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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

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Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#951

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…

You may be going through the same crisis that chess masters went through decades ago. But chess didn't die because engines were better, in fact there has never been more people interested in chess as today. Cheaters are annoying though.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#952

The bitter lesson is that there is no domain that will be left which AI won't get good at eventually. So really you have two options: if you actually believe the timeline is long you can keep retreating to the sectors that will be taken over last (emotional support nurse etc) or you can just say if you can't beat me join em and try to supercharge your career/project/life with AI now so it improving helps you rather t…

The supercharge bit missed an important fact: that strategy is very temporary. Getting expertise in software development takes a long time. Getting expertise in these LLM tools takes a lot less time— the combination of LLM expertise and dev expertise is the useful part. If LLMs make working developers, say, 35% more efficient, that’s going to be many thousands of people out of work, many of them being the most experi…

you're being a doomer and only looking at how AI will take your job or suppress your wage. try to flip it around and see how you can do more. layoffs are coming and I have said as much in other posts but the top AI engineers will make a lot more money. ultimately they will get replaced to but in that scenario we should have reached AGI abundance.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#953

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

I have worked on highly regulated areas in finance (risk). Compliance is a highly creative art, often requiring lots of out-of-the-box thinking and non-obvious solutions. The people I found worst at this were IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. My guess is the model makes the same mistakes as the programmers: taking 'rules' literally, un…

It’s not a highly creative art at all, genuinely don’t get this weird compliance glazing here.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#954
post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it stop with just developer layoffs? When software companies rely on LLM providers to run their business, I’d argue we‘ll see a massive bust of these companies around the world - from on-prem products to SaaS. Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world.

> Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world. Already happening. I know of a few places that have gotten such large gains from LLMs that they know have their engineers working on creating homegrown ports of popular services (Docker etc.).

Not sure about Docker (lol) but stakeholders are definitely more open to "building your own" now. It used to be that to be agile as a business you would seek out already built software and rent it, as it typically was cheaper than building and maintaining your own (I say typically due to stuff like vendor lock-in and such). But these days, and especially in 2026 with the widespread use of agents and harnesses, that formula has started to change. Even though the SOTA models are really good now, it's the harness and the "fluff" around the model that makes it a game changer. The developer is no longer the one writing or even gluing the code together, the harness does that. Pair that with context preserving mechanisms and tools that emerged (automatic context compaction, AGENTS, TOOLS, MCP...) and you can get to a state where you start a new thread in Codex and it knows your systems, your dbs, can smartly explore code it doesn't know and db data patterns etc., it can explain stuff to a new developer (and be correct most of the time and have time to spend on the developer)... all of which SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the risk you take on yourself as a company when you "build your own". What's $10k/year to any half-working semi-profitable company? Nothing. But in 2026, you can build and maintain A TON of software for that, much more than your "average IT needs" company may ever use.

I'm sure the very large (and very small) businesses will keep their absolute need for (or the lack of) inhouse developers, but everything in between will probably get compressed to one or two inhouse architects in direct contact with the stakeholders and the rest will be contractors working with Codex-like automation.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#955
post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, are they? I think two things are at work: 1) How long has full self driving been just six months away? The last mile often tends out to be the hard part. 2) If the catastrophic scenario comes true where white collar work essentially disappears, what does "preparing" actually mean? There's not a whole lot I can do about that. It's like trying to make plans for what I'm going to do if I get into a coma.

> 1) How long has full self driving been just six months away? The last mile often tends out to be the hard part. I agree. I'm not arguing there will be no human drivers, no human coders, etc. I'm arguing there will be much, much less demand to the point where it will be like trying to obtain a career as a Hollywood actor or something. It's not that there are no actors, and if you want to be an actor realistically yo…

My general thought is civilizational collapse, sectoral devastation to white-collar work, etc., are things where my preparation is not going to count for that much. Like sure, maybe I have stuff in the pantry and some bottled water, maybe I try to keep up with what's happening in the world. But ultimately these are not issues that can be resolved through one person acting alone.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#956
A famous AI company valued at over $1 Trillion cannot build a terminal app without screen flicker. They are simply unable, you can borrow money from the future but you can't borrow skill. If your software engineering career had any care for software quality it's impervious to erosion.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#957

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering". The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away. These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use any…

I disagree with most of this. I'm kicking and screaming pretty hard, and yet I'm not one of the "I can do it better" folks. My whole career has been in open source. I'm all about choosing the right tool. I'm also tech lead on a team of seven, so I'm not writing a lot of code anyway. What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get…

> What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot.

Sounds like a "your team" problem, and not a tool problem...

I hate to break it to you...

If your team can write crap in Ruby, they can write crap in Rust, too.

And if they can write crap with AI, they can write crap without it, too.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#958
post #269

> I don't know what to do. Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.

This is the way. But also - keep your head up - your mindset matters more than you think. If you consider yourself a victim of your circumstances with no agency, this will be harder for you. So get your mentality right. Something along the lines of 'this is an exciting new era and I'm well prepared to master this new domain like I have many times before'.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#959
Contrary to other comments, and this post, I am actually seeing even that third pillar torn down. I have an architect who is very good at what he does, who wrote specs for the AI to follow, and other than a couple awkward placements, all the file structure is very sane and maintainable.

We are in trouble. Not from a "no more devs" side, but from a "we only need one of you 7 to remain .." side

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#960

Isn't the solution to learn business skills? My challenge is seeking good resources for the business skills. I'm doing sales for a passion project for the first time, and it's teaching me a lot. I'm just confused still on why it feels so hard and why I can't find an easier way.

> My challenge is seeking good resources for the business skills. I'm doing sales for a passion project for the first time, and it's teaching me a lot. I'm just confused still on why it feels so hard and why I can't find an easier way. Sales are going to be drowned by AI soon enough. The low end is already getting yeeted by webshops, dropshippers and AI powered bots and a lot of B2C and B2B sales are shifting off of…

Ah. My strategy has been going in to in-person shops, as I'm targeting service businesses with my project. I don't think you can ever beat that in person trust and chemistry. Though, also, I think it helps still when I am comparing products as you said "X users => Y $/month" and I have a vibe that I trust one product more than the other I'd go for the one I trust more.

And that level of proximity, humanity, empathy maybe? That isn't being approached very well by these AI or offshore services and probably never will. Thoughts?

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