If your job was writing code, and not designing solutions to solve problems, for which code was just the final expression - then I’m sorry, you do need to find a new career. Best of luck.

How the fuck are you all tech people, yet you don’t realize that the tech you are seeing now is only gonna get better and more powerful?! Do you all suddenly turn off your logical brains when it comes to AI? It’s technology. This is early days. Look how powerful it is now, now imagine in 5 years.

I genuinely can’t understand how anyone can work in tech and not find this stuff incredibly exciting. I acknowledge that all the stuff about AGI and singularities is bullshit, that the cast of characters promoting it is full of idiots and hucksters, and that there is a wild financial bubble behind that is going to pop catastrophically (and hopefully take OpenAI and Anthropic down with it) - but at the same time, it is one of the most exciting technological achievements of my lifetime and just being able to be a tiny part of it makes it an amazing time to be alive.

I question if any of the neo-luddites actually ever had any love of the industry they work in if the current progression of LLMs doesn’t amaze and inspire them.

The job you studied for and got a masters degree in (congratulations, sincerely) was hollowed-out and deskilled years ago; it has been profoundly depressing watching the industry taken over by people who think a 6 month vocational course in Typescript and 6 months of not getting fired qualifies them as a senior engineer, with absolutely zero understanding of basics like information theory or concurrency mechanisms or, well, any basic engineering. These are the fuckers who have been producing spaghetti applications built on a MySQL (God burn its soul in hell) database with no relational integrity (“foreign keys make it slow!”) and no thought to scalability or resilience that someone else then gets to fix when the shit hits the fan.

That those people are going to be replaced with AI shouldn’t give anyone pause to weep. The arrival of AI to do their jobs is an opportunity to reverse the deskilling the industry has spent the last three decades working on - one really genuinely good engineer with an AI can now replace one really good engineer tearing her hair out at the half dozen absolute idiots she is asked to work with to deliver anything today.

On the first half, that’s not how it’s done; the input is a much more detailed description of design and architecture coupled with TDD.

On the second half - I happen to agree, that’s why I think the OpenAI/Anthropic business models are doomed to fail. But that’s where locally deployed models become key - predictable output.

They don’t need to be better than the best programmer in the world to change how 90% of code is written, they just need to be better than a junior dev from Timbuctoo. And feasably-deployable open models crossed that bar around Q1 this year and are only getting better (Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is another huge leap forward.) We may not be quite there yet, but the destination is now inevitable; adapt or find a new career.

Writing code was never “the job”, that is just the trivial typing part you do when the thinking and designing ends. The job is solving problems (which I enjoy very much thanks.)

This is like people who refuse to program in another language because they are “a .NET programmer”. That just tells me you’re a coder not an engineer. In my career I’ve been paid good money to write C51 assembler, C, C++, Tcl, Limbo, Java, C# and Rust (roughly in order) - LLMs are just what’s next.

It’s not going away.

Everyone who complains about the quality of the code it produces is overlooking one important fact: 90% of the code developed by the software engineering profession is utter dogshit, pasted together by people whose understanding just about extends to typing in stackoverflow.com by banging their head against they keyboard.

LLMs are not replacing artisinal hand-crafted code developed by a skilled engineer from a top-10 university, it’s replacing the utter shite produced by the people with an NVQ from Timbuctoo Community College that actually powers the vast majority of websites and enterprise software.

And it’s fucking good at it.

Look, when I started my career I used to hand-write assembly code. I used to personally review the output of the Keil C51 compiler because its optimiser was objectively dogshit. Nobody is doing that any more - partly because the compilers are better than programmers at writing assembler these days, and partly because we have so much CPU and memory we don’t know what to do with, so who cares if they aren’t. Both apply to LLMs, and we will soom be at a stage where reviewing - or even caring - about the quality of LLM produced code is as anachronistic as thinking you need the check the compiler’s output. (TBF, Clang/LLVM for AVR still produces dogshit assembler, but that’s by the by.)

Just as assembler did before, high-level code is going to become just another intermediate representation that isn’t really important; what will matter are the prompts and context you give to the LLMs. And there’s still a hell of a lot of engineering skills that need to go into that.

Software Engineers - the real ones - have nothing to fear from LLMs, and in many ways it’s much more satisfying working with an LLM than a team of barely skilled “coders”. The barely skilled coders who wouldn’t know malloc from a semaphore though? They’re fucked.

Oh yay, I got the email saying “reservation queue” and wasn’t really sure what that meant - I assumed it was “you’ve not won this round, but you’re in the queue if someone drops out”.

yay!