u/Idea_Fuzzy

Not an attack at Open source, but lemme explain.

Back in the old days, programmers were used to put their names at the head of every file of code they create.

/**Created by XXx - some timestamp **… etc

This is no longer a common convention (now git leaves full historical markers who wrote what)

But it shows a big shift in attitude.

Every piece of code was seen as a precious private copyrighted craft, something like that.

Big corps were used to sue each other for millions of $ if they find out some parts of their code were copied into another competitor software.

These cases were so common in the past, look it up.

Courts used to compare two codes to prove code theft (a term that you no longer hear these days).

But then Open Source became a popular thing, to “democratize code” - ever since the code became more or less seen as a cheap commodity, that effect started to happen even way before LLM.

The intent of devs back then was to offer free or cheap software alternatives outside the corp’s monopolies , for the “public good”.

Therefore, the view on code got shifted, reduced to commodity, you no longer hear of “code theft” or code infringement.

At the end all this bit the programmer career in the ass.

It is what LLM got mostly trained on, to make code even a much cheaper commodity; I hardly believe that LLMs got that good due to Stackoverflow answers, surely they were part of the training materials, but the biggest chunk were surely the millions of public github repos.

Please I don’t want to debate the (in my opinion false) tired thing about “Programming/SE is not just coding”; I know it is isn’t , but it was always the biggest valued and most respected skill programmers had in the past (but not anymore) - besides yes LLMs now can do architecture and system design as well, it is trained on millions of architecture blueprints, more than any human can achieve in a lifetime.

So at the end of the day, programmers brought this to themselves by being too nice and oversharing their hard learned skills (Open sourcing).

I am no economy expert, but I don't think Lebanon's market pricing can be explained scientifically.

Let me explain...

A lot of european foreigners living here complain that grocery pricing here is even more expensive than their home countries, and this is true.

Even if you bring back Keynes from the dead , he would struggle to explain our market's behaviors.

There's a very weird pheonomena here in Lebanon, a strange kind of greed.

Not only the mafia cartels, but even regular people.

Like have you ever notice house for sale posters that remain the same for over 10 years? Like a shitty house in a shitty bloc in a shitty neighberhood for like $300k and the owners aren't even willing to lower it by 1 $? They prefer to die and rot rather than lowering it according to supply and demand?

And not matter how much the restaurants, cafes and beaches increase the prices, they are still full.

Very inexplicable model.

First of all, I have 9+ years of experience, working in web development mainly (Express, Go, Angular...ec) ; also did hobby mobile (Ionic, RN) and game projects (Unity, 2D).

I always had some pride in the things I did in the pre-AI era; but like many others now not feeling the case anymore.

There's some counterarguments thatI keep seeing over and over again in such doom topics; I am gonna address them all here; and why I am not convinced at all with each

- "Coding is dead, but System design and Architecture is more important than ever" -> "System design/ Architecture" was never a daily activity, it's something usually done before starting a new project and gets adjusted/scaled everytime there's a new major feature that requires implementing a new tech. ie. Introduicng Uber Eat to Uber. And I swear the last Architect I worked with did use Claude to figure out the system design and even generated docs all by using Claude, so even this part isn’t totally safe from being automated.

- "You can sitll code manually if you want" -> For hobbyist projects maybe, but in the corporate, even if they don't watch your token usage, they are setting very short deadlines now anyways; so it's impossible to finish things before such deadlines without using Claude/Codex.

- "Coding was never the hard part, if you were spending 90% of your time coding then you're a Code Monkey imaaoo bahahaa **fart sounds* " -> The dev communities are now filled with these people mocking at coding and calling it a monkey activity, like wtf...? Coding was the CORE *daily* activity of Software engineering ; as a I said before, not all programming-related activities have the daily frequency nature; System design happens once in a while, requipment collection happen frequently but not a daily work either (also depens in which stage the project is, building something new vs maintenance...etc); coding on the other hand was the daily thing we all did as programmers and for many of us, the most fun part.

- "You have to review the PRs by LLMs" -> No one can review a 10k+ lines PR; Copilot/CodeRabbit would be much faster.

What we senior devs are doing right now, is maxxing our sources of income by doing many projects in parrallel thanks to LLMs; employers still trust senior dev to babysit the LLMs rather than Juniors doing it; but the fact that there's no new blood coming into this industry (no one is hiring juniors anymore) only means that this industry is destined to be doomed. It doesn't matter if software quality degrades everywhere, companies just don't care.

But I predict the "income maxxing" by the senior devs is a temporary situation; soon the employers will realize they need less costly staff than senior devs to orchestrate the agents, that's why LLM companies are trying to automate all aspects of Software engineering: Coding, PR Reviewing, documentation, and yes even system design/architecture.

