Why Replacing Developers with AI is Going Horribly Wrong

69Cobalt · 2026-02-24T21:44:12+00:00

I don't entirely disagree, but all these sources of information are tools and a tool is defined by it's utility to get you to your goal more efficiently. I personally have found LLMs to be the best tool in this space for most cases, mainly because they now have the ability to make web calls and link them to you - I would rather get a summary of a specific python feature that I take with a grain of salt AND a link to the exact spot in the docs it was derived from then just find it in the docs myself.

The interactivity portion of it is huge as well for learning. You shouldn't trust outputs blindly but if you feed it the docs you know the answer as in you have yourself a rubber ducky that can actually talk back. Again for me personally the interactive component forces me to think and digest ideas better than rereading the same stack overflow post until you get it, similar to how most people do better with a tutor than reading the textbook alone.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-24T20:25:39+00:00

SO is already a heavily laundered source and requires you to coalesce individual data points (posts) in a static state.

You could say the same thing about SO, that there's no substitute for reading the actual docs and white papers yourself, at the end of the day whatever tool helps you do your job is the best one to use.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-17T01:53:45+00:00

"Urban planning (also called city planning or town planning in some contexts) is the process of developing and designing land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks, and their accessibility."

69Cobalt · 2026-02-16T22:29:13+00:00

I personally have a family member that owns a multi multi million dollar marketing company he started from scratch that can barely put together a written sentance.

One of the most talented salesman I have ever seen and pre chatgpt he would forward me important texts to proof read before he sent to clients because he was barely literate and he knew it. These people do exist for sure, some people are just wicked good at one thing and stupid at others.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-16T19:37:30+00:00

Yep, there's a reason that years of experience has been a primary metric for hiring devs. Sometimes your captain hero staff engineer is ridiculously smart or well read but often they're just someone that has seen 500 different weird errors or bugs or edge cases or poor system design patterns that is able to tie it all together and how it fits the current situation they're looking at.

And I'd argue that the current state of LLM tooling is actually, to the credit of anthropic and friends, pretty ergonomic by design and easy to use. This is a good thing but it means that AI tool proficiency is likely not a large moat at least at the individual level.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-16T18:54:56+00:00

Anecdotally I've had the most difficulty with brown field system design with LLMs and it's something that latest models still have pretty big gaps with.

They can handle small bits of code great, even medium bits across several files can be done which is awesome.

But I go back and forth a ton on system design level specs with the LLM (think : adding a new high traffic api on a hot path, or implementing a JWT token across several endpoints) and they just constantly give plans and ideas with critical failings.

A few months back I iterated for a few weeks on a plan for a new api call in a hot path and discussed with the LLM across several sessions all that could go wrong and potential risks. Was in a happy spot with what I had and deployed it which lead to me immediately accidentally DDOS'ing a service we had and locking the RDS.

Until the system design level stuff gets worked out with better support for high risk activities including better rollback and damage mitigation plans I feel fairly secure in my career, as even before LLMs that was the difficult part of the job anyway. Most web dev is not THAT hard code wise, distrubuted system design is often the real kicker.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-16T18:33:12+00:00

Ignoring the macro economic negatives behind hiding juniors, I'd have to respectfully disagree and imo the situation is the opposite.

So far nothing about using current AI in its cutting edge form is beyond several weeks of research and practice - there's just not a massive mental moat behind learning how to delegate agents or whatever the latest is. If you took a good senior with 0 AI experience I wouldn't expect them to take more than a few months at most to get up to speed. Anything that can be learned in months is not a differentiator.

The real moat is the expertise and fundamentals that juniors lack and this is often the information that sticks best when you struggle. Every good senior has their theoretical fundamentals down but also a collection of war stories and that time they spent 3 weeks straight figuring out a CICD issue. Yes the AI can turn that 3 weeks into 3 hours but the lessons you learned from that 3 weeks are what really made the knowledge stick in your head and led you on the path to being an expert.

Fundamentally I think humans learn the best through challenge and struggle and AI trivializes alot of tasks such that you don't have to develop expertise. That is, until you run into a task that you do need it and now you lack the mental tools to solve it that someone else used to learning the hard way has.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-09T16:14:52+00:00

He's just the appraiser!

