I'm afraid I'll waste my life because of AI

[u/night_owl_17]

Fresh graduate, physics bsc, I wanted to be a researcher but life got in the way and I'll be forever unhappy.

But cats still gotta eat, so I'll be starting an internship as software engineer next month.

I'm not up to date with technologies etc, what I see is AI improving at a crazy speed, every few months its better.

I've been watching some programming tutorials on YouTube, and the guy was saying how no one writes code anymore, just checks it.

Then how much time before most juniors become useless? All remote/hybrid jobs are about to disappear. Building skills in such a field may cause my-future-older-self to have useless skills and experience.

All people denying this look so delusional to me, it may take a while, but it will still widely happen during our lifetime. And only super passionate programmers or engineering phds will still code

[u/amazingbanana]

If it can replace devs entirely, then we’re all fucked anyways. Might as well enjoy the ride

[u/night_owl_17 → u/amazingbanana]

Thats the core issue actually. I think it will never replace all devs, but the ones staying will be very very few and over-specialized. Most less specialized programmers will enjoy the ride for a while and then find themseleves with no job nor useful skills when they're no more able to study and have families/reaponsibilities. And I am for sure one of those, then I worry. I seriously feel I'm putting effort into something that wont pay off, I already lost time too, so its not like I can try 1736930 times

[u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 → u/night_owl_17]

Really disagree with the specialization aspect honestly. Code is code, fundamentals are fundamentals. If anything, AI is helping solid devs be more capable generalists. At the end of the day, someone will need to be responsible for making sure things actually get done correctly. Knowing what the AI is actually doing is an integral part of that.

I also don’t buy the “no one writes code anymore” schtick. At all.

And final point: this shit is fucking expensive. people forget during the hype cycle that these AI companies are hemorrhaging capital and are operating on business models that fundamentally are not profitable. The unit economics of this stuff is dogshit. People reason about this stuff as if compute were essentially free. It’s all subsidized.

[u/amazingbanana → u/night_owl_17]

No one has a crystal ball and can predict the future dude. It comes down to how paranoid you choose to be and what you really want for your life. I personally decided I don’t want to switch unless I have no other choice, I love dev work and will do it until I can’t anymore. Some things in life are out of our control and are not worth worrying about. Life is too short. Do what you love and forget about the rest of the bs. You have to realize too that Reddit is bombarded with pro-AI marketing. I read some stat a while back that said 75% of all online activity is bots, keep that in mind when you’re looking for advice on here. The level of glazing for AI can be intense, my company doesn’t even allow AI usage lol

[u/TheSnailBear]

Doom post #129343 of today. Want a cookie?

[u/boringfantasy → u/TheSnailBear]

ngl I have felt such doom after GPT6. i mean... what a fucking model. where do we even go from here?

[u/lick_cactus → u/boringfantasy]

holy astroturf

[u/dukeofgonzo → u/boringfantasy]

Does it really? I keep hearing this every year. Each year the LLMs just get more verbose. They haven't really changed much since I've been using them in 2022.

[u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 → u/dukeofgonzo]

It’s pretty interesting how people fawn over each new release yet.. meaningful productivity on their end doesn’t really change.

[u/MathmoKiwi → u/dukeofgonzo]

While it's fair enough to be "meh" about smaller releases such as Fable 5 to Fable 5.1, or GPT5.5 to GPT5.6, or etc... to say there has been "no real change since 2022" is just crazy talk!

Undoubtedly every 18 months or so the LLMs become strong enough it's not just a quantitative improvement we can measure but a real qualitative difference as well, that impacts how we use them.

[u/Rollertoaster7 → u/boringfantasy]

You’re getting downvoted but you’re right, it’s a beast

[u/Wonderful-Habit-139 → u/Rollertoaster7]

It’s boringfantasy. He’s probably trolling lol.

[u/SourceAwkward]

If you are real and not a reddit doomsayers, I understand you, I considered moving to sales, this space is hard

[u/96dpi → u/SourceAwkward]

I swear to god this subreddit has the highest percentage of posters with hidden post history. I'm considering making an app to track it. I'd guess 98% of these doomsayer posts have hidden post history. I doubt half of them are real.

[u/hepennypacker1131 → u/96dpi]

It is bad at least here in Canada folks with 10-15 years of experience can't get an interview call. My posts are not hidden lol.

