Management may eventually purge engineers that won’t adopt AI.
Not even slightly. Any engineering business going all in on AI is heading down the shitter fast so it’s a useful canary for the competent people on the payroll.
I’m lucky to be in a sector that’s generally too well regulated for slop to filter through, but we’re already seeing fixer upper jobs come in from firms who picked a cheap contract from some AI-first start up and now needs someone to make their new equipment actually work and up to code.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
- We will need 6 months and $X to rebuild everything from scratch
- But we already have a semi-working thing, can’t you fix that instead?
- Oh right, then it would be 8 months and $2X to fix that.
That’s a generous estimate. When these jobs were a matter of correcting incompetent or lazy human work, you could depend on the problem being a lack of it - lack of compliant methods, lack of error handling, lack of required documentation.
With AI, the volume of work we’d need to comb through has exploded. There’ll be three different subroutines handling the same error, each tripping up the others using it’s own subtly wrong method, and all of it couched in thousands of lines of code handling errors that could not possibly happen.
There’ll be fifty instances referencing an ISO standard and if the standard does exist it’ll have the index wrong or just invent a plausible sounding line to support whatever method was used. Once any error like this is found, ALL of it needs to be verified.
Turning someone’s slop job into something I can sign off on is several times more work than just starting over, for a worse end result. If a client can’t be made to see thats I usually advise to not take the contract.
I can’t stop management from purging, but management can’t stop me from being one of the few people left whose brain still works and will still possess the skills required to put out their goddamned dumpster fire once the inevitable finally catches up with them.
They’re going to have to beg real hard, though. The kind of begging that has a lot of zeroes before the decimal point.
Be careful. Everyone is replaceable.
management thinks so
i feel real bad for my coworkers if they try
I have other skills.
Just a heads up, drawing nsfw horse comics doesn’t count, just learned this the hard way myself
My career is already impacted by others using it, whether I use it or not. Those who rely heavily on LLMs produce worse and larger code, and those relying on it heavily are not the best in the first place. It’s turning -1x developers into -10x developers on account of them causing additional cognitive load on everyone else.
As for me? I don’t have FOMO. If I’m right and it’s a bubble that will collapse, then I’ll be better suited to weather it. If I’m wrong and LLMs are all they’re cracked up to be, then I will be able to get up to speed quickly.
If I’m wrong and LLMs are all they’re cracked up to be, then I will be able to get up to speed quickly.
That’s the way I see it too. And is this path occurs hopefully open LLMs will be widely available and at least close in performance to the expensive, privacy invading cloud LLMs.
Although it’s the non-programming related impacts of AI I’m more concerned about.
I’ve been experimenting with qwen2.5-coder:7b and it’s the perfect middle ground. Easily runs on 6 GB VRAM while automating boring stuff and letting me focus on new things.
I’ve been running qwen3 coder 30B and I’ve got to say, I’m unimpressed.
I sent it some lines of python for analysis to tell me what’s wrong with it. it miscounted the index number and said it was fine to run even though it was totally broken.
It constantly trips over itself in mid-sentence stating what it just said was wrong, and then finds a totally different way to be wrong.
it’s about as dumb as a brand new college dropout developer.
I actually really enjoy berating it and calling it stupid when it confidently gets things wrong, so that’s about all I keep it around for.
I think it’s sadly both. Open Ai and Claude will probably die and bring the US economy with it, but the tech is here to stay until the next thing eclipses it.
It’s similar to being an assembler coder when higher level languages with compilers came. No need for management purging, you’ll simply be competing for a smaller segment of assigments.
I don’t know of a single developer that has actually used LLM aids say there’s no benefit to them. Those that refuse do so for some other convictions and don’t really know the difference between LLM aiding in tasks and full on yolo vibe coding.
don’t really know the difference between LLM aiding in tasks and full on yolo vibe coding.
Does management know the difference?
Not in the least, and the larger your corp, the more AI just just a shiney buzzword thing that must be attained.
What gets a lot of them hooked is that it gives them a new set of metrics to measure productivity. It doesn’t matter in the least that they’re meaningless metrics. It gives them a chart with a line, so it must be mana from the gods.
