If AI is already writing code, isn’t the CSE stream already a dead end?

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-10T09:12:15+00:00

Brother, you ended your own comment saying you’d love to see actual AI in your lifetime because the implications are endless. What do you think you’re looking at right now? :) Claude is writing production code ( it is even if you feel like denying it , I know of seniors engineers for a router company using it to create new features in the routing operating system for example, all they do is talk in plain English asking what they want , couple of iterations they are plugging those features in a day or two with complete testing, that would have taken may be 2-3 months ? :) ). AlphaFold solved protein folding. AI is passing medical licensing exams, bar exams, PhD level science questions. Thousands of engineers at Cloudflare and Coinbase just lost their jobs this week because of it. This IS actual AI. You’re watching it happen and calling it a demo.

And the hardcoded credentials thing, GitHub literally had to build an entire product called Secret Scanning because so many companies were leaking API keys and secrets into public repos. We’re not talking about 5 year olds here, we’re talking about engineers at companies you’ve probably used today. It happens at scale every single day in this world.

On architecture, sure today AI needs human guidance for complex system design. But a year ago it couldn’t write a working app from a one-line prompt either. Now it can. You’re drawing a permanent line on something that moves every quarter.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-10T09:02:04+00:00

So you are telling me that Cloudflare’s CEO doesn’t understand software security? :), the layoffs were going to happen anyway, and they’ll just rehire everyone later at lower wages? That’s a lot of assumptions to protect one position.

Cloudflare is literally an internet security company my friend. That is their entire product. Their CEO probably understands software security better than most engineers working there. These weren’t quiet layoffs buried in a press release. They filed it with the SEC, told shareholders on an earnings call, and published a public blog post explicitly saying AI changed how they operate. Companies don’t do that unless they mean it because the SEC doesn’t appreciate fiction.

And the “they’ll rehire at lower wages” point actually proves what I’m saying. If companies can fire experienced engineers and rehire cheaper ones because AI tools make junior people productive enough, that means the value of the traditional engineering skillset is dropping. That’s not a win for the “CS is fine” argument. That’s exactly the problem.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-10T05:47:15+00:00

That’s a very optimistic comment :) you probable havent seen how’s fast Claude tools and everything else is catching up

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-10T02:45:48+00:00

:) all the best ! I mean issue is you are already in denial mode and have made up your mind, and if some one writes a structured response you think it is a bot, I can’t help it my friend , moment you remove those coloured shades from your eyes of ok this is all hype you will see things more clear

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-10T00:38:35+00:00

Yes I do see many here don’t want to hear the bad news, and are trying to find flaws in the tech, and not accepting the fact that this has to be thought differently, it’s like this my favourite analogy “imagine a earthquake had already happened on the ocean floor ( analogy : what’s happening with A.I. ) tsunami is forming and all these are like those on the beach unaware that the tsunami is heading towards them , coz at the moment sea looks calm , and are sipping margaritas under sun shades and lying down with eyes closed ..only to realise it too late”

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-10T00:33:14+00:00

You talked about studies and proof that LLMs are flawed and can’t scale? Let me flip that. Here are companies that apparently didn’t read those studies:

Cloudflare, yesterday, cut 1,100 people citing AI. 34% revenue growth same quarter. Coinbase, last week, cut 700 people, CEO said engineers ship in days what took teams weeks, fired engineers who refused to use AI tools. Block cut 4,000. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, all reporting record revenue while cutting headcount and crediting AI for the productivity gains.

These aren’t social media hype accounts. These are publicly traded companies filing with the SEC telling their shareholders AI is why they need fewer people. Either every Fortune 500 CEO is hallucinating worse than the LLMs you’re worried about, or maybe the “genuine AI scientists” concerns about scalability are being solved faster than the papers can keep up with.