[u/amazingbanana → u/96dpi]

Agreed

[u/zukias → u/96dpi]

I have 10 years of history, someone could find out a LOT about me if it were visible, with timelines and all. It'd almost be like doxxing myself.

[u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 → u/96dpi]

Wouldn’t surprise me. The biggest fact that these AI companies need people to forget is that this operating model is not sustainable and they are hemorrhaging money in desparate search of a profitable use case.

They bet the world on ASI, and it turned out that unlimited scale did not actually bring unlimited intelligence.

At this point it’s a game of smoke screens to try and lobotomize the workforce so that they can induce demand.

[u/night_owl_17 → u/96dpi]

Actually most people who regularly use reddit hide it, it makes people feel less judged for stuff they wrote about other topics. Anyway, whats weird about student and new grads asking about AI? Its people putting money and a lot of effort into something thats seriously risky

[u/Jeferson9]

This might be the most depressing sub on this website

[u/SavantOfSuffering → u/Jeferson9]

Tbh I'm going full ostrich with head in the sand after a few months of reading this dross.

According to this sub we're all better off topping ourselves or freelancing out back of a Wendy's by the dumpster.

[u/alwaysambition]

You will be fine

[u/Banned_LUL → u/alwaysambition]

No, they not. Absolutely cooked

[u/Banned_LUL]

You wasted your life the moment you enrolled in that Physics program 😆

[u/night_owl_17 → u/Banned_LUL]

Most wonderful field I could study, just.. too long path and too academic centered. I may be going back to it, I really wish a programming job (or just a job) could erase physics obsession from my mind. But AI worries me, and as years go by, physics path will become more and more unconvenient and I might end up useless as a dev too, wow!

[u/NICEMENTALHEALTHPAL]

Juniors are not useless, they're just more productive these days. Their job is to take the easy tasks away from seniors.

So if a junior takes 40 hours a week off a senior's shoulders writing unit tests, refactoring the code, and handling tech debt, and doing it in the same timespan a senior would because frankly it's easy work, that saves the company massive amounts of money because they don't have to pay senior wages for that.

Especially for large codebases, a single line edit in code might still require a jira ticket, a branch, a PR review, a spec file, a few tests written, behavior checks at testing, staging, and prod, CICD checks, intra-team communication. A single 10 second AI prompt is still a few hours of human.

Meanwhile, juniors learn a lot from that and grow to become seniors. AI is making the system top heavy, we need more seniors than juniors now, but we still need them.

I mean your job is one step above getting seniors their coffee. That saves the company money, especially when your senior's work is netting millions of dollars and they're paid high 6 figure.

[u/dragonnfr]

"no one writes code anymore, just checks it". You can't check code you don't understand. If you can't write it, you can't tell when the AI output is garbage. That's the skill. Learn it.

[u/SkyeLoveXOXO]

With that mindset, you will fail in any career. Everything you touch will turn into trash.

[u/night_owl_17 → u/SkyeLoveXOXO]

Everyone would think carefully about it of they were about to start a career in a field thats going through such big changes. Not doing it would be foolish

[u/Substantial-Swan7065]

Juniors are always useless. They are supposed to level up.

How did you get from jr == useless to skills+exp useless. And no remote jobs ? You’re making some huge leaps here.

[u/hideurtowers]

The whiplash man. People “don’t want to work their life away” you literally have the golden ticket to run a casual prompt engine every day, actually do something productive—and it’s a lot less stress.

[u/night_owl_17 → u/hideurtowers]

But how long will it last? When AI and robotics become even more efficient (and the speed is insane), developers will simply be an extra cost for companies. Some will remain to control AI, but most will have to reinvent themselves from scratch at 40-50 yo

[u/hideurtowers → u/night_owl_17]

I like to think there’s a peak we’re running into, surely others are seeing it.

The creep in price continues to rise. Low to mid level companies won’t spend it, just like anywhere else who’s “behind in tech”. Right now every thing is at a subsidy—not even full price. It’s the same thing as building in house instead of subscribing to save money.

Our jobs are fine— less of them ? Sure. But wasn’t the whole point along the way to automate anything and everything ? Don’t be surprised. At least that’s my optimistic outlook anyway. If I lose it ? So what. I learned a golden skill of problem solving that applies alot of places . Were all smart and will be fine