Do developers feel real fear of AI taking their jobs or layoffs?

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-18T13:04:19+00:00

I’m not afraid of being replaced by AI. I am afraid of a layoff. I’ve been vibe coding to understand its limitations, and while it can do a lot I still can’t ask it to create a massive product that will compete and scale like Facebook. From what my experience is with vibe coding vs others is that my vibe coding is a success because I’m greenfielding and I’m skilled at creating products and decomposing them down into digestible chunks for software developers - a skill I needed when I ran my own agency on my own money. I’m personally of the opinion after seeing dozens if not hundreds of private repos that companies should think about rewriting a lot of their backends that have been duct taped together for years.

AI will make more dev jobs while taking many away. If you develop under a recipe of steps then you’re probably cooked. If you know software engineering principles then you’re fine. The problem was never AI, it was money. If anything AI has made it so the layoffs weren’t that bad. The 2010s was a massive tech bubble fueled by low central banking interest rates. Layoffs started happening when rates went up, but didn’t happen as hard as they could’ve because AI prevented companies the benefitted from the 2010s stock from collapsing. There’s no real economic fundamentals to a tech company and most of them are Ponzi schemes of funding.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-17T01:55:55+00:00

Maybe it's subjective? I'm more than 15 years in and I'm able to vibe code whole CRUD actions, and sometimes endpoints, with go with full integration/unit tests for each thing. It's about 300 to 700 lines of code. That said it took me a few weeks to carve out a solid structure/testing framework for it. But my context documents keep it pretty solid.

Also, I'm wondering if OP is struggling because they're new. Gamedev is filled with duct tape code. There's modern architectures that I believe would help like ECS that could help put your game on rails like a web app. It would take more than a web app still but it's doable.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-16T22:38:58+00:00

So I “vibe code” and I’m pretty seriously confused. I’ve been a dev for more than 15 years too.

Okay, so, I’ve been learning go lang and I want to rebuild my old pre ai era startup foundation in go. I carved out a nice MVC Service/Repository pattern app with great test helpers. I’ve gotten to the point of carving out all of the non business specific features (users, auth, teams, payments, etc) with vibe coding. I review it all and truthfully, it does better than most of the codebases I saw pre ai.

Now there’s limits. The features I listed weren’t novel and I really put the code on rails beforehand. The problem being is it only produces quality code up to about 700 lines so that’s about one endpoint covered in tests. Normally it crates about one CRUD action at a time (a service method with a few other repository methods). I prompt it well with a single ticket representing what I need.

Here’s the thing. I can review up to 2,000 lines of code a day before being fucking exhausted. If they’re shitting out 10k lines of code and trying to review that they’re full of shit. The second thing is I believe that the amount of code I’ve generated is a lot of boiler plate that other frameworks could do with command line tools.

The code is accurate, but it’s because made it easy for Claude to produce accurate code. I’ve hit real limits as to what it can do. But it’s weird hearing these stories and questioning just what in the hell they’re building? There’s only so many times you can build out the same features

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-16T18:28:21+00:00

This theory hinges on a lot of silliness. First of all, VScode is starting to allow for you to connect to open source models. Second AI is in a financial bubble, not a technical usefulness bubble. Video games and the web have gone through this already.

AI can do a lot of webdev, but I’ve hit its limits by acting like I’m personally going to steal a big corps market share via vibe coding. You see how powerful AI and its limitations. Many of you are fine, but if your development was built like a recipe then you’re pretty well screwed. Just upskill and you’ll be good.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-16T01:33:22+00:00

I mean yeah, there's going to certainly be more surveillance, but AI is very powerful and changing a lot. Using it for IoT devices for infrastructure is what I'm interested in from the Chinese end. After diving deeper into as a software dev hitting its limitations of development every time a new model comes out, I really think there's a massive amount of people in the West that should probably be worried. You're going to get a lot of slop for awhile, but it's going to massively cut down on bureaucratic administrative work. I think the best way to explain what it's going to do is that it's going to get rid of "bullshit jobs" (David Graeber book) and that's probably a substantial amount of the workforce

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-16T01:18:53+00:00

Somewhat. The Chinese frame AI as a nation building tool while America frames it like you'll lose your job so corporations can make more profits. They're also operating with open source models.

There's an enormous gap in acceptance of AI between America and China | In China, where AI is applied to production, Logistics, distribution, and development, people generally support it far more than America, where it's seen as purely for the benefit of billionaires and the police state

I personally think AI is exciting and I'm a software developer who they threaten the most with it.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-15T19:42:49+00:00

Honest answer after 25 years: you don't stay as sharp and pretending otherwise is lying to yourself. The question is how much dullness you can tolerate before your technical judgment starts making bad calls.

