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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
AI coding tools are replacing entry-level programming jobs faster than anyone predicted. The traditional path from junior to senior developer is collapsing, and the consequences for the entire industry could be devastating. If you mentor juniors or hire them, this one hits different.
Tbh from my experiences, AI is also turning current senior devs into juniors. The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude (since we’ve gotten access at my job).
The skills I’ve spent a great part of my life acquiring are really not worth whatever advantages AI use may have, even if I just did my job to earn a paycheck and didn’t care about the quality of my output, as long as it’s acceptable. It may feel easier now, but eventually you will have to pass another interview, and good luck when the last time you actually coded without AI was a year ago.
It’s creating this state of mind which is going to kill everything. I was coding a website for fun on the weekend and streaming for one of my friends to see how some stuff works. Every other fucking person that joined the call opened with “I see you are vibe coding a website” when they could visibly see that i was not logged into coopilot, i was using VS on my gaming PC like a chump. These are all CS people and now everything defaults to using an LLM. We are doomed as a whole.
While it took me a few months to really notice it, that still shocked me. Using AI extensively makes you depend on it - and that’s exactly what the big players want. A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.
Since I am not forced to use it, I deleted my OpenAI account and started to code without LLM assistance again. It’s much more fun to solve problems by myself (and get a dopamine kick out of that) anyway - and when the bubble inevitably pops, I can still go on as I did before.
Local models will win. They’re half-assed, but the big boys only provide fractionally more ass. LLMs will become just another tool you can call on when you’d rather read code than write it.
I really hope so, but for that to happen, hardware prices have to go down again and that might take a while.
The fuck are people downvoting for? 8 GB and no CUDA is sufficient for a variety of LLMs. That comparison’s from a year and a half ago, which is forever in this industry, but it’s not like small models got worse.
This mildly terrible website shows Min Istral 3B benchmarking above state-of-the-art DeepSeek R1 32B from ten months prior. And also above the 72B version of Qwen 2.5, whose 3B version was top-of-the-list for the ItsFoss guy.
A Raspberry Pi can run local models. You don’t need 64 gigs and a 5090.
I’m with you, stuck at a billion dollar software company with an AI fetish. It’s a great search tool, can write some decent unit tests. But God help you if you let it write production code, for any of the “you won’t find this on stackexchange” stuff we all work on.
If you believe the AI hype there won’t be any programming jobs soon - so those that do (believe) think they need to become highly-proficient AI-wranglers to maintain employability.
I too think it’s the wrong approach, but it’s hard to say what hirers will be looking for in the medium to long term, and devs whom adapt to ‘the new thing’ faster have typically been more hirable.
Personally hoping the big players crash and burn asap because the benefits just haven’t been anywhere near worth the costs across various domains.
This isn’t anything new. There have been multiple waves of “code-gen for normies”, and every time after the hype dies down there’s a heap of shitty code to fix.
There’s gonna be no shortage of customers up to their eyeballs in broken slop after the bill comes due and Anthropic has to stop subsidizing their prices. AI slop is the best thing to happen to our job security in a while. (Provided you retain your critical thinking skills.)
Fingers crossed for the crash sooner than later, because I’m tired of it all.