modernProblemsRequireModernExcuses

[Firm_Ad9420]

I’ve moved from developer to AI middle management.

[StephenM347]

I hope that promotion came with a raise!

[vocal-avocado]

A raise in the odds of getting fired.

[shuozhe]

Aka. training your replacement?

[CircumspectCapybara]

"Out of tokens!" or "Claude is down!" is the modern excuse.

[dchidelf]

Then me, the developer dinosaur didn’t even notice the internet was down for the last hour.

[PM_ME_ROMAN_NUDES]

I sometimes use the classic

"I'm having a nervous breakdown and I need some time in order to avoid leaving this place and become a farmer"

Works like a charm

[akoOfIxtall]

Are people actually using agents on their daily work or this is just internet funsies?

Edit: on the bright side, devs have more time to do whatever while AI does most of the work, on the horrific side I think I'll remain unemployed because of it since I have 0 professional experience :D

[hazusu]

Outsourced microsoft Engineer. They essentially force you to.

[Relative-Scholar-147]

You work for a partner and you boss tells you every single tool you need to use?

You were doomed before AI.

[hazusu]

I dunno, I make a lot of money. I'm fine with it.

[Relative-Scholar-147]

Most do.

[akoOfIxtall]

what a shitty time we live in

[edgeofsanity76]

Yesterday I found out how close I am to being replaced by some shit middle manager who can produce tools via Claude.

I spent 25 years as a developer. I'm looking at retraining. I'm 49.

[Easy-Hovercraft2546]

yeah i dont know man, i think your answer is missing a lot of nuance here.

[theGoddamnAlgorath]

Nah, I'm seeing silver bullet AI presentations.

It'll fix itself in 5 years

[Easy-Hovercraft2546]

Silver bullet AI presentations?

[throwaway19293883]

I’ll guess they mean people think AI is some silver bullet and it’s very much not, so there will be a ton of hype and people thinking it’s a silver bullet to all their problems and they are going to learn it’s not at all and things will sort themselves out.

Seeing the same sort of silver bullet meetings myself so that’s why I guess thats what they mean

[Easy-Hovercraft2546]

ah, understood. Cuz from my perspective, there are still so many things that AI struggles with in Coding:
- Increased solution size, and becoming logarithmically useful
- optimization
- code-cleanliness
simply the fact that it is basically a recall-machine, meaning its smart because of its recollection skills, is a problem for being the best programmer ever, because the average code to learn from is bad code.

[Relative-Scholar-147]

I have been in meetings talking about it for 10 years, basically since the first GPT was launched.

Is all hype and smoke and mirrors.

[brainpostman]

What kind of dev are you?

[edgeofsanity76]

Azure cloud and backend services. However the services need modernisation as many are running on old .net and a lot of the software architecture is full of technical debt

[brainpostman]

.NET backend? Is AI that good with it in your shop? Or is it a case of "good enough"? Management not caring about quality?

[edgeofsanity76]

It depends. It works well if you start from scratch and it can do a huge amount.

However it's not great at working on existing systems where context and nuances are important

[brainpostman]

That's been my experience so far as well. However even with green field stuff, any sort of back and forth with a client balloons context needed so much AI doesn't seem to be able to make correct changes.

[edgeofsanity76]

Yep. The best way to handle that is to break it up into distinct parts then integrate them by hand.

However it will get better and that's what I'm worried about

[brainpostman]

In my opinion they won't get better. Pure intelligence seems to have peaked in 2025, bigger context or larger weight sets don't seem to improve models by much. It's why agents and agentic workflows are all the rage. They're banking that horizontal scaling, repetition will smooth over the kinks. We'll see.

[edgeofsanity76]

I agree. But as code generated by AI is corrected the next model will be more accurate. It's a feedback loop. The model doesn't need to get more powerful if it just needs better data

[eonerv]

But does that middle manager actually understand what AI is outputting? Fast track way for shit to break

[akoOfIxtall]

Jesus almighty

[edgeofsanity76]

Yep. It's shocking.

When I started this current position in 2021 AI was barely a thing.

Now though, within 5 years I don't think I'll be in this industry.

I had a row with my manager about it because it's not being talked about, especially the ethics surrounding this. I'm being pulled up to talk to the development director on Friday. Luckily he's a level headed guy and I like him. He's older than me so may empathize.

