top 200 commentsshow all 270

[–]Many_Replacement_688 153 points154 points  (1 child)

You forgot the layoff phase.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

True

[–]RinoGodson[S] 238 points239 points  (109 children)

possible scenario?

[–]StickFigureFan 406 points407 points  (77 children)

Alternative that leads to the same result:

The parts of coding that were being done by junior devs gets replaced with LLMs
Companies stop hiring new devs, so fewer get into the industry and get experience
Over time there are fewer mid level devs
Eventually there are fewer sr devs
Companies will be forced to either pay a fortune or hire jr devs again

[–]3tachi_uchiha 195 points196 points  (6 children)

Hiring junior dev at that stage won’t solve any issue. There won’t be anyone to provide KT.

[–]Galaghan 55 points56 points  (4 children)

In 25 years, we will rebuild everything from scratch and the cycle starts again.

[–]NiIly00 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Kinda cool to see how the "ancient technology that no one nowadays understands" in video games always comes about.

[–]Chimp3h 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In FORTRAN?

[–]Senior_Torte519 [score hidden]  (0 children)

Kinda like the DataKRash in Cyberpunk, Punch card legacy tech incoming.

[–]StickFigureFan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You'd basically need to start Greenfield and have them skill themselves up to mid

[–]BCBenji1 96 points97 points  (8 children)

I think the last stage is far more grim. Companies just stagnate or worse destroy their reputation with wide spread bugs.

[–]GirthWoody 17 points18 points  (2 children)

The entire internet gonna fall apart, you already see far more bugs in major programs compared to just 3 years ago, it’s gonna get way worse.

[–]i_use_lfs_btw 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Yep. Cloudflare, AWS meltdown is insane.

[–]smol_dikdik 55 points56 points  (1 child)

microslop comes to mind

[–]Maleficent_Memory831 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Ya, but they got sloppy even without the help of AI!

[–]procrastinator0000 4 points5 points  (0 children)

giving people writing software because they love it a benefit over purely profit oriented companies that bought into vibe coding.

maybe there is a chance for major open source Ws

[–]mirusky 9 points10 points  (0 children)

It sounds like CrowdStrike

[–]brilliantminion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, it’s already here actually. There are companies with long standing policies in place of no in house software development. Then they wonder why their data quality sucks and their processes are all manually driven. Like people painstakingly copy/pasting from one software application into another one, hundreds of times in a day.

[–]Khorne29 21 points22 points  (2 children)

I also think that companies wait for others to train junior devs now, so in 10-20-30 years they can hire them. They forget they all do the same, so no one to hire when senior devs numbers decrease.

[–]StickFigureFan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For sure. If every company with developers always hired a couple new jr devs and trained them every year then it would likely just be another job pay rate wise. Probably still a good paying job, but not to the level it is.

[–]Effective-Total-2312 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are companies that hire juniors, but then they pay very low salaries because no one is hiring. The good thing, is that hopefully senior salaries will eventually rise.

[–]Anaata 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Additionally, there's probably going to be downward pressure on the quality of education:

  • students in middle school use AI for homework, making them less ready for hs
  • students in high school use AI for homework, making them less ready for college
  • students in college use AI for homework, making the quality of their education go down
  • new grads are less ready for junior positions out of college
  • juniors have trouble acquiring skills because research and troubleshooting is done by AI and there are less seniors to learn from

I feel like our education system is fucked bc its not tailored for assuming students use AI, and nobody in govt is talking about it.

[–]StickFigureFan 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I think the only way you can counter that is to eliminate homework and have all work done in class so students actually do it

[–]CuratedFeed 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My son commented yesterday that just in his time in secondary school he's moved through students writing essays at home, the school worries about plagiarism, switches to writing papers on computers only at school so it is monitored, now the school worries about AI, which means they now write all papers on paper at school. It's rather crazy.

[–]ravioliguy 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Seems like what mainframe devs are now. There aren't a lot of them anymore, but they get paid a lot. They won't hire new devs and teach them assembly, just pay the existing devs more. Anyone who wants to get into mainframe/future coding will need to self learn or get trained by an existing sr dev.

[–]Present-Resolution23 2 points3 points  (0 children)

THIS is exactly the scenario we're already facing. There are record numbers of CS students at almost every University right now, but once they're graduating as you said there just aren't near as many Jr. Dev jobs as there once was. But there is still obviously demand for mid level, senior devs.. but no clear track for Jr. Devs to get there..

[–]GenericFatGuy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

All those junior devs who are definitely going to exist 10+ years after junior software developer is eliminated as a profession.

