this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

A person who hasn't debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of "AI".

Oh no. Anyways.

[–] [email protected] 397 points 4 days ago (7 children)

The reason programmers are cooked isn't because AI can do the job, bit because idiots in leadership have decided that it can.

[–] [email protected] 146 points 4 days ago (2 children)
  1. Programmers invent AI
  2. Executives use AI to replace programmers
  3. Executives rehire programmers for thousands of dollars an hour to fix AI mistakes.
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[–] [email protected] 54 points 4 days ago (1 children)

So this. Just because it can't do the job doesn't mean they won't actually replace you with it.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Of all the desk jobs, programmers are least likely to be doing bullshit jobs that it doesn't matter if it's done by a glorified random number generator.

Like I never heard a programmer bemoan that they do all this work and it just vanishes into a void where nobody interacts with it.

The main complaint is that if they make one tiny mistake suddenly everybody is angry and it's your fault.

Some managers are going to have some rude awakenings.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Meanwhile, idiot leadership jobs are the best suited to be taken over by AI.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 days ago

At the end of the day, they still want their shit to work. It does, however, make things very uncomfortable in the mean time.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

As an end user with little knowledge about programming, I've seen how hard it is for programmers to get things working well many times over the years. AI as a time saver for certain simple tasks, sure, but no way in hell they'll be replacing humans in my lifetime.

[–] [email protected] 186 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

"Programmers are cooked," he says in reply to a post offering six figures for a programmer

[–] [email protected] 101 points 4 days ago (7 children)

six figures for a junior programmer, no less

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 3 days ago (4 children)

everytime i see a twitter screenshot i just know im looking at the dumbest people imaginable

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

AI isn't ready to replace just about anybody's job, and probably never will be technically, economically or legally viable.

That said, the c-suit class are certainly going to try. Not only do they dream of optimizing all human workers out of every workforce, they also desperately need to recoup as much of the sunk cost that they've collectively dumped into the technology.

Take OpenAI for example, they lost something like $5,000,000,000 last year and are probably going to lose even more this year. Their entire business plan relies on at least selling people on the idea that AI will be able to replace human workers. The minute people realize that OpenAI isn't going to conquer the world, and instead end up as just one of many players in the slop space, the entire bottom will fall out of the company and the AI bubble will burst.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Tinfoil hat time:

That Ace account is just an alt of the original guy and rage baiting to give his posting more reach.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Counter-tinfoil hat time:

That Ace account is an AI.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 3 days ago (15 children)

AI is fucking so useless when it comes to programming right now.

They can't even fucking do math. Go make an AI do math right now, go see how it goes lol. Make it a, real world problem and give it lots of variables.

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[–] [email protected] 121 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (12 children)

Co"worker" spent 7 weeks building a simple C# MVC app with ChatGPT

I think I don't have to tell you how it went. Lets just say I spent more time debugging "his" code than mine.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I tried out the new copilot agent in VSCode and I spent more time undoing shit and hand holding than it would have taken to do it myself

Things like asking it to make a directory matching a filename, then move the file in and append _v1 would result in files named simply "_v1" (this was a user case where we need legacy logic and new logic simultaneously for a lift and shift).

When it was done I realized instead of moving the file it rewrote all the code in the file as well, adding several bugs.

Granted I didn't check the diffs thoroughly, so I don't know when that happened and I just reset my repo back a few cookies and redid the work in a couple minutes.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

I had a dude screaming pretty much the same thing at me yesterday on here (on a different account), despite the fact that I'm senior-level, near the top of my field and that all the objective data as well as anecdotal reports from tons of other people says otherwise. Like, okay buddy, sure. People seem to just like fighting things online to feel better about themselves, even if the thing they're fighting doesn't really exist.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 days ago (6 children)

People who think AI will replace X job either don't understand X job or don't understand AI.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Lmfao I love these threads. β€œI haven’t built anything myself with the thing I’m claiming makes you obsolete but trust me it makes you obsolete”

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

It's even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like "Eh, don't worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you're doing and screw things up on purpose." Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 4 days ago (15 children)

Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn't a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.

After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I've ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.

I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

My mate is applying to Amazon as warehouse worker. He has an IT degree.

My coworker in the bookkeeping department has two degrees. Accountancy and IT. She can't find an IT job.

At the other side though, my brother, an experienced software developer, is earning quite a lot of money now.

Basically, the industry is not investing in new blood.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

As someone trying to get a job in IT, I'm just going to ignore this comment :)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

AI isn't ready to replace programmers, engineers or IT admins yet. But let's be honest if some project manager or CTO somewhere hasn't already done it they're at least planning it.