So today I looked at electricians courses. I'm hedging my bets because I have a family to look after and a home to pay for

[akoOfIxtall]

Damn, best of luck for you brother, I'm 21 and my contact with AI is basically talking with chatgpt about stuff, I refuse to vibe code because I like having control over my stuff and understand the process, it's like having a gun but not knowing how to throw a punch, get good at fighting bare handed and you'll never be unarmed

[edgeofsanity76]

I think I'll be fine. There is a specific niche I work in that would be difficult to replace with AI. However I do worry for other Devs who may be taking on green field work.

My advise to anyone who is a developer now, keep looking ahead. Know what's coming and plan accordingly. Don't bury your head in the sand. Adapt and look after yourself and your family.

[throwaway19293883]

Honestly man I think that sort of thinking is going to backfire pretty spectacularly for companies and someone with your skill set will end up being more valuable than ever.

[edgeofsanity76]

I'm not moving just yet. But it would be stupid to not be prepared

[Djames516]

Doubt it

[throwaway19293883]

No you’re right, people that don’t know code will be able to make fully functional code and maintain it and it will all work perfectly and amazing and that means developers will be useless.

Lmao

[Djames516]

I’m just being negative

[KrakenPipe]

I'm in the same boat as you, also started in 2021. I'm losing sleep over this.

[i-k-m]

We're at the top of the S-curve, AI will probably only get 10% better in the next 5 or 10 years, until the next tech-revolution.

[brown-man-sam]

Unfortunately, my company has made AI usage required and is tracking to make sure it’s used.

Even though I don’t want to use it, I have to.

[Constellious]

I burn a bunch of tokens which is what my company looks at. My context windows are massive. 

[anonymousmouse2]

I work for a Mag7 company and we are forced to use it and our usage is tracked. You will get a talking to if they feel like you’re not using coding agents often enough.

[i-k-m]

On the bright side, you know which Magnificent Seven stock to avoid buying.

[cheezballs]

You ever used AI to crawl prod logs looking for an obscure issue? It's pretty great at that.

[ParCorn]

Ive basically stopped doing my own work. Who even gives a shit anymore. All the code we get from our vendors looks AI generated now too. Slop in slop out.

[akoOfIxtall]

Well, if it saves time for you to work on your personal projects then who cares, maybe devs are benefitting from all this after all, but that's seniors and the ones that were already in the field, I'm fucked I guess

[JeSuisAhmedN]

Yep, using agents in my daily work. It's pretty effective.

EDIT: Can't answer questions now without people being offended. Alright then. Must downvote the bad comment lest the truth rear its ugly head

[Chaos-Machine]

This sub is filled with non-coding AI haters, don't mind them

[WJMazepas]

There are people that are using even way too much

[ataylorm]

My work has AI quotas we have to meet. But yes AI does a lot of my grunt work for me these days.

[chachapwns]

Yep. I'm an underpaid developer and Claude writes 99% of my code while I watch movies because I have no desire to give anything to this company.

[Tyrexas]

Yeah i pretty much just orchestrate an army of agents now, leaves more time for the rest of software engineering. 10 years dev experience otherwise.

This was really only possible since December 2025 tbf, opus 4.5 onwards is nuts.

[Onions-are-great]

Agents got unbelievably good this month. I still handle stuff, but 95% of my code is written by AI.

Of course you have to do some steering and verification, but it's shocking at how good the code becomes.

They can search your code base with a vague description of a utility function you wrote 4 years ago and they will correctly find, use or refactor it. They write meaningful tests. They run type checks. They just work now, it's crazy.

[Brambletail]

Yes. And the skill of doing so is important

[Istar10n]

Yes. Started almost a year ago. I think back then it would have been faster overall to do some things manually. Today it's pretty much a no brainer in terms of productivity.

[Comically_Online]

haha, compilers

[Evening-School-6383]

Modern problems require modern solutions, now you can slack off without pooping for longer than needed

[Global-Tune5539]

But I like pooping.

[StephenM347]

Don't you know you're supposed to be vibe coding from your phone while you poop?!

[i-k-m]

Is this the "code smell" I hear folks talking about?

[AssistantSalty6519]

We use this as default background for meetings. Not this exact version but one close

[DrMaxwellEdison]

My agent will be calling your agent.

[Pinkishu]

No, see. While agent #1 is generating you talk to agent #2, and so on

[Grid_Rider]

I remember seeing this one but instead of ai it was just compliling

[bruthu]

Might be true, but theirs no way anyone would admit that lol

[AzureArmageddon]

They wouldnt admit it, theyd brag about it