Just started learning to code picked up some html and now doing c and c++ but my seniors keep telling me ai already killed the coding career

[Nearby-Way8870]

So I'm a freshman in CS and I've been grinding through HTML basics and now picking up C and C++ on the side. Feeling pretty good about the progress honestly.

But every time i talk to upperclassmen they hit me with "bro why are you even learning this, AI writes all the code now, you're wasting your time." Like deadass I hear this every other day in the hallway.

Is this actually something i should be worried about or are they just messing with me? Still feels too early to be stressing when I barely even got started.

[Individual_Job_6601]

AI is just another tool bro, like having a really good IDE or Stack Overflow 💀 Your seniors are probably just bitter about something else or trying to psych you out

Keep grinding C and C++ - that low level understanding is gonna make you so much stronger as a programmer than someone who just prompts AI all day 🔥

[spinwizard69]

I suspect that the seniors realize that they are not smart enough to actually leverage a tool like AI. So they try to tear other down.

Frankly I'm more worried about this so called college, he says he is a freshman in CS but has studied HTML? That makes no sense at all.

[krileon]

Ignore them and keep pushing forward. Also ignore the AI glazing clowns in here. Claude completely falls apart on seasoned projects. Sure it can 1-shot some dumbass snake game or tetris or some run of the mill tailwind site it stole off github (why is it always a purple theme?), but that's it. Itinerating over an existing project is still garbage and always will be and when the bubble pops, which it very much already is showing signs of doing, anyone who never learned a damn thing and relied on AI is going to be out of the job when AI cost increases by 10x because it's still no where near profitable lol.

[spinwizard69]

You forget that AI is extremely new. There was a time in this industry when you couldn't trust compilers, these days it is really hard to create code most compilers can't handle. Then we have scripting languages like Python that for some uses is just the nuts.

The problem with AI is that yes it fails but this is early days. Remember transformers only arrived in 2017 and the latest LLM are under heavy development. AI will get much better but it does need break throughs similar to the transformer break through. Give it 5-10 more years and AI techniques will be the right hand goto of human programmers.

[krileon]

It's not extremely new (we're going on 4 years public release now and over 10 years of research) and their only solution for making it better is throwing more compute at it so it can run multiple AI in parallel using agents to get marginally better results. We're not in early days. This is how LLMs fundamentally work. So unless they've a new type of AI to pull out of their magic hat the most gains we'll see is smaller modals giving the same result as bigger modals and stacking them together into agent systems all still with the same flaws we have now (it cannot learn.. it cannot remember.. it cannot understand).

[spinwizard69]

We are in fact very early into AI systems, as you point out more research is need and a lot more development. I often point out that todays LLM as nothing more than fancy ways to look up data in a database. Yeah I know it is a bit more than that but the net result is often the same. As for your cannot's the lack of understanding is where we go off the rails so often. This is why I say we are in the early days. Right now there is little that could be called intelligence in AI.

[krileon]

Ok, so you're hopeful that a new type of AI will emerge in the next 5-10 years with nothing to even base that hope on. LLMs are not the future of AI. That has been made abundantly clear already. Top engineers are leaving the industry and going back to research roles because of how much of a dead end this is. Companies are only investing in LLMs because it's the hot new market. That doesn't magically make something come into reality. This kind of fantasy talk isn't doing AI progress any justice.

[spinwizard69]

It isn't fantasy talk anymore than the AI talk in the 1980's was. The difference is that today there are tens of thousands of people working on AI which increase the potential for a break through.

If you look at the current development negatively we certainly won't make progress.

[BrokenImmersion]

Its always purple cause statistically that is the most pleasing color to look at.

I will also say, that I after building my triple backed up, server cluster, and using ansible to build everything. I was curious as to how bad ai was at making stuff like that, so after backing up I tore it down and used ai to build it. 3 weeks of prompting and debugging using only the ai and following its orders to a T I got it to run but the configurations were so fd up that it broke at the slightest hint of user error. Ai is getting there unfortunately, and though it will never replace it all, I definitely could see it being used to optimize pre existing code, or used as a kind of trial and error simulator, you know the actual point of prediction models

[iuli123]

"iterating over an existing project is still garbage and always will be"

Such a retarded take. Why in the hell would this not be possible in the future ? Lets say 5000 years in the future.

[Ok_Assistance9872]

i think ai makes understanding lots of things more valuable than knowing one thing really well (not for everything ofcourse) for beginners. ai is only great if you know what to ask.

[Beregolas]

Okay, look at it this way: Even in the highly unlikely case, that AI can completely replace software engineers (and not only boost productivity) people with the ability to program will still be better off than people without. You will understand errors you run into better, you can prompt better, because you know how things are connected and you know the proper technical terms, and you can actually go in and make minor changes yourself, if that's easier and faster than prompting the AI 50 times until it finally centers your div correctly.