So I was one of those who are really late adopters of LLMs for coding; I am a sole developer of a codebase in the company I worked for (Angular)- a maintainer, rarely new features are added - no hard deadlines, a very very relaxed job , so I was away from the picture how other devs work in the industry now ; and sometimes I take side jobs of all kinds of stacks (I am fullstack); most often Nodejs/NestJs + React/Next + Postgres or Mongo; but my last side project was early 2025 - I took a long break from them.

I won't lie, I did use GPT and Copilot at times; but mostly to autocomplete boring stuff (ie. mock data, enums..etc). Yet I kept seeing posts on dev reddits that one doesn't have to full adopt the more powerful tools such as Claude Code / Codex.

I recently joined a side project with a team; so it's my first time since almost 1 years and 7 months.

WTH happened to this industry???!

Ok, the things I discovered:

- Deadlines now are 10x craziers; it's IMPOSSIBLE to finish anything manually. These deadlines force you to rely on Claude Code / Codex; there's no other way, Agile is meaningless now; it's just pump and ship

- All other members are heavily using LLM, frontend, DBA, AI....everyone.

- Claims I encounred on reddit posts that "Ok coding is automated but 'System design' and architecture are now more important than anything else" ? A LIE - everyone is using LLMs even for System design; I have seen entire achitecture documenation all generated by LLM, even this part is automated now.

- It is impossible to do PR reviews now when each PR is like ...a lot of thouands of lines; even PR reviwers are using copilot to review.

SO what part is left in this industry that is not automated?? NOTHING!! iT'S ALL AI AI AI!

And spec gathering is one person's job, often the tech lead, so please don't tell me it's this one, it doesn't require a team.

First I hate the word 'Engineering' but this what everyone is calling themselves nowaydays but it's innacurate, or real career was always called "Programming" - but that's another topic.

I have around 10 years of exp in the industry.

There's tremendous signs that this career will die, maybe not soon, but it is obvious, and all counter-arguments are not convincing to me.

Sign 1:

• CS major enrollments are in decline, just google it, it's collapsing.
• Cope: "But this is a good thing, it means that the industry is re-aligning itself".
• My anti-Cope: Nope, it's a sign that this industry is very scary now.

Sign 2:

• Companies not hiring juniors anymore.
• Cope: "Yes, but the demand on seniors now is more than ever!"
• My anti-cope: First, this is ***** selfish, second, half of you seniors will be next not to be hired.

Sign 3:

• Historical layoffs.
• Cope: "IMAO LOLLOL, these layoffs have nothing to do with AI, it's because of Covid hire inflation"
• My anti-cope: Sure bro, keep lying yourself, even the big corporates themselves are admitting they're laying off for AI, either as replacement or for further investment, but the end result is the same.

More coping arguments:

• "Yeah, but eventually corporates will wake up and realize how much vibecoding/Ai-driving programming is prone to disasters, and programmers will be in demand more than ever, VICTORY WILL BE FOR US".

My anti-Cope: Yeah, sure, do you really believe that c-suite people really care about code quality? They care about promising clients and delivering too fast no matter what. And even if this eventually happens, it will be too late already, how long it will take for these corporate to "wake up"? 10 years? 15 years? By this time, many seniors would be retired already, and juniors never even had the chance to acquire the know-how to fix those problems; it's like the moon-landing, the humanity is struggling to do the moon landing again because the know-how hasn't been transfers to the next 2 generations, a lot of things lost forever, this what may happen to programming. Besides, there's no guarantee that the AI "tools" will never get so much better to the point that this will no longer be a problem - I mean, everyone was laughing 2 years ago at the idea that manual coding will be taken over by AI, but here we are.

• "Yeah, but bruuuh, maybe only manual coding is dead, but SYSTEM DESIGN, and SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (roar, engineering), and CODE REVIEWING, and collecing and writing requirements are still important skills tha will never be taken by AI.

My anti-Cope: Stop lying to yourself, it's not only the manual coding which is dead (which is the most fun part); but everything else is dying too, due to the higher expectation in deadlines, NO ONE has time to do manual PR Reviewing, NO ONE has dtime to do manual System Design, or any sort of "software engineering"....hell, I come across many stories all the time on Jira/Clickup all filled with long dashes; purely generated by AI; nothing is being done without AI; and there's no guarantee in the future that the AI will get so good in listening as well, the CEO just talks to him and gives him vague orders what to do, and will give resuls.

A godly victory

Look how cool this victory pause is. Epic!

Edit:

And oh btw, I was really struggling on this map and retstarted few times (against Merlin and Calioth); the strategy that worked was VASSAL SPAMMING, it was epic when I ordered them all to attack Merlin + bounties for Julia, they crumbled.

https://preview.redd.it/641c0o30ko5h1.png?width=1919&format=png&auto=webp&s=da5b82776d0d6bd1be2b5a76ad4220f5933d9dfe