I’m already watching some of my colleagues’ brains turn to mush by just blindly doing whatever the slip machine says. I don’t want to lose my skills in the same way. Years from now, I’ll be ready to retire while the technical debt piles up to critical levels, and demand for skilled and experienced critical thinkers skyrockets; then I’ll have to make the hard decision of leaving the rat race to pursue my own interests, or going back in for one last job for a massive payout.
Or I’m completely wrong and I’ll just be deemed a grumpy old relic by then, and I’ll take my severance and it still won’t be my problem any more.
Severance, you say? AI told HR that you’re not a team player. Non participation = no rewards.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant that I was going to sever one of the HR director’s limbs and take it.
Not really. I’m not really using LLMs (yet), but I’m not too concerned. If they purge me, they would’ve done it regardless of my LLM use.
For me, what’s important is that I can stand for the code I write, which I can only do if I have been an active part of the journey. When I’m in a meeting and anyone have a question about the software, I should be able to answer on the spot. Is this new feature easily feasible, or is a risky rewrite required? Can’t do that if my brain haven’t participated in the code.
I’m still one of the more productive members of the team as well.
A front end developer friend of mine told me last week that three of his colleagues were laid off because his workplace adopted AI. I don’t know the size of their team so this doesn’t speak to the magnitude, only to the fact, though.
No wonder web pages are getting so bloated
I wouldn’t refuse to use an LLM for coding if it were specifically requested by management. I mean, I might advise as to risks, but ultimately, if a business is willing to put their resources on the line as a business decision, then okay, their capital, their call. But I wouldn’t personally be spending time on it in 2026 on my own initiative either. Maybe for some special cases that are particularly well-suited to it, like “I need a limited amount of throwaway code in a language that I don’t know”.
Why not?
Software development has a lot of stuff that’s asserted to “change the world” come along all the time. Could be new tools, new programming languages, new paradigms, new validation software, whatever.
First, assuming that one really does take over — be it a new programming language or a new editor or a particular LLM generating code — it’s typically easier to let other people do the work of breaking the path, since whatever the thing is typically not in a fantastic state. There are problems that are going to need to be solved. Some of those may never be solved, whatever the promises or expectations. And some of the early workarounds may be unnecessary in the long term. The first-mover benefits, on the other hand, aren’t likely that big a deal (and I think that we have enough data out now to show that while there might be benefits, as things stand, they aren’t that large).
Second, a lot of the time, things that are put forward as being the future are not, in fact, the future. If you sit back and watch, then you don’t burn time heading down every new blind alley. If LLM-assisted coding becomes the norm, then five years from now, a lot of data will have been gathered showing that using them in coding produces benefits and what those benefits are, as well as drawbacks.
Specifically in the case of AI writing software, I am pretty sure that in the long run, AI will be writing software at a human level. Same as AI will be doing a lot of things. But I am not at all sure that that it’s going to be an LLM of the present form taking the present approach. Also, a lot of the workarounds to learn today to deal with present limitations of the tools may not be the ones needed down the road. Further, those limitations probably vary by tool even today; I’m not very interested in learning how to try to get Llama 3 to do something only to switch to ChatGPT only to switch to Claude.
Another issue is that most current code-generation models run on cloud services, which raises security and dependency issues.
Plus reproducibility issues. Even if I decide that, say, a cloud-based LLM of a particular version works well and the tradeoffs are acceptable and I tune my workflow to use it, then I’m spending a lot of time learning to deal with one LLM. If that particular version of an LLM later becomes unavailable — as has happened to users in the past — then it may be that all the workflow and workarounds that I’ve developed are more-or-less useless, if the provider decides to alter the revision of the available model or entirely remove it. I enjoyed using Stable Diffusion 1.5, and picked up and developed a number of techniques that work well with it. But those same techniques don’t work well with even all models derived from SD 1.5, and if one’s using a different diffusion model like Flux, then suddenly all the rules go out the window and one is starting at ground zero.
In the case of Stable Diffusion and Flux, I’m okay with that. I’m not professionally an image manipulator, so I’m not building much expertise on a foundation of sand, and I run both of them locally, so my ability to run them can never be taken away. But that’s not true when cloud services enter the picture.
The reproducibility issues might be mitigated in some ways at a business level — AI service companies could enter into some sort of escrow agreement under what an LLM is guaranteed to be available as a service for N years or something, and if they go under some other company automatically becomes a provider, but frankly, I don’t think that any benefits now warrant that level of hassle.
