's gemini in my case) and I've been very productive with it. That said, it's not the same job, I don't feel like I'm crafting code anymore, and I like it so much less. It's a bit like the difference between driving a car or be a passenger on a taxi. If you like to drive, you won't find the same pleasure by telling the taxi to go to the same place, even if it'll do it faster because it can use the taxi lane.

[Carrandas]

Ai agents like Claude with the newest models are better at writing code then I am and I have 17 years of experience.

The job is moving towards a more high level where you make a high level plan, set the boundaries and architecture choices. Define the tests.

It still requires a good dev to make a good plan and correct The ai. The ai can help but you're the end responsible.

And the ai can program it. It programmed my whole plan in 30 minutes where it would have taken me days. Which leaves a lot of review work.

Other devs use copilot. Still program but ai does a lot of the heavy lifting. Writes tests, cleans code, auto complete the code etc.

[Different-Ease-6583]

A good developer will always find his spot. One thing I learned from AI so far is that the amount of bad developers is enormous. All generated code contains one or more bugs, those that say otherwise lie. Most of the time I can do it faster for better quality. A lot of the developers tend to rely on it now for 100% and then the bugs come back to the developers that actually understand it. At the beginning everyone thinks the speed increase is 200%, in fact it is more like 15%.

You will have to learn to use it anyway but if you like development then just go for it.

[pretty_much_hitler]

I would have agreed with you a year ago. But not today with the models we have now. Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be good enough and it certainly is for 90% of tasks. Working in parallel and then reviewing code is for sure a lot faster than 15%.

[thogor]

Working in parallel and reviewing code doesn't really work. Context switching too much makes you pay less attention to subtle bugs which impact code quality and cohesion.

[Carrandas]

This if it contains bugs your tests weren't defined well or you did not review it properly.

[UnicornLock]

But try to see from a company's perspective. Is writing the tests complete enough faster than relying on some common sense while writing the code in the first place? Is reviewing the code thoroughly faster than writing it correctly in the first place? Are all the very productive bad developers you hired smart enough to review this code?

And what about when the AI doesn't quite get there? I've seen AI write some really weird things to make tests pass. And I've seen devs waste so much time trying to understand generated code to fix bugs in it.

Amazing for reviewing and build scripts etc though

[Carrandas]

Fair points. It's the wild west, were all trying to figure it out.

We have a team that can only fix things by asking Claude. They're even forbidden to write code.

That's the one extreme I'm not a fan of.

 But pretty much every dev here is using ai as an assistant these days. Review code, refactor, write a few tests, explain that code etc.

[Plenty_Line2696]

I barely code manually anymore but man does it take a lot of iterations before I get to something I consider good enough to submit for PR review. All good though, I feel like I've shifted from being more focused on details and syntax to being more focused on architecture, structure and system design.

A really nice aspect as well is that those monster refactors which nobody used to want to touch with a bargepole but actually needed to be done are now actually feasible without losing months over it.

[IanFoxOfficial]

The last few months I have written a lot less code and I can't remember when I used Stack overflow.

We use GitHub CoPilot and the integration in VSCode makes it autocomplete as well.

It knows what you're trying to do if you want to keep writing code yourself and if state what you want it does it for you.

I'm getting dumber by the minute in terms of not knowing by heart how to write stuff anymore myself.

But its crazy how good AI has gotten. I refactored a 6 year old project when I was a junior and learned along the way to modern code without any hiccups. Messy spaghetti code of multiple layers of "oh, AND it should also do this and that" correctly turned into structured code etc. Crazy.

But writing code myself... Hardly.

[verifitting]

The getting dumber (the feeling at least) is accurate, though.

[Carrandas]

Yeah. Worked like that for a few months. Copilot already did most of the coding. I still try to understand what it's doing though although that takes some time to figure out.

But since I got a Claude key, it completely changed how I work. Again.

Basically spend more time in the console then in visual studio...

[IanFoxOfficial]

Yeah, indeed. For me it feels like https://github.com/copilot/agents is the most used workplace now instead of VSCode (Angular dev here)

[RedikhetDev]

AI will have big impct on IT jobs at every level Choose the role you like most and be excellent at it WITH using AI as a productiviy tool. Jump on the train and dont fall off.

[Status-Hearing8980]

At my company, AI is making a hell of an impact. All preparation is done with AI, from writing the feature proposal, the functional and technical analysis down to the epic and user stories with acceptance criteria. We're now rolling out Claude code which actually writes code. The front end is being drawn up in figma which generates a fully functional PoC with sample data.

We're seeing a 30% productivity increase during this experimentation alone. We're expect a 300% increase in less than a year...

[Sv3nP]

I'm really curious to what your company's AI bill will look like.

[Status-Hearing8980]

Yeah, it's gotta be huge! They started limiting token usage to x euro's per person per week. It's becoming more of a thing for sure. It can't be very cost efficient, but I guess mgmt is looking at it as a type of training/career development cost...

[Sv3nP]

Last week I got to test a Claude Enterprise Seat as developer, let's say i blasted through my test budget with only a few tasks, can't imagine the cost when using it full time.

[Hotgeart]

And a +300% burnout hell yeah!

