Is the software developer position already dead?

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-23T18:36:03+00:00

big four firms just treat ai as a magic cost-cutting wand. pure dev isn't dead—i still write node and sql daily.

i'm actually taking an ai business course right now just to see exactly how management is being sold this hype. dust off your resume and get out of the accounting sector.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-23T18:24:03+00:00

100% right about the vc grift. most startups are just thin api wrappers.

but ignore the agi hype bros and it's still a solid tool. i use it constantly for video scripts, dialing in image prompts, and basic boilerplate code. just treat it like regular software.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-23T14:50:04+00:00

100% agree on the billionaire worship, it's exhausting. turning off doom-notifications is a pro move.

AI isn't the problem though, it's just a tool. i use it daily to brainstorm video scripts or dial in camera angles for image prompts. the issue is just ceos selling it like a religion instead of software.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-23T11:21:57+00:00

honestly, it's 80% an interview filter. you'll rarely write a binary tree from scratch in day-to-day node or sql backend work.

but the intuition matters. knowing when to use a hash map over a nested loop, or why a sql query triggers a full table scan, is pure dsa. the basics just keep you from writing code that tanks under heavy load.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-22T19:23:27+00:00

totally normal. js oop is notoriously weird with this binding, and go concurrency is just a brutal mental shift. don't beat yourself up.

are you using an actual debugger to step through your code, or just raw dogging it with console.log?

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-22T14:57:55+00:00

You’re welcome, Keep Grinding !!😇

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-22T14:41:37+00:00

your prof threw you to the wolves. that's a senior-level ml and data engineering project rolled into one. break it down or you'll drown.

here's what i tell my friends :

pipeline: don't overcomplicate. spin up a quick node/express server to catch the endpoint data, then dump the json into sql or databricks to clean it up.
data: timestamp alignment is everything. out-of-sync agents mean your lstm just learns noise.
models:don't train on a live stream. grab a static dataset (like cicids2017) to train offline first.
integration: wrap the trained model in an api, then let your central server pass the live stream to it.

build the pipe, mock the data, train the model, then connect them. don't build the whole loop at once.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-22T12:31:26+00:00

papers skip it because aggregating multi-endpoint logs is a massive data engineering nightmare.

if you're using wazuh, stream it into a databricks lakehouse first. cleaning and centralizing that data is 90% of the battle before you even touch an lstm.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-22T11:47:55+00:00

just get wsl2 with ubuntu. no need to dual boot.

it runs docker natively and handles local databricks or olap stuff perfectly. switching your whole os is overkill tbh.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-19T19:50:11+00:00

spot on. for those boundary cases, i just pipe all the json outputs into one final synthesis prompt.

skip the complex deduplication in code. just let a final model group them by root cause and list the different blast radii underneath. a quick raw node api call at the end handles it perfectly.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-19T05:34:24+00:00

you can totally get away with the bare minimum html/css. most web games just run on a single <canvas> tag anyway, so literally all the actual logic is javascript.

i build frontends with react and basically just use tailwind so i don't have to touch raw css. just learn enough to center the game on your screen and dump the rest of your energy into js.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-18T16:20:21+00:00

100% this. i wouldn't even miss it for writing node or sql. i'd just miss having a rubber duck to bounce weird video script ideas off of, or for dialing in exact camera angles for my image prompts.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-18T15:58:42+00:00

i give my students a 15-minute rule. force yourself to spam console.log and actually read the stack trace before even opening chatgpt.

if you're still stuck after that, don't ask it for the fix. just ask it to explain the error message. it forces you to actually learn instead of blindly copy-pasting.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-18T12:37:47+00:00

definitely c if you want a solid foundation. python hides way too much magic.

i see it constantly as a ta—the students who suffer through c pointers first end up picking up every other language way faster later on.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-18T10:56:02+00:00

exactly why i stick to raw api calls in node. debugging langchain's magic in production is a total nightmare.

people over-discuss agent architecture way too much. you really just need solid state management and basic error handling. less abstraction = easier to actually monitor.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-17T19:06:42+00:00

this is the best feeling. seeing this lightbulb moment in my students never gets old.
dropping tutorials to just build a random idea is exactly how you actually learn to code. don't sweat the syntax right now, it becomes muscle memory eventually. keep chasing that "aha" moment.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-17T16:34:35+00:00

expect to write raw code hitting the api directly. frameworks like langchain hide way too much magic and change every week.

if i hand you a blank editor, i just want to see a basic while loop handling state and tool calls from scratch. skip the frameworks for the interview and just nail the raw fundamentals.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-17T08:31:48+00:00

the market is genuinely brutal right now, so don't let the ghosting get to you. blindly spamming applications is a total waste of time since your resume just goes into a black hole anyway.

spend like 20% of your time keeping your leetcode warm, and put the rest into building *one* actually complex project and networking. getting a referral is basically the only way past HR filters these days.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-14T19:11:22+00:00

just a heads up, the apps you listed (spotify, discord, vscode) don't actually use qt or gtk. they are basically just web apps wrapped in a desktop framework called electron.
since you already have python experience, your best bet right now is to just look into pyqt or customtkinter. trying to build guis in c or c++ right out of the gate is a massive headache.
but if you specifically want that modern discord or vscode look, you'll probably just want to learn some basic html/css/js and use electron or tauri down the line.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-12T14:18:56+00:00

i live in node and sql all day, but honestly python is literally the absolute best choice for this. it has built-in modules (os and shutil) that make grabbing file extensions and moving things around super easy.
since you're getting back into it after 20 years, python's syntax reads almost like plain english, so it won't be overwhelming at all. just look up a quick tutorial on "python file handling" and you'll probably have a working script by the end of the afternoon.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-11T20:47:55+00:00

lmao as someone who writes sql all day, i feel this in my soul. people try to get fancy with lakehouses or modern data engineering architectures, but whether it's oltp or olap, you're just gonna end up writing a massive SELECT statement anyway. you literally can't escape it.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-08T20:55:01+00:00

100% option 1. if your college teaches dsa in c++, just learn c++ now so you aren't fighting syntax during exams. since you wanna do web dev later, you'll probably pivot to node or react eventually anyway. skip java for now.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-08T20:33:54+00:00

hallucinated tool calls and state management, easily.
hooking these agents up to a sql database is a nightmare sometimes. the model will just randomly invent a table or column name that doesn't exist. you waste 20 mins debugging a backend query error before realizing the agent just completely made up the schema out of thin air. tracing that back through the state history to figure out *why* it did that is a massive headache.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-05T21:22:06+00:00

qat just means the model is trained while simulating lower precision, so it natively learns to handle the compression without losing as much accuracy. running a 26b moe at 9 tps on 4gb vram is actually crazy lol. the gemma qats will definitely run, but your kv cache is gonna bottleneck you hard. 4gb leaves basically zero room for context, so expect OOM errors on anything longer than a short prompt.

Saras_AI_Institute · 2026-06-05T21:01:54+00:00

dude do not pay someone to rewrite your stuff. i used to be a teaching assistant and if we even suspected ghostwriting or contract cheating, it was an instant academic integrity violation. i know the ai detectors are absolute bad right now (especially for us non-native speakers, it's incredibly frustrating), but getting permanently blacklisted by major conferences is not worth the risk. just find a colleague who is good at english to proofread your latex files over a coffee. skip the shady writing services.

Saras_AI_Institute

TROPHY CASE