Then eventually to save themselves or out of sheer ignorance they'll blame the chaos that results on the few remaining people who know what they're doing because they won't be able to admit or understand the fact that the bold decision they took to "embrace" AI and increase the company's bottom line which everyone else in their management bubble believes in has completely mangled whatever system their company builds or uses. More useful people will get fired and more actual work will get shifted to AI. But because that'll still make the number go up the management types will look even better and the spread of AI will carry on. Eventually all systems will become an unwieldy mess nobody can even hope to repair.

This is just IT, I'm pretty sure most other industries will eventually suffer the same fate. Global supply chains will collapse and we'll all get sent back to the dark ages.

TL,DR: The real problem with AI isn't that it'll become too powerful and choose to kill us, but that corporate morons will overestimate how powerful it already is and that will cause our eventual downfall.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 days ago (4 children)

In all seriousness though I do worry for the future of juniors. All the things that people criticise LLMs for, juniors do too. But if nobody hires juniors they will never become senior

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sounds like a Union is a good thing. Apprenticeship programs.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

AI is certainly a very handy tool and has helped me out a lot but anybody who thinks "vibe programming" (i.e. programming from ignorance) is a good idea or will save money is woefully misinformed. Hire good programmers, let them use AI if they like, but trust the programmer's judgement over some AI.

That's because you NEED that experience to notice the AI is outputting garbage. Otherwise it looks superficially okay but the code is terrible, or fragile, or not even doing what you asked it properly. e.g. if I asked Gemini to generate a web server with Jetty it might output something correct or an unholy mess of Jetty 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 with annotations and/or programmatic styles, or the correct / incorrect pom dependencies.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

English isn’t my first language, so I often use translation services. I feel like using them is a lot like vibe coding β€” very useful, but still something that needs to be checked by a human.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 days ago (17 children)

Everyone's convinced their thing is special, but everyone else's is a done deal.

Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The best part is how all programmers at Google, Apple, and Microsoft have been fired and now everything is coded by AI. This guy seems pretty smart.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

We're as cooked as artists (when asked to do shit jobs for non paying customers)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The day that AI can program perfectly is the day it can improve the itself perfectly and it's the day that we'll all be fucked.

I personally vote for some sort of direct brain interface (no Elmo, you're not allowed to play) that DOES allow direct recall of queries but does NOT allow ads ffs) that allows us to grow with AI in intelligence. If you can't beat em (we can't), join em.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

AI is a tool, Ashish is 100% correct in that it may do some things for developers but ultimately still needs to be reviewed by people who know what they're doing. This is closer to the change from punch cards to writing code directly on a computer than making software developers obsolete.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I work in QA, even devs who've worked for 10+ years make dumb mistakes every so often. I wouldn't want to do QA when AI is writing the software, it's just gonna give me even more work 🫠

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm a senior developer and I sometimes even look back thinking "how the fuck did I make that mistake yesterday". I know I'm blind to my own mistakes, so I know testers may have some really valid feedback when I think I did everything right :)

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Personally I prefer my junior programmers well done.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The way I see it, there are two types of developers we should take into consideration for this discussion:

  • Software Engineers
  • Code editors

Most "programmers" these days are really just code editors, they know how to search stack overflow for some useful pointers, copy that code and edit it to what they need. That is absolutely fine, this advances programming in so many ways. But the software engineers are the people that actually answer the stack overflow questions with detailed answers. These engineers have a more advanced skillset in problem solving for specific coding frameworks and languages.

When people say: programmers are cooked, I keep thinking that they mean code editors, not software engineers. Which is a similar trend in basically all industries in relation with AI. Yes, AI has the potential to make some jobs in health care obsolete (e.g. radiologist), but that doesn't mean we no longer need surgeons or domain expert doctors. Same thing applies to programming.

So if you are a developer today, ask yourself the following: Do actually know my stuff well, am I an expert? If the answer is no, and you're basically a code editor (which again, is fine), then you should seriously consider what AI means for your job.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

I agree with the overall sentiment, but I'd like to add two points:

  1. Everyone starts off as a code editor, and through a combination of (self-)education and experience can become a software engineer.

  2. To the point of code editors having to worry about LLM's taking their job, I agree, but I don't think it will be as over the top as people literally being replaced by "AI agents". Rather I think it will be a combination of code editors becoming more productive through use of LLMs, decreasing the demand for code editors, and lay people (i.e. almost no code skills) being able to do more through LLMs applied in the right places, like some website builders are doing now.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

You can say β€œfucked” on the internet, Ace Rbk.

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