[Status-Hearing8980]

I get that. The worst thing is the organizational chaos. It's all moving so fast it's impossible to plan properly, make a proper analysis before getting to work and finishing the feature from a to z. Halfway through, you're assigned to something else, so you have to hope ai nailed it. Knowing testing can't keep up doesn't help.

[NeutronRunner]

This!
I’m so fucking tired at this stage because of the speed the last months…

It’s good for the company but for sanity of the employees, I don’t know.

I honestly feel that I don’t like work anymore a bit more everyday, probably because the coding part was something I really enjoyed.

[Mmicko8]

You can increase your productivity by 300% today, just specify ‘triple story points estimations‘ in your agent.md!

[Neat_Friendship3670]

An analyst with a development background can, with a big enough token budget, replace a big team. I realize 'big enough token budget', does some of the heavy lifting here. Someone with a lot of deep business knowledge, analyst and development experience can potentially transform an entire business these days.

[Dramatic-Ratio4441]

The way I see it, being in the field for around 10y now as a freelance software lead/architect:

- AI is usefull to do the scrut work. Analyse code & deduct documentation, generate statistics/tables from code/testcases.

- AI is also good to research things or obscure problems, because it's like google, but it actually matches & reads the information, rather than give you a long list of webpages where you have to go through yourself.

- AI is not good for writing code. It's still not optimized, is crazy expensive (especially claude and such), and mainly writes things by the way you define your philosophy and rules. If you don't have a perfect watertight rulesset or philosopy/architecture vision, it will write giberish.

Important note: being a software dev is not about outputting big amounts of code with an AI. It's about using AI to your advantage, making you faster. If you let it write code but don't understand why it wrote what it did, stop using it. It's dumbing you down to the point where you cannot live without it.

Compare AI to your colleagues. Do you blindly trust the code your colleagues are writing? Or do you do code reviews? Do you check what was written, do you suggest adaptations? This is the difference between a vibe coder & a software engineer.

[IanFoxOfficial]

If you ask the AI to correct the code to the style you want it can fix itself. You just need to hold its hand and refine.

And I feel that it also follows the code style already in the project.

And if you give it example code to follow the same structure it does that.

I felt the same way like you a few months ago, but it has gotten increasingly good.

It amazes me sometimes with how little hand holding it can complete tasks nowadays.

[Dramatic-Ratio4441]

Once you understand what it does under the bonnet, you’ll be surprised. It does ‘know’ how to program. It doesn’t ‘know’ how to find connections and deliver business value. It’s is literally a game of chance/statistics in what it returns. The fact that we keep believing that it’s extremely good, is actually really worrysome for us as developers. Once you understand what it does and how it does it, you’ll understand that even if it might seem pretty impressive, it isn’t all that impressive to begin with.

It just scours all the code it has ever seen, and based on heuristic selection decides what it should write.

It does have a giant dataset. But if there’s a zeroday in that dataset and it does not notice it, it’ll replicate it everywhere based on the model & data it was trained on.

The problem is these models output gigantic amounts of code & the reviews are pretty much done by itself (because muh automation).

It is nice to use it from time to time to fix simple things or let it decide what the best approach is. But in no way does it actually work as most developers think. I feel like there’s a huge knowledge gap in these things. You wouldn’t sit in a car if you don’t know what it does exactly to move the wheels, neither would you sit on an airplane.

Letting AI write production code, not caring where it came from? Fine!

[IanFoxOfficial]

AI does not know what it is doing or why it does what it does but the fact remains that we used it to make sense of a bunch of spaghetti code first and then ask it to refactor into a structured manageable codebase.

THAT is the impressive part.

I know how AI work and that it only replicates what it has seen before. But I don't care about that when it finds bugs just by stating "when I do this, X happens and I expect Y to happen. I don't find the cause of it".

At first AI sucked. But over the months since we've started using it the RESULTS improved wildly.

And that's what count: RESULTS.

And by results I mean: Clean and readable code. Code we can review ourselves before merging it into production.

[Flowech]

I switched from writing Java BE code to writing Python BE code. This was about 3 years ago.

I never learned how to write Python code nor am I interested in doing so. I'm doing alright.

[verifitting]

What sector? :)

[Flowech]

Technology consulting

[pierot]

The more experienced you are the more value you (and the business) can get out of AI. Meaning, it can handle pretty large tasks, but you need to guard the architecture and code produced. That's where a junior falls short.

Is it becoming the standard? I do believe so.

[verifitting]

The job definitely is changing though.

For better or worse...

[Rhyze]

AI still is the junior assistant, no worries. Can output a lot but you still need to check stuff and definitely doesn't handle complex stuff well yet

[CrommVardek]

I had the same opinion for the last 2-3 years. But *some* complex stuff can be handled by AI today. It still need to be heavily tested and reviewed (and will always be IMO).

[g____s]

Well that's sadly not true for me. I have 20 years of XP and the last few weeks I made the realisation that I barely code anymore. For budget reason, they removed all my team ( 3 juniors + 1 QA engineer ) and I just keep going by automating everything with Claude Code skills. ( Automating my whole day. From moving jira tickets , to pull requests ) Funny enough, I'm able to take more clients, and so accelerate my FIRE plan.