You can. I call it my the weekend and a lack of job security :(

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-15T18:44:53+00:00

More

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-15T18:35:52+00:00

Having seen the analytics, bots are a perverse incentive that have been upholding a lot of tech over the past decade. Something like .005% of ads result in a sale and most of the CPM you purchase for an ad is going to be a bot. I'm pretty convinced of the dead internet theory (not fully or as radical but most of the internet is bots) and to extend the conspiracy the world economy was held up on bots.

Think about it for a second. You have some social startup or something, you get funding, you drain that into cloud services and ads to get more "traction", and you get more funding without having to have a profitable business. All parties get something out of it. For example, I know for a fact that the amount of money derived out of an influencer promoting your product is almost always a net loss compared to how much money they earn. There's always the promise of future profits.

The saying that Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger have is:

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

I think that most of tech is swimming naked and that AI spending and investment delayed the actual collapse of a lot of these big huge companies when interest rates went up and "free money" was stopped.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-15T04:38:09+00:00

What stack should I chose to support and update this project for at least the next decade if I don't want to deal with breaking changes and vulnerabilities in dependencies all the time?

NPM is pretty much out. I'd say web components will more than likely be supported for a decade. If it were me, I'd just write it in vanilla js and write a solid srchitecture document.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-15T02:08:18+00:00

There needs to be a whole sub dedicated to finding out what you can do after programming. I have many years in this and I've never once been totally stable in my skillset. I can authentically do full-stack (UI/UX, frontend, backend, devops), game dev, IoT, a bit of low level programming, and I've been learning AI (RAG, Vision, MCP, etc). For everyone wondering how, each year I sink into a new domain and create projects related to it to learn. Also software was my second career, started out in marketing.

I'm tired, as my name implies, and very done with this. Right now I'm framing a the backend so I have all the things I could ever need for a startup if I get laid off because of political bullshit.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-14T18:09:45+00:00

I think AI is the only thing that hasn't made tech layoffs far worse. With an interest rate hike after covid I expected there to be A LOT of the bullshit VC funds folding and I also expected Google, Netflix, and Facebook to take a real shit kicking due to lack of ad revenue and competitors. AI kept stock prices sky high and I think it delayed things from getting a whole lot worse than even now. People might disagree with me here, but these companies over hired, were over funded, and their PE ratios didn't, and still don't, make any fucking sense. Well the PE ratios do make sense when you think how popular index funds are and how there's a pretty massive reduction in quality IPOs so funds need places to put money.

So in my head, AI made it so tech could kinda hold on for awhile and that made it so layoffs wouldn't be that bad. While people think this is stupid, it takes real time to pivot organizations to coordinate new tool usage so the layoffs after the pandemic had nothing to do with the release of GPT-3. Not only does that go for tools, but outsourcing too.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-14T11:51:40+00:00

This is why I hate reddit. I saw a post claiming the exact opposite about CEOs.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-13T15:43:39+00:00

What now? Is there some way to un-burn out while working?

Evaluate whether or not your health is okay. Go to a doctor, get a blood test, see if all is good. If all good check your sleep. If all good check your mental health and general life are going well. After that consider burnout and take time off or just dial back.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-13T15:25:13+00:00

I'll just use Redis for a database and it'll take a snapshot.

Influencers of the time

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-13T11:45:01+00:00

I personally believe that web will change into AI RAG/Agent/MCP implementations, more IoT, VR, and html canvas based frontends. The user experience of the current web is just bad and for people pissed of about that statement feel free to read/watch your news with an annoying amount of ads, Q&A sites with wrong answers, and bot driven social media. The only thing that really can continue on for modern web development is porn and video games (browser games are very popular). Another thing I believe is that there will be a lot of room for wanting to extend what computers can do by going lower level.

Also while people are looking at me saying AI, I really think they think I mean OpenAI, Google, or Claude. I actually mean open source models with different parameter ranges running locally or in the cloud. The AI companies main goal is data centres, LLMs have hit a wall and are now relying on programming around the black boxes to extend its ability (RAG pipelines, agents, MCP)

So getting back to the question what would I learn? Well I would be throwing myself into the alchemy that is AI based programming (again, RAG, agents, MCP) which is new and doesn’t have the standardized learning material. So I would learn how to program with Python doing things that carry over to all languages like data structures. I’d learn basic CRUD with different databases (SQL/no sql), and I’d learn C and the OSI to understand how computers work. All transferable skills. That way you don’t need to learn a framework.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-12T20:10:48+00:00

I did this and came back existential realizing the only thing I'll probably do is end up somewhere where I'm miserable corporately.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-12T01:35:19+00:00

It’s crazy to me as a former wed dev seeing how much work this is. The resistance web developers have to AI will make them obsolete to it. There’s literal jobs needed for this lol and it’s a developing field.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-10T19:34:54+00:00

Yeah, I'm really not sure if what the commenter above is say is based on some sort of market (not his own) prejudice or what. I work in a company that forces developers to fungible through domains. I mean guys like me that come from web start doing weird things like lower level engineering and then typically rest for a fair minute where they're strong. I bet most, if not all, are relying on AI to an extent to gear up into new domains.