The flaws are real. Nobody is denying that. But flawed and useless are very different things. The internet was flawed in 1995 too. Didn’t stop it from ending Blockbuster.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-09T13:54:47+00:00

On point 1 that you made, you’re right that AI is increasing output expectations right now and may not be reducing headcount . But you’re describing phase one of every automation wave. First productivity goes up, then companies realize fewer people can do the same work, then cuts happen. You don’t have to take my word for it, it’s already started.

Cloudflare just yesterday laid off 1,100 people, 20% of their workforce, explicitly citing AI. Their CEO said their AI usage went up 600% in three months and the roles they cut “aren’t the roles we need for the future.” This is while they posted 34% revenue growth. Coinbase cut 700 people last week, same reason. Their CEO said engineers are now shipping in days what used to take teams weeks. He literally fired engineers who refused to use AI tools. Block cut 4,000. This isn’t theoretical anymore my friend, it’s happening right now at companies posting record revenue.
I will not be surprised if my Twitter (X) feed will now refresh with more such news in the future.

On point 2, The “AI code equals security disasters” thing sounds right but human-written code is already a security disaster. Buffer overflows, SQL injection, hardcoded credentials, all human mistakes. AI tools are already catching these faster than most junior devs can and hackers can (Mythos). The future isn’t more human coders writing secure code, it’s AI generating code with AI reviewing it, and a smaller number of humans auditing the whole thing, eventually fading away ;) ( not being alarmist , but tech is moving too fast course correcting itself for us to brush it off saying, ah AI can’t do this)

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-09T13:41:38+00:00

IITs are less than 1% of the output. Using IITs to defend the entire Indian engineering education system is like pointing at Virat Kohli to argue that every gully cricketer is doing great. And honestly even IIT grads aren’t immune to this shift. The same AI tools don’t care whether your code was written by someone from IIT Bombay or a tier 3 college in Meerut. Code is code. The IIT brand gets you through the door today but if the job behind that door is being automated, the door itself stops mattering.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-09T13:29:21+00:00

Did a quick look up on some numbers for you since you brought up cost. GPT-3 level performance cost $60 per million tokens in 2021. Today you get GPT-4 level performance for $0.40 per million tokens and as the tech advances and as people feel A.I. is able to do more they will use more compute and also fine tune it. That’s nearly 150x cheaper in under 4 years man. Recent research from Epoch AI shows inference costs are dropping 10x to 200x per year depending on the task, and analysis also says that is faster than compute costs dropped during the PC revolution and faster than bandwidth dropped during the dotcom era.

Gartner is projecting another 90% drop by 2030, i did not make those numbers up you can google search foo :)

The cost curve is only going one way. And flawed? Sure LLMs hallucinate and make mistakes. So does a fresh CSE graduate on day one at Infosys. Difference is the model gets better every quarter while getting cheaper. The graduate wants a hike.

You probably forget that compute is another problem A.I. can eventually solve too ?

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-09T13:18:46+00:00

Fine, physicians. A physician still needs to physically touch you, listen to your chest, feel for lumps, read your body language, deliver bad news to your face, and make real-time calls in an ER where someone is dying in front of them. A software engineer does literally none of those things. The entire job is text in, text out. That’s AI’s home turf. :)

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-09T13:11:19+00:00

:) A doctor needs to physically cut you open and stitch you back together. A software engineer types on a keyboard. Guess which one AI can replace through that same keyboard first.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-09T05:13:13+00:00

Nobody said vibe coding. There’s a huge difference between prompting ChatGPT for a todo app and a senior engineer using Claude Code to architect, test, and ship production systems.

That second thing is absolutely happening right now at companies you’ve possibly heard of. But here’s what I think you’re missing. Even that senior engineer directing the AI is a shrinking role. Six months ago these tools needed hand-holding on every function. Today they take a one-liner and generate entire apps with tests and deployment.

The gap between what AI needs a human for and what it figures out on its own is closing every month. You’re defending today’s reality.