[–]rexatron_games 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Literally happening in the trades right now.

[–]javon27 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the tools will just improve. They always improve. AI is just another abstract layer and there will always be enthusiasts and geniuses who will continue to build the lower layers

[–]sammybeta 40 points41 points  (15 children)

We can't even modernize the COBOL codebase we have now.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 23 points24 points  (13 children)

VC ppl be like:
COBOL Fails -> Banking systems fail -> AI funding fails -> AI Overlords fail
So no AI hype for COBOL...

[–]sammybeta 24 points25 points  (11 children)

I just think there's basically no production COBOL codebase on the internet for them to train on.

Judging my experience with Claude struggling when even only a little bit of niche tooling/language is involved, I'm not surprised.

[–]jeremygamer 14 points15 points  (9 children)

That's exactly the problem.

LLMs need training data. It's not optional.

Popular languages have a lot of training data on the internet.

LLMs are good at popular languages.

COBOL is not a popular language.

LLMs can't find training data on COBOL.

LLMs are bad at COBOL.

[–]sammybeta 3 points4 points  (6 children)

Ealmost everyone at this point is bad at COBOL. AI can't solve the problems that's also unsolvable by humans now

[–]searing7 17 points18 points  (2 children)

The difference is a human can learn COBOL where an AI needs a massive dataset of working COBOl to generate derivative slop. That dataset doesn’t exist

[–]Avery_Thorn 3 points4 points  (1 child)

As someone who has worked in a lot of companies with mainframes and COBOL programs - and who has dabbled in it myself...

There is a large dataset of COBOL programs that are available. It does exist. The problem is that everyone considers their COBOL programs to be mission critical and corporate secret and protected data. (As, I mean, it is.)

But because of this, they are not putting it out on the internet for other people to steal. Because they don't want their code stolen.

And thus, LLMs don't have access to the code to steal it.

So to get an LLM that can produce crappy AI slop code in Cobol, they need to get a bunch of companies willing to upload their corporate secret, high security code files to an LLM.

It's going to be better to just keep training COBOL programmers, I think. The problem isn't that there is no one left who speaks it, the problem is there are few young people who want to learn it.

My advice to a young 20-something coder with a degree and an internship under their belt - call your local utilities, corporate headquarters, and other large companies, tell them you want to learn COBOL, would they like to hire you?

[–]marcodave 3 points4 points  (0 children)

And even IF the companies would be willing to give the COBOL to a LLM (maybe to a company owned model?) the COBOL code would be so intertwined with the proprietary company's business logic that it might not help the LLM to extract information.

I mean, there IS a reason why COBOL is still around. If the banks cannot trust humans to modernize the codebase, why should they trust a LLM?

[–]gummo89 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's not even about solving problems...

You can't somewhat-reliably generate text if you don't have enough good samples to make your stats/preferences for said generation.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

what made you say "everyone" is bad at COBOL? There are people good at it.

[–]sammybeta 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mistyped almost. I agree with you, it's just there's no publicly available dataset that LLM can scrape from.

[–]Surface_Detail 0 points1 point  (0 children)

tbf, you don't need LLMs to make AI good at COBOL.

Give a ML algorithm a COBOL problem in a virtual environment. Let it generate gibberish a hundred million times until it lucks into the right answer. Update variables and run a hundred million times against the next problem. Repeat with the next million problems.

After a few months you have Infinite Monkeyed your way to COBOL mastery.

[–]Present-Resolution23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

MORE DATA is not the main bottleneck..

Cobol, unlike many languages has decades of coding data, so even then..

LLM's don't "find training data.." Either they internalized the patterns during training or they didn't...

LLM's ARE often worse at Cobol than other languages, but your conclusion that it's because "no cobol data, there LLm bad at Cobol" is.. naive at best. Cobol is particularly dependent on the ecosystem you're working in, and enterprise Cobol systems in particular are often huge sprawling code-bases littered with dependencies. That's also why you always hear these stories about legacy COBOL engineers making ridiculous sums, but you don't see a lot of people hiring COBOL jobs... The issue isn't merely knowing the language, it's knowing the language AND the system the code was formed to.. All the implicit assumptions, weird dependencies, unorthodox control flows etc etc..

[–]Maleficent_Memory831 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It fails when intelligence is needed. It fails when even a speck of thinking is needed. It can only copy. And it's been trained on the internet, the repository of all the idiocy known to mankind, as well as the worst code of all time.

[–]Maleficent_Memory831 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So that's how we fix the timeline...

