6 ms·

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper.

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).

zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that away then the remaining part of the job is just not very appealing anymore. It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings, design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to actually code something cool in the end. Now I get to... prompt the AI to code something cool. And that just doesn't feel very satisfying. It's the same reason I didn't want to be a "lead" or "manager", I want to actually be the one doing the thing.
- Nextgrid 8mo ago
  You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.
  - archagon 8mo ago
    If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com https://thethreevirtues.com) Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.
    - wtetzner 8mo ago
      Funny how people complain about macros as an abstraction mechanism, but replacing them with an LLM is fine.
      - sneak 8mo ago
        Macros are referenced, like a function call. LLM output sort of “vendors in” smart macros (for lack of a better description) by saving the actual output of the LLM. In that sense, they serve different purposes.
        wtetzner 8mo ago
        Yes, LLMs are more like offline code generators that can't be reliably re-run. So the very first step of producing the code is "easy", but after that you have lost that ease, and have to read and maintain the larger generated output.
    - ruszki 8mo ago
      Not just laziness of writing scripts, but also laziness of learning what your options are, like inside the framework you use, or what is available off the shelf. And btw AI is also terrible with this, because they learned from the same code written by the people who make these mistakes all the time. I need to write detailed explanations for them all the time about how to use tools/frameworks/language features properly, because majority of examples in their learning data are simply a huge pile of technical debt. They could never created anything proper without a step by step rulebook, and examples written manually.
    - chipsrafferty 8mo ago
      This is a nice fantasy. In practice, maintaining tools that help you scaffold common code patterns take more time to create and maintain than it does to copy, paste, and edit. Turns out LLMs are REALLY good at "make me this thing that is 90% the same as another thing I've built / you've seen before, but with this 10% being different" Also, by your own metrics, laziness is a virtue, and copying, pasting, and editing is much easier and lazier than maintaining boilerplate tools. So it's not even following your 3 commandments.
AstroBen 8mo ago
There are many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars being poured into the smartest minds in the world to push this thing forward I'm not so confident that it'll only be code monkeys for too long
- Nextgrid 8mo ago
  Until they can magically increase context length to such a size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're safe. It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs replacing every office worker, rather than any action to that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous) limitations that make this unlikely.
  - esafak 8mo ago
    Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you. You both search for what you need. Models can already memorize more than you !
    - Jensson 8mo ago
      > Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you Humans rewire their mind to optimize it for the codebase, that is why new programmers takes a while to get up to speed in the codebase. LLM doesn't do that and until they do they need the entire thing in context. And the reason we can't do that today is that there isn't enough data in a single codebase to train an LLM to be smart about it, so first we need to solve the problem that LLM needs billions of examples to do a good job. That isn't on the horizon so we are probably safe for a while.
      - esafak 8mo ago
        Getting up to speed is a human problem. Computers are so fast they can 'get up to speed' from scratch for every session, and we help them with AGENTS files and newer things like memories; e.g., https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory It is not perfect yet but the tooling here is improving. I do not see a ceiling here. LSPs + memory solve this problem. I run into issues but this is not a big one for me.
notnullorvoid 8mo ago
Agreed. Programming languages are not ambiguous. Human language is very ambiguous, so if I'm writing something with a moderate level of complexity, it's going to take longer to describe what I want to the AI vs writing it myself. Reviewing what an AI writes also takes much longer than reviewing my own code. AI is getting better at picking up some important context from other code or documentation in a project, but it's still miles away from what it needs to be, and the needed context isn't always present.
jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
Yes. And I'm excited as hell. But I also have no idea how people are going to think about what code to write when they don't write code. Maybe this is all fine, is ok, but it does make me quite nervous!
- Nextgrid 8mo ago
  That is definitely a problem, but I would say it’s a problem of hiring and the billion-dollars worth of potential market cap resting on performative bullshit that encourages companies to not hire juniors to send a signal to capture some of those billions regardless of actual impact on productivity. LLMs benefit juniors, they do not replace them. Juniors can learn from LLMs just fine and will actually be more productive with them. When I was a junior my “LLM” was StackOverflow and the senior guy next to me (who no doubt was tired of my antics), but I would’ve loved to have an actual LLM - it would’ve handled all my stupid questions just fine and freed up senior time for the more architectural questions or those where I wasn’t convinced by the LLM response. Also, at least in my case, I learnt a lot more from reading existing production code than writing it - LLMs don’t change anything there.
  - Anamon 8mo ago
    I agree that they can be used this way, and it would be less of a problem if they were. However, the current evidence we see from universities is that those who use LLMs to actually learn something are in the minority. The dopamine hit of something working without having had to do anything for it is much stronger.
JeremyNT 8mo ago
I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself. The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it. So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed. I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.
- Nextgrid 8mo ago
  You hire the junior developer because you can get them to learn your codebase and business domain at a discount, and then reap their productivity as they turn senior. You don’t get that with an LLM since it only operates on whatever is in its context. (If you prefer to hire seniors that’s fine too - my rates are triple that of a junior and you’re paying full price for the time it takes me learning your codebase, and from experience it takes me at least 3 months to reach full productivity.)
  - joquarky 8mo ago
    > then reap their productivity as they turn senior What companies are retaining employees long enough for this?
    - jsrcout 8mo ago
      Plenty of places, actually. Maybe not so much in the companies people here tend to be familiar with. It happens all the time where I work (smaller company far from the Bay area).
- wtetzner 8mo ago
  > why would I ever hire a junior developer Because a junior developer doesn't stay a junior developer forever. The value of junior developers has never been the code they write. In fact, in my experience they're initially a net negative, as more senior developers take time to help them learn. But it's an investment, because they will grow into more senior developers.
plomme 8mo ago
I think it’s naive to think that not every part of our jobs will worryingly soon be automated. All the way up to and inckuding CEO. This is not exciting.
strken 8mo ago
LLMs are a threat to the quality of code in a similar - but much more dramatic - way to high level languages and Electron. I am slightly worried about keeping a job if there's a downturn, but I'm much more worried about my job shifting into being the project manager for a farm of slop machines with no taste and a complete inability to learn.
yread 8mo ago
Nevermind coding where is the llm for legal stuff? Why are all these programmers working on automating their job away instead of those bloodsucking lawyers who charge hundreds of eur per h.
- kstrauser 8mo ago
  It’s happening as fast for them. I literally sit next to our general counsel all day at the office. We work together continually. I show him things happening in engineering, and each time he shows me the analogous things happening in legal. This affects everyone.
- ndiddy 8mo ago
  They are, you probably just aren't hearing about it. There's been loads of cases over the past few years where lawyers use AI to automate their legal research, then get admonished by the judge because their court filings contain fake quotes or reference court cases that don't even exist. A few examples: https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-lawyer-fine-ai-regulation/ https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-la... https://natlawreview.com/article/judge-issues-public-admonition-12000-sanctions-hallucinations https://natlawreview.com/article/judge-issues-public-admonit... https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Mezu_v._Mezu_USA_29_October_2025.PDF https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Mezu_v._Mezu_US...
- throw234234234 8mo ago
  Domain knowledge and gatekeeping. We don't know what is required in their role fully, but we do know what is required in ours. We also know that we are the target of potentially trillions in capital to disrupt our job and that the best and brightest are being paid well just to disrupt "coding". A perfect storm of factors that make this faster than other professions. It also doesn't help that some people in this role believe that the SWE career is a sinking ship which creates an incentive to climb over others and profit before it tanks (i.e. build AI tools, automate it and profit). This is the typical "It isn't AI, but the person who automates your job using AI that replaces you".
- sneak 8mo ago
  There are many. My friend (a lawyer and a programmer) wrote one from scratch in the basement. This would have been a 4 person startup before.
Dumblydorr 8mo ago
Why is that safe in the medium to long term? If LLMs can code monkey already after just 4 years, why assume in a couple more they can’t talk to the seniors’ direct report and get requirements from them? I’m learning carpentry just in case.
squirrellous 8mo ago
If you believe juniors are already not safe, it’s only a question of time before seniors are in the same position. First they came for the socialists, etc etc.
zaphirplane 8mo ago
The output is a feature, a bug fix, a product.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