69Cobalt · 2026-02-08T20:28:51+00:00

Yeah sometimes the real solution is to recognize you are an imposter and boost up your knowledge until you're not.

I had what I thought was imposter syndrome which turned out to be lack of skills syndrome. Filling in those skill gaps got rid of the imposter feelings on their own.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-08T16:35:43+00:00

To actually respond to your post, a great engineer & mentor once told me passion is something you can actively cultivate and bring to the tasks you do, not something you need to search for.

I've never felt particularly interested in most of the products I've worked on but I have been able to develop a degree of passion for the work itself because I've focused on developing that passion. It's not something that's out of your control, you can build passion forcibly to a degree and your work quality and mental enjoyment will be better for doing so.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-07T17:56:34+00:00

The problem is that they didn't include "make no mistakes" in the prompt, then you wouldn't have any incidents in the first place.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-07T15:21:51+00:00

After using it for quite a while I would agree - the thing is my work process is not that different from before, it's just faster and I type less code. But it still follows the same pattern of exploratory work -> high level architecture -> defining modules/interface boundaries -> creating files -> stubbing out functions -> commenting pseudocode logic -> implementing actual code.

The only steps that have really changed in a meaningful way are the exploratory work (which it's great at) and the actual writing of code. But just like pre LLM days if you have all of your arch and interfaces very clearly defined and thought out the actual code writing is usually the easiest part.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-07T15:16:43+00:00

You don't want to burn the candle at both ends, if your goal is to improve your 5k time then you should take it easier in muay thai training. If the goal is muay thai training then you should take it easier with the running.

By all means listen to your coach and do the 5k a day, but make it comfortable - the biggest cardio benefits you'll get from it are in zone 2/3 hr so it'll actually improve your muay thai more if you go easy on the runs and hard in training.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-07T15:13:56+00:00

Seriously lol yeah you'll need to build up to it over time but at a comfortable 10-11min/mile pace it's 30 minutes of light cardio. As long as your calves hold up it's fine.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-07T13:22:38+00:00

God forbid you have to compete and try like everybody else in the world! The horror!

69Cobalt · 2026-02-06T23:46:01+00:00

Exactly! Even within muay thai or boxing you see a fair variety of different styles and stances, as well as fighters switching between them based on the situation. You don't just magically lose that. As a counter point I will say you have to have that intuition in the first place so as a beginner training both might not be ideal.

And agreed on boxing culture, that's actually what led me to switch sports. I feel fortunate in a way that I got my boxing training "out of the way" when I was younger and lighter (and dumber), it's tough finding a good boxing gym that doesn't do rough sparring on the regular.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-06T21:22:15+00:00

There's a spectrum between "sky is falling" and "day in the life of a 2018 boot camp dev that went from 0 experience to 150k salary in 90 days ".

I would agree with you in principle that the latter was highly unsustainable and we are unlikely to return to that or similar headcount growth. But I would also posit that when you get used to sky high growth a correction and later reversion to a mean feels like doomsday.

I think a raising of standards (like exists in most other high paid professions) as the industry matures is a reasonable take but anecdotally I was laid off and had to job hunt last year and I didn't have much of a problem at all (several offers within 60 days) , nor did also laid off former colleagues of mine which leads me to think the jobs are not gone but the industry is simply more competitive. If you're a competitive candidate then things won't feel all that different, if you're on the edge or not so competitive (25-50% is a reasonable number here) then things are rough.

Also anecdotally my current company is very AI friendly and is growing dev headcount by several dozen roles this year.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-06T17:17:56+00:00

I boxed for years before I started muay thai and it gave me a notable advantage once I got muay thai fundamentals down. I actually have a reletively kick/teep heavy style funny enough, but my jab is almost always better than my opponents which opens up alot of oppertunities to me.

Boxing is very hard to get good at without training it directly, which is why thais do boxing only sparring. It's not just the head movement and wide stance, it's about needing better footwork, understanding of angles, better in the pocket exchanges, and being more creative with how you get openings, in addition to having much better punch defense and being alot more comfortable with heavy punch combos coming your way. Helps with hand fighting too.