My expectation is that existing LLM service cloud providers — which are currently losing money — will, later on, do things like raise prices or otherwise use their leverage to make more money. That is, they are currently in a growth phase, where they accept losses to build their user base. Later, they will shift to a monetization phase. If you are heavily locked into use of that service, they can extract from you up to the cost of shifting off of their service, and you will keep using the service. My guess is that the costs of transitioning off might be quite substantial.
EDIT: Okay, one exception to the “I wouldn’t refuse” case. If (a) I were working at a startup and (b) a substantial amount of my compensation were in the form of stock options or similar and (c) I were personally convinced that use of AI-assisted-coding would be an extremely bad move for the company, then I might take a “if we do LLMs, I walk out the door” position, because then it’s my capital on the line, not just the company’s. Part of the point of equity compensation is precisely to give you a kick in the rear to get you to act as you see being in the interests of the company. That being said, I’d try to talk to whoever was involved in making the decision to use it first in a scenario like that, to try to understand our difference in opinion on the matter, see if it couldn’t be reconciled.
First, in my branch of programming there is only insufficient training data available to make an impact. Second, by now it is confirmed scientific knowledge that using LLMs heavily impacts a humans brain to think. Third, there are so many cases of LLMs producing shitty code that nobody will be able to maintain, this will be a serious technical debt to be dealt with in the future.
Yes and no.
Yes becuse our new C-suites are pushing it heavily and my boss (who only cares that we use AI as much as we need to not draw ire) has warned AI usage is a tracked metric that may be used for perfamnce reviews, bonuses, promotions, and raises.
No because I know my immediate chain of command does not fully believe in AI or are skeptics, and when the bubble bursts the price per token is going to slyrocket. Suddenly minimal AI usage as a tracked metric will probably look pretty good.
Either way once I’ve finished up certain things I intend to look for a new job. I love my team but I fear the writing is on the wall, and even if they try to reverse course I’m skeptical that the company will be able to.
Management really wants to push me into using AI, but I genuinely haven’t found a use for it. It can’t handle complex things, trivial or repetitive things don’t need it, and I have two decades of content that no AI could ever reproduce.
Not a dev myself, but I happened to see sitting near some the other day and got their take on how they use it.
They seem to be throwing mundane tasks such as creating a project plan at it. My guess is it spits out something and they treat it like a template and edit it until it says what they want.
They also seem to be throwing their tasks at the machine and then editing what it says to fit their environment. The one said they have several terminals open and they have them spit out code, have the other check out, and the others are reviewing what he is adding.
Being a scripter, I personally think it would be a lot of work to accept the code if it isn’t flowing the way I expected. If I did start accepting it, how long until I give over my trust to the machine? Will I lose my own voice? How long until I stop relying on my research and just take what is handed to me?
I only use SQL at work and not really had much use with AI. I can’t give it our databases and the time it takes to describe the issue is usually slower than writing the solution myself.
I have had it provide useful output when other options failed but it’s few and far between.
I have some experience with SQL from Access. I can see it providing some guidance for how to do a join, but the deeper you get the more it starts resembling an expanded regex. I don’t expect the generated SQL to get the lists and parenthesis correct.
Why would I need an LLM to join 2 tables?
Not as much as asking the LLM to do so, but I feel that joining two tables is a basic task for us but I wouldn’t entrust it to the machine.
Asking an LLM takes longer than typing join myself and is more likely to get it wrong.
I use it for code reviews but that’s basically it. Looking at open job postings. Ton expect ai experience. I want to die.
100% of the job offers I’m getting right now mention AI use. In my current job as tech lead, part of my responsibility (as in part of what I’m evaluated on) is to require AI usage and measure productivity gains/losses.
Things might flip in a year or two but for the time being I think it’s pretty clear that refusal to use AI is going to have career implications.
gotta inflate that bubble
Management is paying for my AI use. After a month or so they noticed I hadn’t activated my account yet, so I did it. Haven’t ever used it. Management is happy.
I see some coworkers doing a ton of work within a day for some PoCs and that sort of stuff that I would never be able to do in the same time, but when it comes to actually fixing issues and completing tasks on average I’m still faster than everyone else.