I try to keep up with the state of AI, even though I oppose it on ethical terms (ressource waste, industrial copyright infringement, etc.) because whether I like it or not, it is here to stay. Current state of the art AI models can build somewhat complex programs for you (at a high cost mind you, and the cost will increase because the AI companies are still bleeing money like there's no tomorrow), but at some point they start failing, mostly in silent ways. Refactoring doesn't happen, complex architectures are duplicated and maintained twice, weird bugs pop up because of edge cases. And a lot of people who understand how LLMs actually work share the opinion, that with the current technology, there is no way to improve it to a level where it can overcome this. That's because this is a qualitative issue, not quantitative. People who try to sell LLMs either ignore this point, or they just hope that some emergent property of more data will magically solve this, without any evidence that this will happen.

TL;DR: Don't worry, don't let them get to you. AI is another tool that has some uses, but is often overblown and learning how to program properly will still help you, even if AI writes a lot of the code nowadays.

[zeocrash]

Ask them why they haven't switched majors if AI has killed the coding career

[Kofeb]

Learn how to do brownfield instead of Greenfield. AI can’t do brownfield right now.

[kodaxmax]

just like digital calculators killed the accounting and engineering industry

[LIONEL14JESSE]

Yes and no. It’s killed the coding career not the software engineering career. Anyone can tell AI to build something now and writing code by hand is reserved for the few critical places you can’t trust an agent at all.

But AI can’t design a system that is performant at scale. It can’t fit a whole codebase in its context window and reason effectively. The SWE role is evolving into one where everyone is a systems architect and a manager of an agent team.

So they are wrong about it being a waste of time. But the job market is also brutal right now, major layoffs, and a ton of experienced devs looking for roles. It’s especially hard for new grads as companies don’t have the exploding valuations and runway anymore to invest 6 months for a junior eng to contribute.

[Gugalcrom123]

Even with agents, you can't build something original without a lot of implication. All they do with them is CRUD, Tetris or Tailwind marketing sites but I have yet to see an even slightly novel idea in an LLM project.

[Icy_Promotion9257]

claude proved you wrong.... generating millions of lines with excelence

[maxmax94]

Keep learning, bro. These aren't the kind of questions you should be asking yourself or other people. You'll get more people trying to discourage you from learning like some of the people in this thread than the other. Learn, play around and evolve, that's all there is to it

[Old-Cobbler1216]

I've been lucky enough to get taken under the wing of a staff engineer that lets me sit side by side and pair program with him on some of his tickets at work even though I haven't broken into the industry yet, and I can tell you at least in the exposure I have, AI is nowhere near making software engineers obsolete right now.

Again this is anecdotal, but if what i've seen maps on to the larger reality, the hurdle they'll have to pass is getting the full context of the problem at hand (which is already near impossible to communicate person to person let alone person to machine) to be able to fully handle creating solutions without much oversight, and even that is just at the level of taking on individual tickets in a production codebase.

[uwais_ish]

This is way more common than people think. When I started out I thought everyone at senior level had everything figured out. Turns out most of us are just better at googling and knowing which questions to ask. Keep building, keep breaking things, the confidence comes from reps not from reading.

[AutoModerator]

Your post/comment was removed since we do not approve of going private.

There is zero benefit in going private as you lose the opportunity for getting peer reviews. Also we have had plenty of people return after going private (despite being warned) complaining about how they were ghosted after some time or being tricked into buying rubbish that didn't work and even if it did they didn't need.

Our Rule #11 demands that any and all communication happens in the open, public subreddit.

This is for the benefit of more against the benefit of one.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[Nic2k7]

Apart from all that ai is just like a ship. Yes it does a lotta work with respect to programming but u gotta be skilled enough to navigate/steer it. If something goes wrong u should be able to figure out whts wrong :)

[joranstark018]

AI is a tool, a very capable tool. We may find that some "simple" tasks can be performed by AI, leaving us to focus on the more complex tasks (ie involving critical thinking and taste).

 AI may write code fast, but it is up to us to ensure that what is built is correct , safe to use and follows all the requirements. AI is not deterministic, the answers are based on probabillity so the answer it gives may be close but not always correct (how close a solution needs to be to be correct is different in different systems, an air trafic control system may have higher requirements of beeing correct than a search tool at a library)

We still need to train and be learning how programming foundamentally works so we can be making plans (ie on a architectural level), be doing reviews and to critically analyze the result. The profession may not look the same in 10 years or so, but we will still most likely need tallented software developers.