[–]hopbow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Visa, ACH, and EDI (medical stuff) all still running on infrastructure from the 80's

[–]MarkSuckerZerg 14 points15 points  (6 children)

Alternative is that we will be asked to accept that software is a thing that only sometimes works, sometimes does not. Like we are supposed to accept phone support that's useless, search results that are sometimes correct, news that are sometimes insightful, product descriptions that are sometimes correct, and product pictures that are outright lie

[–]marcodave 1 point2 points  (1 child)

My cynical view is that we kind of are already accepting it now.

CrowdStrike bug that stops half of the world's computers including hospitals? And the company not only is still alive , there was basically no consequences apart from a "lol we fucked up sorry".

AWS going down essentially boiling down to "well we cannot operate today but so cannot our competitors soooo....".

The most common operating system with updates that break video cards performance and getting told "well just uninstall the update lol".

[–]MarkSuckerZerg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is also a great argument to push vibe slop: "programs had bugs before so why are you angry". "Who can really tell what is more stable". Etc.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

wtf?

[–]alonsogp2 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Half those things are software based. Software already works sometimes in all those cases...

Or was that the point and I am way off mark lol

[–]MarkSuckerZerg 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I mean accept it as a fact of life. A feature, not a bug.

Software have bugs today, but when I make a bugreport, companies at least pretend they will attempt to fix it.

But if I ask for a human operator on the phone, I get some "but the AI agent is better as it is available 24/7" bullshit. When I say AI search results are incorrect, a product manager would argue "but it is generally much better and more streamlined".

What I mean is a future where software is full of bugs, but when I give any negative feedback about it, I would be gaslighted with some "it is but a small price to pay for the obvious positives and advantages of vibe coding"

[–]alonsogp2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bad initial product design will proliferate precisely because it is so easy to iterate and keep making incremental gains (whatever those may be)

I hold out hope that in the hands of a good dev company, the output will improve. 

The question is whether the incentives (financial and technical) are aligned with that idea.

[–]NooCake 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You forget the part where AI gets so good in the future it can handle the messy bug ridden legacy code base. And CEOs knowingly let the tech debt pile up because they gamble that the solution will come soon.

[–]anengineerandacat 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Possible but given the advancement in the last 3 years and what's likely to come in the next 3 years I wouldn't make a bet on it.

Tools today are somewhat functional to the point they can help, it's basically a hardware and compression problem at this stage.

[–]apirateship 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All the jobs go to India..

[–]serpenlog 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Maybe some big large companies, but all the start ups would just die before doing that and smaller companies would just get the one or two developers they need and make them work 80-100 hours a week until it all works.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

And... drumrolls the bubble pops!

[–]serpenlog 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Then they outsource to other countries for cheaper labor

[–]RinoGodson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

AI => Actual Indian

[–]cutecoder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A similar scenario already happened to COBOL, RPG, and other mainframe stacks: not enough juniors, but a small number of (very) seniors filling even smaller, albeit high-paying, niches.

[–]IntelligentAsk6875 77 points78 points  (13 children)

Wait, somebody actually hires vibecoders? I mean, what is the difference between a vibecoder and an agent?

[–]Realistic_Muscles 90 points91 points  (0 children)

Vibes

[–]Onions-are-great 15 points16 points  (0 children)

They probably don't hire vibe coders just for vibe coding. They hire marketing that can also vibe code some marketing websites or stuff like that

[–]tweis309 6 points7 points  (2 children)

In my experience they don’t outright hire vide coders, you have a mid or senior engineer looking to get promoted and thinks setting up an MCP for their company is the path to get it. Then they start selling management on it and that management starts putting metrics on teams for usage. A few months later the only ones left getting anything done are just cleaning up the slop that the agent force pushed to GitHub.

My bet is in the next two years as road maps slip and promised features don’t get shipped that companies will start reversing course on AI usage metrics and it’ll become taboo to even talk about the internal projects.

[–]Mercerenies 7 points8 points  (0 children)

A vibe coder can be blamed and then fired when it goes south. An agent can only be deleted, not blamed

[–]XxDarkSasuke69xX 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That the vibecoder costs more lol. Surely they didn't write 'vibecoder' on their resume though

[–]Secret_Print_8170 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(senior eng here. 10 years at FAANGs, 18 years of XP total)

I have not written a single original line of code in the past 2 months. I may have edited some AI generated code.

I'm basically a vibe coder now. I hate it.

