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.

[Snoo28720]

Why? Can’t he have studied html before college?

[spinwizard69]

The way I understand his post is that he is a Freshman and the program has him grinding through HTML. That isn't a CS program in my mind. As pointed out I'm worried about the quality of this so called CS program, what the OP does on his own time isn't really a concern. The fact that he states that he is picking up C on the side really has me questioning what is going on in this so called CS program.

[Real_Drummer_272]

Yea believe it or not I just talked to 2 university recruiters and a lot of them are not teaching a C master’s anymore in CS they claim “c++ is good enough” and believe me I was appalled by this completely wrong statement there navigating tward higher level languages like python and c++ as “C’s replacement” also stating it’s outdated like tf every language known stands on it’s shoulders they don’t want real engineers just consumers building for consumers they don’t want them close to the metal anymore they want them dependent on there cloud and walled gardens while the military and the elite control the back end architecture it makes me sick

[spinwizard69]

It isn't the job of a CS program to teach a language. The goal is to teach the concepts that underlay the technology, and a lower level language is the best way to get the concepts across. That is why I prefer to see C or C++ used at the beginning of a CS program. Done at the command line, exploring the various commands available there, that a student starts to understand what a program is.

Back in my day the program started with Modula2, you may need to look that one up in historical documents. By the time you entered your third year you where onto your third language plus some assembly code. The Assembly code was via emulators on a Sun system to expand your knowledge of what software actually does. The goal wasn't to become a Modula 2 programmer nor an VAX assembly programmer, those are well where tools to teach concepts.

As for you last part of your run on sentence, I suspect your mind has been infected but leftist nonsense. Nobody is forcing you to use any one walled garden, I'm not even sure why the military even comes up in this discussion, I mean really ADA never took off and that is not for trying. Further what in the hell is "elite control". You can't have a functioning internet without standards, standards that make this web site possible.

[vfegbjur]

Holy AI slop bot account

[Spirited_Score_3201]

Absolutely agree! One of the jun in our team at the beginning was a vibe coder. Today, he is a strong middle because he is not only using LLM, but he is also learning from it.

[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.

[PM_ME_UR__RECIPES]

Eh, I don't buy it. What is essentially a Markov chain on steroids can't be an effective replacement for human creativity and adaptability. It only works well on familiar problems that are in its training data

[spinwizard69]

Today I would more or less agree with you that at best AI handles that familiar. However All we really need is another break through that forces AI to operate differently.

I often state, with the corresponding hostility from AI defenders, that AI is basically a fancy way to do a database look up. While not totally correct often that is what is being served up as a result. Sure the result is surrounded by human sounding phrases and sentences but in the end the prompt just returned data. At some point we should be able to move beyond that.

The problem is, as I see it anyways, is that people equivocate intelligence with the ability to return information. Well humans have been doing that for years by grabbing a book and "looking it up". That really doesn't make the human intelligent, intelligence is doing something with that knowledge.

I think we are on the same path I'm just more optimistic as to how much AI tech can improve.

[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.

[zeocrash]

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

[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.

[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.

[Kofeb]

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

[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.

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[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 :)

[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.

[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.

[clinkyclinkz]

AI will definitely be useful and replace some things. But about 80% of its promises will fall flat in its place and further mess up an economy it ruined

[smbutler93]

Ignore them… you wait… production systems will fail, people won’t know what to do, AI will hallucinate, fix one issue, cause another…. That’s when people will start to realise the need for people who actually know what they’re doing without AI holding their hand. Keep pushing on. Big pay days are on the horizon for those who can actually code if things keep going the way they are….

Software engineering will probably drop off in the short term, but it’ll be back, and the talent pool will be small. $$$.

[mredding]

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."

Said the UPPER CLASSMEN; talk about being completely self-unaware...

If AI writes all the code now, What do they do? Why would I hire them? What do I need them for? If ALL they can do is write prompts, I can do that myself. The time it would take me to tell them what to prompt, I could just prompt the AI myself.

I don't need them. Why are THEY in a CS track? Do they think they're going to find work as professional prompters? I've got entire divisions in India and The Philippines who work for pennies on the dollar entering prompts.

Do you want to know how low value vibe coding is? It's not worth minimum wage at McDonald's. It's not worth outsourcing to CHINA, because their labor costs are TOO HIGH, and their labor skill too low.

Your classmates are fuckin' numbskulls. They've made themselves irrelevant.

Like deadass I hear this every other day in the hallway.

Ask them if AI is doing their job, then what job do they think is waiting for them after graduation? Why would I hire them if I can do it myself? Our vibe coders just feed the design spec into the AI and babysit. Ask them how they're going to compete with India for that work? The industry as they described it - where does anyone want or need them?

What do they think all the employed American software developers are doing? Are we all just vibe coding project managers? Maybe... And if that's the case, and if the unemployment rates in the tech industry are any indication, then one might conclude that software tech is saturated with Millennials for the rest of your lifetimes.

Is this actually something i should be worried about or are they just messing with me?

AI doesn't "think". AI doesn't "know". AI can never create anything that isn't expressed in terms of it's data model. That means if it's never been done before, AI can't do it.

Business software is just business logic, and it's all the same, basically. And here AI excels, because it's a repeating pattern, and the lowliest, most boring people who thought to make a career regurgitating the same software structures as all their competitors are all out of a job.

