Fellow software engineers, what's your plan for the next 5-10 years?I wasn't worried until Sonnet & Opus 4.5 but it genuinely one shots everything I give it. We went from doing 30 story points (team of 4) to 60 per sprint after the release. The writing is on the wall, software engineering will be the first white collar job to be automated.What do we do afterwards?
>>107678494I started working as an enterprise AI deployment consultant. It's fucking soul crushing.
>>107678544Just watching engineers get chopped down by the remorseless scythe at this point. I really miss the 2010s. It was so much fun to be in software.
Use my varied set of skills and experience to pivot to Networking or System Administration until it blows over, and or enough of society are unemployed that society collapses from riots and shit. Or UBI I guess, but not holding my breath on the elites even tossing pittance to people.
>>107678575The robots do the living, we do the survivalWe cremate our memories to power their vitals
>>107678494In general, jobs where you are valued for your knowledge and experience are more comfortable than jobs where you are valuable for your labor. Codemonkeying might disappear as a profession but you still need people who understand software and programming.
>>107678597Not sure anon, Opus 4.5 seems to understand better than most of us.
>>107678597Currently, there are millions of programmer positions around the world, and I'd say 90% of those positions are easily replaced with AI. Look, the overwhelming majority of the job market is web-dev, something that has extensive documentation, frameworks, well-defined constraints, etc. It's literally the perfect type of work for AIs, which is exactly why we have the impression that AI is much better than junior developers and most mid-level developers.I'd say Claude does about 80 or 90% of my web-shitter work these days, the other 10 or 20% is basically reviews, documents, and meetings, which AI helps with, but can't completely replace me. The problem is that by reducing a team's workload by 80%, it means you now only need 20% of the team to continue delivering the same throughput as before. The only reason to keep current programmers is this: you're a big tech company that needs to secure professionals for its own future, or you have such a huge backlog that even without AI you would need to hire more employees to meet the demand. Companies with this profile are a minority; most people work with web-shit, basically pasting pieces of frameworks together, nothing innovative or groundbreaking.In a few years, being a programmer will be like being an artist; only truly brilliant individuals will be able to make a living from it. Most will need a side hustle or even change professions entirely. But look on the bright side, this will serve as a filter to remove all those Indians and Chinese who came to the US and EU.
>>107678494I’m going to commit suicide
>>107678607Imagine you are a non-technical CEO living in the near future. You ask Opus 7 to explain something in the codebase to you. It can reply with either:1. Exact explanation at the right of level of abstraction to help you understand what needs to be fixed/changed. You don't really understand what it said because you don't have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding. The explanation is not helpful.2. Inexact explanation that is intelligible to you. It gives you the impression of having understood *something* but does not help you know what needs to be fixed/changed.So you still need people who have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding to efficiently interface with the AI. This only becomes false when AI can do everything on the behalf of humans and in a perfect way that does not need correction or steering. So ASI basically.>>107678657If you have a deep understanding of what you are doing as a programmer at the level of abstraction that you are specialized in, then you will still be able to find work and you will still have an insane amount of leverage and be paid handsomely due to asymmetry between the amount of value you create/maintain thanks to economies of scale and your relatively tiny salary. Jobs that just need any warm body that can translate a detailed spec to JavaScript will probably become really hard to come by though, yes.
>>107678789>CEO asking something about the codebaseThat's where you're wrong. The most likely scenario is as follows: The CEO says they will need to add telemetry to their web portals, so they pass this on to the VP, the VP passes it on to the manager, and the manager goes to Claude or whatever tool they use, asks it to create a step-by-step plan on how to add telemetry, and also gather a requirements document about the impacts and how feasible it will be to add the feature, as well as different implementation methods, their pros and cons etc. Then the manager sits down with the VP to discuss the GPT slop, they decide on the task, and ask another LLM to do the task iteratively so that it can be tested, as well as instructions on how to do the testing.Yes, I literally had to do this lol. My manager insisted for months that we do a demo of how to add some more complex feature to our codebase, and we ended up doing it. In practice, nobody uses it because managers don't want to be responsible for any eventual screw-ups that might happen.I believe it's more a matter of managers becoming more familiar with AI tools like Claude Code and others.