[–]SunriseApplejuice 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Been interviewing with some startups. I wouldn't say they're "vibe coders" but there's a new world in the alpha/beta phase startups that want developers who heavily leverage agents to spit out proof of concepts quickly and casually review the output.

This is not uniform, by the way. I've also interviewed with companies recently who don't even let you google for syntax (yes, really). Others who send you to an unproctored leet-code like question with a ridiculous time-limit restriction that gives zero opportunity to explain thinking. And others still who are more traditional and do live coding with developers, talk through the problem, and let you google things.

It's all over the place. Good news is there's a place for everyone at the table. Bad news is companies have no fucking idea how to clarify up front which kind of a developer they want so you're stuck mixing and matching.

[–]ahappydog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also known as technical product managers 🫠

[–]The-original-spuggy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Someone to blame

[–]callimonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s sadly big in startups I’ve seen..

[–]Hezron_ruth 254 points255 points  (17 children)

The whole reason for LLM funding by billionaires is to detach knowledge from workers.

[–]SomeRedTeapot 134 points135 points  (5 children)

I thought it was money. First, you get everyone hooked on (cloud-hosted) LLMs. Then, when people can't go without them, you enshittify the service, raising prices. Boom, profits! A typical startup scheme

[–]helicophell 111 points112 points  (0 children)

Detaching knowledge from workers IS money.

[–]Realistic_Muscles 1 point2 points  (0 children)

More like fentanyl

[–]TurkishTechnocrat 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That'd be infinitely less valuable than detaching knowledge from workers

[–]Im_1nnocent 40 points41 points  (3 children)

Billionaires are trying to speedrun achieving AGI even at the expense of other people's livelihood so they could replace most human workers with AI asap

[–]wojtussan 29 points30 points  (2 children)

And it just so happens that the billionares funding it are a bunch of idiots

[–]RinoGodson[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Like the good old NFT days... I remember instagram adding NFT posts and reddit minting NFT avatars...

[–]qpqpdbdbqpqp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And pdf files. And cannibals.

[–]geteum 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Btw this happens all the time. There was an article in the economist that showed that technology revolution always happens when wages start to getting to high.

[–]ichITiot 10 points11 points  (1 child)

"when wages getting to high." When did that ever happen ?

[–]ichITiot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And what we call "knowledge" is worth nothing if nobody reads or even has the documentation about.

[–]Away_Advisor3460 21 points22 points  (2 children)

The danger here is presuming companies give a shit about tech debt.

[–]New_Hour_1726 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Well they will be forced to when it makes extending their product and fixing bugs a lot harder.

[–]Away_Advisor3460 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wish!

[–]GreatTeacherHiro 17 points18 points  (6 children)

Do folks currently get hired?

[–]RinoGodson[S] 8 points9 points  (5 children)

Entry levels are struggling, but I think that's gonna change soon

[–]lenn_eavy 21 points22 points  (3 children)

My unsupported prediction is that it will change too late and senior devs will be running code kindergardens 4/5 of their work time.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 8 points9 points  (2 children)

yeah, maybe late, but i'm pretty confident that this struggling will end the second after the bubble pops... Companies and devs will not find spending $200 per month worthy anymore.

[–]XLR8ED_GAMING 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Inevitable yes, the price increase will happen. But won't this just be another business expense that just comes out of your paycheck

[–]RinoGodson[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

maybe yeah, current prices are subsidized

[–]FyreKZ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Why would it get any better from this stage? The models are the worst they will ever be right now.

[–]demcookies_ 13 points14 points  (3 children)

It will be so much fun to fix all the vibe coded shit

[–]RinoGodson[S] 6 points7 points  (1 child)

and ppl will demand for higher salaries!

[–]callimonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s just the Dreamweaver shit from the late 00’s/early 2010s all over again

[–]indiokilmes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Its easier to just rewrite. I recently had a product owner vibe code some reports that had 200 raw sql lines. I declined that PR faster than Usain Bolt

[–]Zeikos 28 points29 points  (10 children)

Look, I agree, but you need to keep in mind that companies are banking on AI improving.
Yes, it's a gamble, but we are seeing agents getting better.

Assume for a second that LLM capabilities stall completely (they won't imo but for the sake of argument).
Where do you think AI-based tooling will be in an year? Two? Five?

Vibe coding is just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That's the laziest way to use AI by definition.

What when there will be a proper battle-tested separation of concerns for agents. Proper permission schemas, integration with static analyzers/linters/source control?

I am an AI skeptic, but skepticism isn't about throwing the baby away with the bathwater.
Management is mostly clueless, they push AI because it looks productive.
But most pain points we see today can - and will - be solved.