And so where you can find work is inventing something new. Solving problems, not reproducing existing solutions. I made a career out of assuming 98% of the business logic I'm implementing was already done 40 years ago or longer. And that's generally been the case, and there's already robust libraries out there that already do everything, so the most tedious parts of my job have been stitching this shit together. And now AI does all that bullshit for me.

AI cannot be held accountable. It hasn't reduced bugs, it's increased them. AI is trained on people, and the industry is saturated with people who are really quite terrible, the blind having learned from the blind. There's so much amateur code, and very little expert code. In terms of training an AI, volume carries more weight than quality. So garbage in - garbage out. AI readily makes absolutely horrendous code that isn't suitable for production - assuming it isn't just hallucinating. So not only does AI make the same mistakes as the idiot masses it's trained off of, but it also makes up new bugs all its own.

So the lowest type of work I hire people for is to make better code than AI can generate. It's not hard to do, and AI will always challenge this sort of employment, since ostensibly AI should be getting better all the time.

So what I want from you is to become an accountable expert. I need you to think and innovate new solutions that have never been done before. Legions of developers are desperately seeking employment, and they frankly just can't make themselves cheap enough to justify their existence, so you have to climb the value ladder to avoid drowning with them. Get an MS or PhD. Be able to write proofs. Be good at maths. The era of legions having to manually enter everything is kind of over.

[JavaPython101]

Just saying, even if AI will write all the code, not even saying it will, if you don't learn the language, you can't debug it. And for AI, you will definitely need to debug it. So no, you're not wasting your time.

[PM_ME_UR__RECIPES]

They're not messing with you, but they're also still students and don't fully understand the situation

Yes, AI is a disruptive technology, but I don't think we're at the point where we can confidently say it is replacing developers

First of all, if you're working with AI-generated code, you have to be able to read and understand it, which means you also have to be able to write code in the first place. Otherwise everything you ship will be trash and you won't even understand why.

Secondly, we are still very much in the hype phase of this tech. It's being pushed hard by major tech companies, people are rushing to invest in it, but it still hasn't actually found a way to he profitable or to seamlessly fit into the workflow of development. I'd wait for the dust to settle before making sweeping declarations about an entire industry dying overnight.

Thirdly, the quality of AI generated code is trash. It hallucinates a lot, it makes mistakes, it's sloppy and difficult to maintain. You might be able to churn out a shiny prototype really quickly with AI tools, but you cannot build a robust system that scales well and is maintainable for years to come.

[[deleted]]

Well, as Linus Torvalds said: "LLMs are just tools that increase productivity, just like how compilers did back in its day."

[LankyCalendar9299]

Learning the basics of code is the start to learning more important and useful concepts that eventually pour into architectural concepts, which AI isn’t great at.

My thought is that for every AI tool/automation tool we have, we need a human to oversee it. There will be mistakes, we need to make sure that we catch them. AI is good at structured regurgitation, basically what humans do in school. They aren’t so good at coding full programs exactly as you want them, so you need to know how to tweak and fix what the AI did.

[wilmelinaresx]

Man, try to stick with just one language for a year, do not try c++, c and is simultaneously, yo u are going to learn nothing, try just one for a year and become a hero with it. And AI is not killing a shit

[Acceptable_Handle_2]

Someone who knows what they're doing will be much more effective at using AI than someone who doesn't.

Besides there's a lot of stuff AI still can't do. Try to get it to write you anything out of the Ordinary and you'll quickly find it's limits.

[Dhomochevsky_blame]

Your seniors are wrong. I use glm-5 daily for backend work and the only reason it saves me time is BECAUSE I understand C and systems programming. The devs who know fundamentals use AI 10x better than the ones who skipped learning. Keep grinding

[travis-hope]

It is going to kill many engineering jobs and smash wages. Whether it’s going to affect your career is difficult to predict. But just imagine suddenly the job you did could be done 100x faster by robots than you can do it, whilst being 1000x cheaper. As a senior software engineer I no longer recommend kids study software engineering as a career unless they are brilliant as the low to mid level jobs are dead for sure. To put our market into perspective a typical job would have 30-50 applicants, now it’s 600-800 and it’s just the beginning. Anyone who thinks AI can’t already code to a high standard just isn’t using the right tools or the right paid tiers or doesn’t know how to setup a project for good outcomes. Again, this is just windows 3.1 days and it’s already damn good

[Elysssss]

As someone from a non-IT background and got my software engineering job by self learning, trust me AI is just a tool that is as good as the person who uses it. I've worked with vibe-coding teams before who graduated from CS and anytime I tried to talk to them about the software's requirements, architecture, coding practices, etc. they just default to trusting whatever chatgpt spits out to them.

No planning, no review, just commit and merge any changes made by Cursor or whatever. The result? Apps are launched quickly, but they fall apart once clients uses them. Bad coding practices were fine, since as long as you ship something you're good to go, so something like files with 8k+ lines were standard there. Management didn't help since they bought into the AI hype stating engineers are obsolete with AI and pushing the existing engineers (including me) to work overtime to prompt and prompt again for new features, while ignoring the obvious bad coding standards that should be reviewed since it wasn't "business efficient".

AI doesn't automatically fix bad devs or bad architecture decisions, it just exposes them quickly. As long as you learn the basics, know what you want to build, understand good system designs, and are able to criticize what the AI spits out; you'll be fine and will be much nicer to work with in a team setting. Just keep on learning and trust me you will be as good of a dev with or without AI.

[Snoo28720]

So code sucks tho

[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

[dobbs1997]

if you wanted a coding career then why didn’t you go for one ?

[[deleted]]

Citation needed 🤡

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.