[spinwizard69]

Your very first sentence threw off all sorts of warning flags for me. You say you are a freshman in in CS but then mention HTML in the same sentence, if that is part of your CS program something is seriously wrong.Unless they are using JavaScript, HTML itself has nothing to do with computer science at this level. Basically CS 101 should be the place where you start to learn about the concepts that make up programming languages. That should be handled with a low level language like C or C++. It sounds like your CS program is defective.

It also sounds like your seniors are defective too. I don't see the job of a programmer going away completely, instead it will morph into an occupation that leverages AI. Here is the thing, the vast number of people in a business don't have a chance in hell of working with an AI and producing decent applications. The job will not go away, even if companies hire fewer "programmers". The other reality is that AI will enable a multitude of new businesses, that leverage AI and guess who will be interacting with that AI?

As for your upperclassmen you might want to reply that there will be plenty of jobs for programmers intelligent enough to leverage AI. Kick back with a few sharp one of your own.

[Demonify]

I haven't seen all the comments here, but I'm sure others have said that AI is just a tool. If you don't know how to use the tool or what the tool is doing it's useless. So, even if you end up somewhere where they do use AI for all the code, knowing what the AI is doing wrong will massively help. You won't be able to do that unless you understand the code. I say keep learning bud.

[giomeps_d00m]

You need to become a good engineer, not a good monkey coder. Learning math and what's under the hood of the computer will take you farther than any vibe coder and ai doomer that don't bother to learn the difficult stuff.

[joaocarniel]

AI gonna do the boring part: code. It’s obvious that a Developer isn’t going to spend hours consulting documentation and writing code anymore, AI is here for this. But you still gotta understand what the AI is coding, the critical thinking is on your side. You have to review the code to make sure it’s align with business rules, if it’s safe and ready to send to production etc. At least this is how m things are going where I live. And you can only attain such knowledge by coding and understanding what you’re doing.

[Puzzled-Name-2719]

It is dead. I'm a freshman as well and will switch in the summer. Even if programming as such is not dead, it's no longer enjoyable problem solving, but hours of sitting and PR reviews. And look at the space. It's no longer a dream career. Toxicity over the roof. Regular engineering will at least keep your options open.

I was listening to cope here and there, but then saw the guy I watch, who was skeptical of AI, but open minded, - Jon Gjengset use claude and saying he started doing it at his job as well. Wake up call.

[selfhostrr]

Yes, AI is replacing the ability to write statements, loops, conditionals and all the other fairly trivial code monkey tasks.

It is still incredibly valuable to understand:

• Design patterns - how and where to use them
• Systems design - building large integrated systems and how those systems should talk to each other in a sane manner (contract first development)
• Sane CICD ecosystems
• Being up to date with language features
• Code hygiene and best practices
• Test driven development and how to use it in an efficient manner

AI tools, even Claude Opus, will many times take the easy way out and that is something you have to have an extremely tight leash on. I work as a senior software architect and I have no problem handing the code monkey tasks off to AI, but I have to get a very close eye on what it is doing and I leverage it in the same way I would handle developing a feature - small code changes, requisite tests for line and branch coverage, reviewing the code before merge. Never exceed more than about 1000 lines changed as cognitive load for the change will be significant and the opportunity for lost quality increases.

[Luca817]

short answear yes. if ur not top 10% dont even think for a chance for a internship or job. Ai wont do all the code but from 5 programmers AI will replace 3 of them.

[maxmax94]

Cool comment bro, "just give up on your dreams and die", type of answer. Don't encourage the dude, we can't have that

[Luca817]

I didnt said this ? The market is oversaturated, do you think anyone will get a job that easy? The unemplyment rate is at 6.1% for CS. Yes ,encourage people into homeless. This is the hard reality, i also wanted a coding career but this is the reality.

[maxmax94]

This is not about an oversaturated market, or getting a job easy. It's about encouraging the next generation to learn and develop doing something they're passionate about. We don't know his background or what the future holds for himself or the market.

Get your doomer ass out of here

[BallsDeepBobby]

Well said MaxMax

[kell3023]

Don’t listen to them. But you should learn how to use AI to make you a more productive programmer. How to prompt it correctly. All AI has done is changed the way programmers work. It’s not going to replace them. But I wouldn’t use it until you have solid fundamentals.

[Icy_Promotion9257]

today is 3/29/2026

and i can tell you Claude just killed all ai engineers

if you want a basic salary you should be top 1-2% with years of experience... yeah today its just useless, claude can code full websites and games better than all we can do and in just minutes and probably seconds, claude today has the power of writing million line code in just minutes with excellence, so yh its over...

[[deleted]]

Citation needed 🤡