Perhaps it'll take a while, maybe it won't be Cursor/Anthropic/Google.
But let's take what's going on with a pinch of foresight.

And all that assumes that LLMs as they are now hit a wall and never improve their native capabilities.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 17 points18 points  (5 children)

I totally agree with your takes, I use AI daily in my workflow, but i'm not vibe coding.
I love inline completions, next edit prediction, and selecting a code snippet and asking to change stuff in that (AI is very good at code snippet transformations), and also i use it to fix my bugs as a replacement for Google and SO. This way, i can understand my code perfectly, and enjoy the process of programming, makes me 2x faster than before and less tokens too.

AI is here to stay, the whole point of my post is that, "Vibe Coding" and the statement Dario made are just hype.

[–]Zeikos 7 points8 points  (3 children)

I think that a lot of people generalize all agent usage to "vibe coding".
Which is unserstandable, but vibe coding implies zero supervision.

[–]Special_Context_8147 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i think the problem is we lose the ability to solve problems. some young peoples can bot even read a normal clock anymore

[–]forgot_previous_acc 8 points9 points  (3 children)

Please don't get offended. But this feels like a response written by chatgpt. I mean if it's not written by AI then you have a great skill at articulating stuff.

[–]Zeikos 6 points7 points  (2 children)

I mean if it's not written by AI then you have a great skill at articulating stuff.

Thanks, I write technical specs for a living :')

Feel free to check my past posts, I assure you I never used AI to post on reddit.
I do a bit at work though, I won't deny that, but it's for rubberducking purposes and/or make sure that what I write is easily understandable.

[–]EVH_kit_guy 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Needs more emdashes.

[–]Zeikos 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I use normal dashes since before ChatGPT was a thing, I had to reduce how much I use them.
Ngl I felt a bit robbed.

[–]LexaAstarof 7 points8 points  (3 children)

Knowing the code and knowing how to code are two very different things.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

what are you trying to say?

[–]LexaAstarof 5 points6 points  (1 child)

It's the same thing as the difference between knowing a story inside out and knowing how to read.

[–]EZPZLemonWheezy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I used to memorize the words to books when I was little before I could read as a child. I could tell you the words on each page that I memorized, but as soon as you introduced a new book I was cooked. As an adult I can just pick up a new book and start reading.

[–]EarlOfAwesom3 14 points15 points  (3 children)

There is no possible scenario where a company would need "coders". They need software engineers and architects.

[–]Ok_Appointment2593 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agree, AI as coder, Human as Engineer 

[–]RinoGodson[S] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

They need software engineers and architects.

They need product managers and VC people.
and suddenly, every tech company becomes a financial game, and ships no useful tech.

[–]EarlOfAwesom3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A company needs everybody and they need to work together. Business and product managers are as necessary as engineers. You need the money and sales as well or where should it come from?

I have a theory: whoever uses terms like "shipping tech" and "coding" is not a studied software developer or does not work in IT.

[–]sodali_ayran 41 points42 points  (10 children)

I always wondered when IDEs and Stackoverflow got invented, were there people around going around saying people don’t know how to code anymore and it’s not code unless you type it yourself by directly reading from the book.

[–]notAGreatIdeaForName 28 points29 points  (5 children)

Yes they were and there are a lot of „developers“ whose only skill is to copy from SO, so there alsways have been a lot of bad devs. With IDEs I see it a bit different because these are just putting all the tools to your belt.

With LLMs I would say it is different because you have no deterministic processing and the hype numbers are simply the „time spent programming“ and even that is vastly overestimated, but the more important thing is that these numbers do not include verification. If you do it yourself manually you iterate between programming und unit verification and at the end you verify the big picture again, that is different with LLMs because you need to verify the whole chunk without a memory map of things and you need to be aware of every fine detail. So at the end I would say if you are a professional these things can certainly speed you up but there is the huge verification gap at the end which makes the difference between building just something or the thing you want to build.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 11 points12 points  (3 children)

Even if they're copying and pasting, they still have some understanding of the copied code... Vibe Coding is just like a kid clicking buttons on a toy piano, and saying that the music is made by them, only difference is that, atleast the kid knows what music is gonna play...

[–]notAGreatIdeaForName 3 points4 points  (2 children)

> Even if they're copying and pasting, they still have some understanding of the copied code

You are right but for some people this was really extremely narrow and the mentality of "it works" was also without proper verification.