>Long term thinking in 2k26Lol
>>107678875I agree Claude Code does make it easier for non-technical people to create things that kind of work but not really or not in the exact way they want. My point is that it is less risky and more efficient and therefore makes a lot more economic sense to have someone capable of fully understanding the intricacies of the telemetry system so that they can interface with the AI and know *what* to ask it to fix or change than it is to have non-technical people fumble about with it.
>>107678494WTF is it one shotting? Hello world? I been using claude code for a white and I need to baby sit the damn thing through near everything. I didn't splash out for the newest models though.To be fair, this is probably why Microjeet are happy to use it to rewrite windows in Rust...Don't forget your trade though, you'll get called back in to fix the problems AI created but cannot fix. That's when you charge a gorillian dollars.
>>107678494I'm milking my current job until the inevitable layoff comes. I still don't know if it will be in 5 months or 5 years, but it will happen. I have $300k saved so far. I was hoping to make it to $1,000,000 so I can at least retire in a third world country but that doesn't seem likely at this rate, maybe I'll just blow through my savings living a wild degenerate life for a few years then kill myself. Maybe I'll do it anyway cause it doesn't seem like the wife and family thing is happening for me either
>>107678494Forest hermit/wizard
>>107678607LLMs have zero understanding of anything.
>>107678985You have to be a mongrel to retire in a third world country, they are pretty good at taking all your money off you. Not like it used to be. They all basically Muslim these days, so might as well strap bombs to yourself and save the effort.Realistically, why not just make a megabonk style game and cash in the millions it earns?
>>107678976Your problem is thinking that all companies are pinnacles of technology. The truth is that even for big tech companies, the details of implementation don't matter that much as long as it works. If companies were so concerned with the best result, the absolute state of the internet wouldn't be what it is today.Another thing, you talk as if every programmer out there is an expert, when most only know the basics of programming they learned in bootcamp. That's more than enough to meet the demands of most companies. They don't care about the smallest details of telemetry implementation, as long as it works. Obviously, there will be a point of no return, where each small change in the codebase will require thousands of lines of code to change, but just put an experienced programmer on the team and they can at least guarantee a decent minimum. They will no longer need squads with 3 juniors, 2 mid-levels and 1 senior. Now all it takes is 1 smart mid-level or 1 Indian senior to deliver the same as the squads used to deliver.Welcome to the modern world. All the gains in performance and productivity that we achieve translate into more work and worse working conditions. Have fun!>>107679019Just like 99% of web developers out there. Yet, they're capable of producing enterprise-grade software. Nobody needs a PhD-level LLM; a mediocre LLM is enough to take 99% of you out of the market and ease the burden on the Jew's pockets.
i couldn't get Claude code to one shot a 4000 ish line unity game a couple months ago
>>107679049>the slave is still dumbfounded by the fact his owner decided for him his own valueYou're playing a game you can't win
>>107678595If it gets to that point there will be enough violence I should think. Violence enough for me to join in. Society wouldn't function without people, despite what fearmongers and corporate executives would think.
>>107678494Going to keep programming. Most of the "programmers" are still afraid of math, have bad abstract reasoning (hence afraid of math and have to use python, java, c++ etc), trouble thinking of questions to ask, and have poor reading comprehension. Not worried at all. 60% of americans can't even complete some college. In other words, the vast majority of the population can't learn to program at all. Oh, also, language is mostly used for a method of communication, not for thinking. Have you looked at the university rankings for colleges in India and China compared to the number of people they are graduating?
>>107678494Better start practicing your burger flipping for your new future at McDonald's, chuds. I used AI and create a full functional app and I don't know how a single line of proper code.Lol LMAO
AI is only useful in small self-contained use cases, basically benchmarks. Not real systems with all their associated cruft and ugliness. AI only impresses me when I venture into a new framework/language, because it's confident and seems knowledgeable, but as soon as I learn things I realize that it's retarded. programmers who feel threatened by AI are telling on themselves
>>107679347McDonald's isn't hiring
>>107678494Keep working. Why would I be worried? I actively try to use AI to make my work faster and it mostly goes the other way and takes longer because LLMs are retarded. But ymmv, I'm an actual engineer with an engineering degree not some codeslop boot camp faggot or unemployed autist from /g/