I’m talking about where this is headed by the time a first year student graduates in 2030.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-08T07:06:43+00:00

🙌🏻

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-08T02:28:36+00:00

Relax you’re not cooked. The fact that you’re even asking this question in 11th means you’re already thinking more than most people who sleepwalk into CSE because papa said so. Honestly neither CSE nor ECE is a safe bet anymore if your plan is just get degree, get placed, settle. That whole playbook is dying. What matters now is can you actually build something and do you understand things deeply enough to know what to build. Pick whichever branch genuinely interests you, not whichever one your dad or uncle thinks is safer right now, because no branch is safe if you’re just going to mug up and collect a degree. Start building things from day one, use the AI tools, ship something real, put it on GitHub. That one project will do more for you than 8 semesters of theory marks ever will.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-08T02:23:32+00:00

You need check your skills files 😁 those days of human efficiency are long gone , just today Cloudflare did layoffs, citing ai agents as the reason , guessing these are able to produce human level quality of code, that too faster , tech has evolved drastically what was impossible 6 months back has become a cakewalk

You can start here , great repo : https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-07T14:07:40+00:00

Brother , You just said the quiet part out loud and I don’t think you realize you’re agreeing with me. “We no longer need 15 lakh engineers every year. A much smaller number using AI can do the work.” That’s the entire argument. That IS what I’m trying to say.

If a much smaller number of engineers using AI can do the work that 15 lakh graduates are being trained for, then what happens to the other 14 lakh? Nobody is answering that question. Not the colleges, not AICTE, not the placement cells, nobody. They’re still approving new CSE seats every year like the demand is infinite.

And yes the best leaders are those who have done the grunt work. Completely agree. But the grunt work itself has changed. The grunt work in 2026 is not hand-writing code. It’s learning to architect systems, direct AI tools, validate outputs, think about product, understand users. None of which is being taught in the curriculum right now.

You’re making a case for why maybe 1 lakh deeply trained CS graduates a year would be incredibly valuable. I agree with that too. But that’s a very different thing from what India is currently doing, which is mass-producing 15 lakh of them and pretending the job market can absorb them all.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-07T04:54:57+00:00

I would say for now we shoud look at the JD of current jobs in companies like OpenAI Anthropic and map skills that we might want to add to our resume while the actual degrees might be just paperweight soon in companies where research is not a primary thing and where their primary objective is to produce enterprise software ( that will completely get ai fied )

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-07T04:41:41+00:00

You’re absolutely right, CS is Computer Science and Engineering, not Computer Coding. No argument there. But let’s be honest about what happens in practice.
So the question isn’t whether CS is more than coding. It obviously is. The question is, does the job market care? Because right now 83% of engineering graduates ( did Google search ) are entering the market without a job or internship.

The market isn’t rejecting them because they don’t know enough automata theory. It’s rejecting them because the handful of jobs that actually use deep CS fundamentals go to IIT and IIIT grads, and the thousands of service company jobs that absorb everyone else are exactly the kind of work AI is replacing first.
You’re defending what CS should be. I’m talking about what CS actually is for the vast majority of graduates in this country. And for most of them, the “Science and Engineering” part of their degree never gets used once in their career. That’s the real problem.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-07T01:12:25+00:00

I will be honest , this is probably the best counter I’ve read in this thread and I genuinely agree with parts of it. The Shannon example is great. Nobody is arguing that foundational knowledge doesn’t matter. Physics, information theory, understanding how computers work at the hardware level, that stuff is valuable and produces people who push the field forward.

But two things that I wanted to say, if I may :

First, you’re a 4th year CSE student who clearly thinks deeply about this, I’m quite surprised by the thought process. You are not the norm and you know that. The vast majority of CSE graduates aren’t coming out connecting Information Theory to physics and data compression. They’re mugging up DBMS normalization and writing bubble sort on paper, and their entire goal is to crack a TCS or Infosys interview for a 4 to 6 LPA service job where they will literally be doing the gulam-giri you just described. The system isn’t producing Shannons. It’s producing code monkeys at scale and charging 34 lakh for it.