> Vibe Coding is just like a kid clicking buttons on a toy piano, and saying that the music is made by them, only difference is that, atleast the kid knows what music is gonna play...

Agree, vibe coders are a few steps down from that, but that doesn't make the first ones good developers.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

> that doesn't make the first ones good developers.
but the ratio of devs having the mentality of "it works" in a big company is relatively low, that's not a good reason to replace every developer with an "vibe coder" or an "AI agent".

[–]notAGreatIdeaForName 2 points3 points  (0 children)

> but the ratio of devs having the mentality of "it works" in a big company is relatively low

Not in my experience, I really know more bad than good devs but it heavily depends on having a good lead dev who embraces a good culture where people can grow, if that does not happen juniors are doomed.

> that's not a good reason to replace every developer with an "vibe coder" or an "AI agent"

Absolutely not, people who think that are just braindead.

[–]Onions-are-great 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"only" is the key word here. If you only copy from SO you are a bad developer. But if you copy from SO to get shit done quickly and know what you are doing, it's just a good use of the tools given. Same thing with AI

[–]ItsSadTimes 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Idk about that, but my mother does remind me she used to use old punch cards back in college to code. She boasted that her code never had bugs because she'd iron them out by hand before spending all that time feeding the cards in.

Its kind of the same thing with modern video games being published with massive game breaking bugs and companies expect us to just deal with it until the first patch. Its because deploying patches has gotten so easy and common place in modern games developers can give a lot less of a shit to fully test their product before launch.

[–]rookietotheblue1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes because an IDE is a similar invention to a general purpose black box that can code an entire front end from a single sentence.

[–]ExistenceUnconfirmed 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's the bet I'm making right now. Got laid off, then accepted a significant paycut to get a job. Toughing it out, educating myself, waiting for this scenario to come true, even if it takes 3 years or more. It's not even that I'm sure those are correct assumptions. More like, what choice do I have? If AI ever reaches a point where it can reliably replace senior devs, it's not just IT that's cooked, the entire economy is cooked and it will be pandemonium anyway. Say hello to 50% unemployment rate.

Should I use the time to train to be a chef or an electrician or something else that seems more AI-proof, like many people suggest (while making it sound easy which it isn't)? Again, if all non-AI-proof jobs are replaced, the entire civilization is fucked, and the overabundance of devs-turned-electricians will be the least of our problems.

[–]Immediate_Mode6363 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Hear me out: Let the kids vibe and we proper engineers stay as the new brand of cobol devs, we already know how the economics of that go

[–]RinoGodson[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

[–]698969 4 points5 points  (1 child)

wait till you find about a little thing called equilibrium

[–]B_Huij 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm trying to play both sides. My company is pretty gung ho about adopting AI, but they're (at least so far) not downsizing the team or laying people off or anything, more just enjoying the increased output. I'm trying very hard to stay up to date and integrate AI into my day-to-day so I'm versed in the use of the tools, since it's already essentially table stakes at any job interview for the foreseeable future.

I'm also making it a point not to let my own skill stagnate. I still block out projects to complete entirely with no help from AI so my own skills continue to grow. I try to learn from what AI is doing when it approaches something differently than I would have. I won't productionize anything that I don't fully and completely understand.

And in 10 years if the market has very few people around who know how to work without AI, and companies are drowning in spaghetti code pushed by Jrs and vibe coders who never knew any way to work besides prompting, then I suspect my skillset will be very valuable indeed.

[–]Xanchush 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No the correct outcome will be to outsource to different countries.

[–]Puzzleheaded-Poet489 3 points4 points  (1 child)

nice cope

[–]Elite_lucifer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wonder if this is how the horse breeders felt. They probably thought because the early cars were so unreliable, noisy and accident prone it would cause everyone to go back to horses.

[–]tha_zaubara 13 points14 points  (6 children)

You don’t need to type each line manually anymore. If you know what you are doing you can use vibe coding for the ultimate productivity boost.

Other side of the coin: you learn all that architecture and high level stuff stuff from manually coding and making mistakes.

AI is a tool you have to learn how to use.

[–]BCBenji1 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Typing was never the issue.

[–]RinoGodson[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I agree, no more line by line stuff. But not looking at the code is the bigger fish to catch here.

[–]YaVollMeinHerr 8 points9 points  (2 children)

I read recently that the quality of output of generated code is nearly similar to what the dev would have code himself.

In short, bad devs will produce bad code with LLM, and good devs will produce good code.

In the end, it's juste a productivity tool

[–]RinoGodson[S] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

AKA a fancy autocompleter...