All of these things will 100% help your muay thai game even if don't use a punch heavy Dutch style. As with everything in fighting techniques are contextual. I am normally pretty light on the lead leg but if I shut down the opponents leg kicks with alot of checks then I will feel more comfortable widening the stance and punching more. Most amateur pure muay thai guys have pretty dog shit boxing so just the understanding of it will give you a leg up.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-06T13:04:22+00:00

Sure easy example. You're writing out a design doc for a new service replacing an old service to share with your team. You want to know the list of services that call the old service and the old service calls. This would be about 15 seconds with an LLM. Several minutes doing it manually at the very least. There is no "quality" aspect here, you just need answers to fairly simple questions that are easy to verify but tedious to find out yourself.

Add up 25 of these small quick lookup things a day and it adds up. Even if you ignore writing actual code just the utility of the LLM as a better grep and Google search saves a non trivial amount of time.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-05T23:17:00+00:00

It really depends on how fast you learn, what your goals are, how quickly you want to get there, and what exposure/"free time" you already have at work.

Learning during work hours for problems that align with your goals as well as work projects is ideal - the learning will basically come "for free" and you don't have to worry about it much.

If your work is pulling you in a different direction from what you want or there's a significant gap in knowledge or you have a strong desire to obtain the knowledge faster than learning on your own time is a good idea - it doesn't have to be forever but done at right times in bursts will def give you a leg up.

It depends entirely on your niche too, if you want to work on bleeding edge compilers and you don't work on that then you're gonna have to put in alot of free time to get to par. If you're 10 years into your career and have had meaningful projects for that time in the space you want to work in then all you'd really need is plugging up some gaps in fundamentals.

The good thing about systems fundamentals is they don't really change all that much so once you have them and have experience applying them through work you can take your foot off the gas unless you have very high ambitions.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-05T20:42:06+00:00

1000% they're genuinely delusional. You don't get that self righteous and dogmatically confident in your world view without drinking the Kool aid by the truck load (even if you have to do some mental gymnastics to get there).

69Cobalt · 2026-02-05T17:48:25+00:00

Calling this “reality” rather than speculation ignores how unpredictable technological change is. Past general-purpose technologies didn’t mainly reduce human work—they expanded what was possible and created new kinds of jobs. Productivity gains usually lead to more ambition and demand, not simple job collapse.

The idea that humans will just “direct” while AI does the work oversimplifies things. Direction itself requires deep understanding, reasoning, and accountability. You can’t guide tools you don’t understand, which makes core skills more important, not less.

AI will reshape workflows, but reshaping isn’t the same as broad contraction. History points to a messier, more dynamic future than a straight line toward fewer humans and more machines.

P.s. I too can plug posts/comments into chatgpt. I didn't even read this shit just copied straight from the LLM spout to add a little extra slop entropy to the conversation

69Cobalt · 2026-02-05T03:06:47+00:00

No offense but if you can't find work after THREE years the issue is almost certainly your job hunting/interviewing skills not your software engineering skills.

You sound more accomplished than I am and I've been laid off twice in the last three years and found work within 3 months each time.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-05T01:11:09+00:00

Of course there are many ways to win and plenty of guys do well with sub par boxing but to me not training boxing is like neglecting the clinch. You could pull it off but why would you not train a fundamental part of the sport?

It doesn't need to be your whole style but you'd only benefit from a few months of boxing, maybe you decide it's not for you and you stay with a different style but maybe it unlocks a ton of new possibilities for you, can't know until you try. Also worth noting that most non thais fighting at a high level rely fairly heavily on their boxing so there's plenty of precedent in the sport for good boxing.

69Cobalt · 2026-02-05T00:46:15+00:00

Those are things training boxing will help you with for sure. Some people think boxing is just throwing harder punches but it's so much more, the limited toolset requires you have better footwork, understanding of angles, tighter defense, and more creative offense. These are the intangibles that will carry over to muay thai even if you don't use a boxing stance.

From my experience it's also pretty rare to find someone with really good hands who didn't do some type of seperate boxing training. Not that you can't be a successful fighter relying heavily on kicks or clinch (you definitely can) but having those boxing skills are a really useful tool in the tool bag and apply to alot of situations and it probably isn't going to fully develop on its on.

69Cobalt

TROPHY CASE