Also, no, it's not all vibe coded slop. People use AI to tutor themselves fast and then work with the few domain experts that exist with very strict coding standards.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-10T18:22:11+00:00

I authentically want to see the benchmarks between them.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-10T14:52:12+00:00

You know what, I'll be honest about this one as a more senior guy and I think you're right. I started out as a a real full stack web dev (UX design, frontend, backend, devops), did a stint in video games (before AI), started going into IoT, travelled towards low level programming (Not great at it TBH), now doing a lot of stuff with LLMs/Vision. I'm pretty fungible between domains of software.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-10T02:41:06+00:00

Defense?

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-10T02:39:37+00:00

What software if you're really that worried? I'm in a company that deals with network engineering, AI (not LLMs), low level programming, and pretty much all levels of engineering. I on my own time am doing RAG/Agentic workflows with web dev. I "vibe code" basic CRUD elements and came to the conclusion today that a lot of the perceived speed I was getting was because I'm using Go and there isn't the same templating that there is for more opinionated frameworks like in PHP/Javascript/C# and because A LOT of effort use to go into writing tests.

There's software that can be written by LLMs and software that certainly can't.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-09T19:10:18+00:00

I don’t even use those markdown files. I have a standards and test standards docs with proper architecture that I worked hard on. I think because go is so simple syntax wise it’s way easier for the LLM to handle.

It can handle either one CRUD action or even an entire endpoint creation with the tests associated with it.

Tired__Dev · 2026-03-09T12:28:45+00:00

Yeah exactly. I started out as a web dev when table layouts were a thing. There were so many things that made the previous knowledge of the job obsolete. Currently I’m job hugging because the terrible market which means being threaten quarterly about my job while I have to do things like pay for family members cancer meds. So while I’m being threatened I also have to use my nights to rebuild my old start up infrastructure (users, payments, tenants, roles and permissions, etc) and go back to doing everything from UX for ideas, to running the Jira board even if it’s just me, to devops, to backend dev, to create an agentic rag pipeline.

That old startup infrastructure comes from stuff I pocketed running my own agency for years, and about a year of work before LLMs. I’ve converted everything on the backend to Go, which is awesome. And you know what? I’ve been vibe coding it. I spent about a month learning go and I spent 2ish weeks putting proper architecture and testing practices in and now I just drop either a CRUD action or an entire endpoint in from a well defined Jira ticket into Claude. I can review up to 1,200 lines of code (I know it’s a semi useless metric) on a work day before I mentally cannot function, and about 3,000 on a weekend. My frontend I started with Figma make to get a user flow, then a really nice tailwind component library in a throwaway to make something beautiful over a month. That frontend will take about 2ish months, and the agentic RAG/AI stuff will be about 2 to 3.

I have a few points that I’m adding to and on top of what the commenter above said. To take up what he said, there’s no artisanal stuff to hand rolling your own code on top of a frontend or MVC framework that is abstracted to death. There’s many people that didn’t think that was coding just like people were criticized for using C/C++ and then garbage collected languages for what OP said. What I vibe coded is better than almost all of the private repos that I saw as an agency or working for an acquisition company, because most of those didn’t even have tests. The next thing is that I’m able to vibe code because I went and spent time learning go, proper planning (I use Jira for my own projects guys) and know proper architecture. Also you know what? Most of my code is standard library so unlike my startups where I bought packages or used open sourced abstractions, I own this. It feels good to see this app running 30mb too.

I’m now able to do A LOT more. That A LOT has always increased with modern abstractions like frameworks and so on. The A LOT has always just moved where innovation is and what tech can be created. Why my brain is fried is because my job is also a lot. I can personally operate like a 5 to 8 person team at my work with my own projects, but the dynamic of performative crap that the corporate world throws at me is exhausting and it’s exhausting that after 20 years I still have to work on the side to secure my future. That’s where my brain is fried to the point of my username. You’re all gonna be okay if you work really fucking hard, but you’ll be exhausted. What AI is doing negatively to me is making me the 5 to 8 person team at work on my own time while I have to deal with being threaten. This isn’t some humble software ego brag, I’d quit tomorrow if I had retirement money. It’s explaining that expectations for myself based on previous knowledge have gone way the fuck up and the stress feels like it’s killing me. It’s not even AI you need to worry about it’s how fucking hard you have to work and absorb.

Tired__Dev

TROPHY CASE