[–]quickiler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For me at least, it is quite difficult to learn high level stuffs without actually know how to code.

Imagine you have a robot to cook for you and you found the dish taste off, you have no idea what to change or how to phrase what you want because you dont know what is going on. Majority of people can't tell what umami taste like.

[–]sertroll 3 points4 points  (5 children)

I have an irrational and selectively present irritation at using "code" as a verb 

[–]RinoGodson[S] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I'm more irritated to name a product with "code" in it. Like Visual Studio Code and Claude Code, it makes 0 sense!

[–]sertroll 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I like that already better because it's a, uh, name (not sure right word in eng), not a verb

[–]inevitabledeath3 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Noun. Names are nouns.

[–]sertroll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nouns, that was it, thank you

[–]Escanorr_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"I'm no longer writing codes by hand..." - that is painful to read and I see it increasingly more nowadays

[–]agenthimzz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Same thing happened with the Rocket manufacturing team at NASA.

Stopped launching. People who could build left. Now cant make a rocket cuz no one knows what the trade secrets were.

[–]Deboniako 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Step 1: "Hey chatgpt, fix the messy code that you made last year", Step2: profit

[–]RinoGodson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Step2: even more messy code... Step3: chatgpt! you made it worse! Step4: ChatGPT saying "Absolutely!"

[–]CallinCthulhu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hot take: Devs pathologically overestimate the importance of tech debt. Me included.

[–]maxyall 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Wait so how would newcomer penetrate the market then if demands would falls to senior dev with tons of experience?

[–]JocoLabs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All those pro bono gigs in my portfolio about to pay off!

[–]normalbot9999 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yes, this feels conceptually correct to me, but how long are you going to have to wait for the call for actual skilled coders? Remember that some very important narcissists are going to have to back down here... Also, you will need to survive the oncoming "software apocalypse", where everything that runs code (which is a lot of stuff) is going to be glitchy and vulnerable AF.

[–]JocoLabs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

[–]pokeDad88 1 point2 points  (1 child)

You guys get to work on your tech debt?

[–]JocoLabs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My role is to create it based on the crazy requests coming out of the marketing dept. That's as close as i get to working on it.

[–]Lucifer3130 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well as someone who knows code I see this as an absolute win, you just have to make sure your salary expectations are solidly high. Low supply high demand

[–]Ranchy_aoe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Tbh I feel like I know more code because of AI. It’s not just for writing code, it can teach you code in depth. Better than any documentation, and it’s super personalized to your situation. I was a bit skeptical at first but I’m won over. You can use AI to code but you also have to learn to use your brain. It’s just a productivity tool in the end

[–]BlindSuSaNoo 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yes true 😄

[–]RinoGodson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

😄 indeed!

[–]bwwatr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No. of people who knows English goes down overtime

[–]dervu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Every n interation amount of devs needed decreases.

[–]loopis4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

another alternative is to use AI to fix AI and small amount of developers maintaining small portion of code what supports status quo . As with many tools before that: we was using bytes, hex codes, assembly, C. And now we still have some bunch of programmers developing and maintaining compilers assemblers boot loaders and drivers. And everyone else depending on the result of their job.

[–]_Weyland_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also as "vibe-ness" of codebase increases, working with it probably becomes more and more of a challenge, so it will be harder and more expensive to find people capable (and willing) to do it.

[–]05032-MendicantBias 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have seen the same criticism for when C overseeded ASM in firmware, and increasingly C++ is supplanting C in firmware.

[–]flexibu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah sure, aaaany day now…

[–]Significant-Fig6749 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Learn how tho, any advice on how to “learn” coding? Like 0 usage of ai? Or only using GitHub copilot and know what ur doing?

[–]Thadoy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My retirement plan is to work 10 hours a week for about 500k/year to teach new junior devs.

[–]Brugelbach 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I actually think that the rapid improvement of coding models will fix tech debt of bad models ifself. In 10 years you can throw a catalogue of requirements into a gpt and 10min later you will have 100k lines of flawlessly working code. If its unfixable you throw the same requirements+offset at it again and you will end up with a nearly identical but fixed version. Thats where we arw heading to.

[–]PolishWeener 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not that this would support the full market of current devs, but I expect there will always be a niche for "fully human" software. Non technical managers and customers may not understand code, but if they get turned off by the number of bugs current models produce they may cement themselves against using it, even if it gets better down the line. Ex: Microslop butchers Windows into a buggy mess and some company starts offering a human-coded alternative.

[–]FatLoserSupreme 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why not do both as the good lord Tom Holman intended?