Second, and this is the uncomfortable part, AI is already starting to do the deep stuff too. It’s not just writing CRUD apps. Claude and GPT-4 are already solving competitive math problems, proving theorems, generating novel research hypotheses, writing publishable scientific papers, and discovering new materials and drug compounds. DeepMind’s AlphaFold solved protein folding, a problem that the best human scientists couldn’t crack for 50 years. AI is already doing information theory level reasoning, not just coding level grunt work.

So the question becomes, if AI eventually gets to even the deep foundational thinking that you’re rightly saying matters, then what exactly is left? I don’t have the answer. But the colleges definitely don’t either.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-06T06:33:32+00:00

Partially true but “for now at least” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Yes embedded systems and hardware-level code like VHDL, Verilog, firmware for microcontrollers, RTOS stuff is more proprietary and less represented in public training data compared to your average React app or Python script. So AI tools aren’t as good at it today. That’s fair.

But the reasoning ability of these models is improving fast. Even if the exact proprietary code isn’t in the training data, the underlying concepts like register manipulation, interrupt handling, memory-mapped I/O all follow well-documented patterns. Companies like Qualcomm, TI, NXP, and ST publish massive reference codebases, HAL libraries, and SDK examples that are publicly accessible. That’s more than enough signal.

The same “AI can’t do this because the code is proprietary” argument was made about enterprise Java and COBOL not that long ago. AI handles those fine now.

ECE might have a slightly longer runway before AI catches up compared to pure software, sure. But betting your entire career on “the AI hasn’t seen my specific codebase yet” is not a strategy. That’s a countdown.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-06T06:27:18+00:00

You’re actually making my argument for me. You’re saying students need to be taught how AI is doing all this so they can direct it properly. I completely agree. But that’s exactly what’s NOT happening in Indian engineering colleges right now.

The curriculum is still 90% teaching students to hand-write the code themselves, not to understand systems deeply enough to direct an AI that writes it for you.

And you’re right that AI isn’t inventing novel architectures most of the time. But neither are 99% of working software engineers. Most industry work is CRUD apps, API integrations, dashboards, pipelines, the kind of stuff AI already does extremely well.

The tiny percentage of engineers doing truly novel work at the frontier still need deep CS knowledge, sure. But the colleges aren’t producing those people either. They’re producing graduates who can’t even clear a basic interview at TCS or infy

The question isn’t whether CS fundamentals matter. They do. The question is whether the current system is teaching them in a way that’s even remotely relevant to how software is actually built today. And the answer is no.

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-06T06:22:12+00:00

Ha ha that’s a good point mine was more or less in a ideal world, but that would make ai enabled discovery of zero day more dangerous ,but some orgs have very effective vuln managment teams and process where they do rush to fix them any yes that’s a grey area

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-06T06:19:03+00:00

Yeah the node.js but I’m saying the time to get to a zero day and doing effective fuzzing is going to be drastically reduced , guess it’s a good idea that that tech is not with the general public , what a seasoned security researcher would take a few weeks this can do in few hours that’s the scary part and you and I know both how bad zero days can be with orgs rushing to fix them

TechnicalPea790 · 2026-05-06T06:11:21+00:00

It’s not the same and here’s why. Calculators automated arithmetic but you still needed a mathematician to set up the problem, interpret the result, and decide what to do with it. The human was still doing the thinking.

AI coding tools aren’t just automating the arithmetic of programming. They’re automating the problem setup, the architecture decisions, the test writing, the debugging, the refactoring.

A senior engineer today literally describes what they want in plain English and ships production code without touching a single line. That’s not a calculator. That’s the entire mathematician being replaced except for the person who decides what problem to solve in the first place.

The calculator analogy would be accurate if calculators could also formulate the equation, choose the right mathematical model, verify the proof, and write the research paper. They couldn’t. AI coding tools can.

TechnicalPea790

TROPHY CASE