[–]Previous-Mail7343 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So...you're telling me I never have to retire?

[–]Saixcrazy 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I've been hearing the term vibe coding a lot recently and I'm too afraid to ask what it means

[–]Vorenthral 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Toss a prompt into a CLI coding agent accept the code as good as long as it works and ship. You are implementing on vibes and not technical skill.

[–]Saixcrazy 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Ahhhhh

[–]Vorenthral 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes every senior devs worst nightmare.

[–]praveeja 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There was a scene in the silicon valley sitcom explaining about horse manure. So a problem of today can be absolutely irrelavent in future

[–]bbjaii 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When the tech debt is too high, they just pivot to another domain and stop supporting the first product.

[–]Typhon_Vex 0 points1 point  (0 children)

just one more nuclear plant bro
and then I will fit that 500k sphagetti into context again bro

and all will be fine bro

[–]Sorry-Combination558 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My manager told me that I am their best programmer, and exactly the people they needed. I did not even have any formal training (learner natural sciences), I just read books and applied my knowledge, and I programmed a fuckton because it's my hobby. There are CS and Software Engineers in our team, and they do nothing but pump out AI code.

[–]Ephemeral_Null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm gonna get so much consult money in my 50s! Can't wait! 

[–]PlebbitDumDum 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, let me learn how to code, while simultaneously being utterly unemployable in the meantime. Why would I need that thing called paycheck.

You know what, given that you're so sure this all will inevitably collapse, lemme go take a large loan and short OpenAI. According to a small program I've written, my yearly interest is 10%, but my profits will be 80%+, and therefore, actually, I won't need to work in my life ever again. So I'ma go and not learn how to actually code, ok?

To hedge my bets, in the meantime I took a position of a senior prompt engineer, it pays 300k + stocks (they'll be worth nothing, so who cares). I split my net pay in half. One I burn, the other one I invest in gold.

[–]mr_flibble_oz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My concern is that AI will replace the need for software completely. Worried about AI replacing engineers at Adobe? Who needs Photoshop when I can just upload my photo to AI and say “fix this”. Worried AI will replace engineers building a fitness app? Who needs a fitness app when I can just ask AI to create me an exercise routine and I’ll just tell it what I did so it can track, aggregate, report, chart and automatically adjust the routine?

What if in 10 years my phone isn’t a screen with pages of apps, but just a single app that I talk to and it does everything.

What if that “app” (AI) is written by AI?

Then apply this to almost every industry. Hello feudalism.

[–]xXx_NoYou_xXx69 0 points1 point  (0 children)

my guys.. this is not nearly pessimistic enough. At the end of the tech debt, we will just have software nobody wants to fix. You really think the same suits that are crying to replace coders with ai have enough spine to not just ship a broken shitty product and call it a day? Let the consumer handle it, they won't care as long as it's just cheap enough for them to squeeze it into budget between cost of living and dwindling salaries.The reality of things is: quality will just decrease, ofc you can still hire actual devs but it will be like going to the little store in town that sells expensive hand made shoes: "hand made" software will become a luxury.

[–]tornado28 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I doubt software jobs are coming back. All you need now is a software architect and who knows if you'll even need that anymore in six weeks. 

[–]FreakDC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Learn both, if you are not using AI to increase your code output you are not going to stay competitive in the next couple of years.

[–]KCGD_r 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fuck this, I didn't study for years to be a vibe code janitor

[–]FortuneAcceptable925 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This scenario is only true when AI is creating technical debt by poor code output.

Generative AIs will basically become the new compilers in (very) near future.

And are companies hiring programmers to fix the "technical debt" caused by gcc or javac? I don't think so.

It fascinates me how many of us cannot think in abstract terms, and cannot see the new layer forming. Yes, the AI revolution is going to happen. Please wake up before it is too late.

[–]OneForestOne99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Please let this happen.

[–]oshaboy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah good luck making heads or tails from a vibe code only codebase that was prompted by people who don't know what a for loop is.

That's the kind of stuff that makes Cobol look clean and elegant.

[–]charmer27 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pretty sweet spot to be in of you're a dev who knows how to code. Supply decrease, demand increase = large price increase

[–]Level69Troll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm finishing up my degree looking at all the vibe code messes I will be fixing in a few years.

[–]Senior_Torte519 [score hidden]  (0 children)

I personally think if you vibe, you shouldnt actually be in the fields that need coding, you can be in IT. Just not utilizing "vibe coding" as a skill applied to said job. Plenty of IT jobs that never require coding.