zeroonetwothree 8mo ago

I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that away then the remaining part of the job is just not very appealing anymore. It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings, design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to actually code something cool in the end. Now I get to... prompt the AI to code something cool. And that just doesn't feel very satisfying. It's the same reason I didn't want to be a "lead" or "manager", I want to actually be the one doing the thing.

Nextgrid 8mo ago
You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.
- archagon 8mo ago
  If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com https://thethreevirtues.com) Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.
  - wtetzner 8mo ago
    Funny how people complain about macros as an abstraction mechanism, but replacing them with an LLM is fine.
    - sneak 8mo ago
      Macros are referenced, like a function call. LLM output sort of “vendors in” smart macros (for lack of a better description) by saving the actual output of the LLM. In that sense, they serve different purposes.
      - wtetzner 8mo ago
        Yes, LLMs are more like offline code generators that can't be reliably re-run. So the very first step of producing the code is "easy", but after that you have lost that ease, and have to read and maintain the larger generated output.
  - ruszki 8mo ago
    Not just laziness of writing scripts, but also laziness of learning what your options are, like inside the framework you use, or what is available off the shelf. And btw AI is also terrible with this, because they learned from the same code written by the people who make these mistakes all the time. I need to write detailed explanations for them all the time about how to use tools/frameworks/language features properly, because majority of examples in their learning data are simply a huge pile of technical debt. They could never created anything proper without a step by step rulebook, and examples written manually.
  - chipsrafferty 8mo ago
    This is a nice fantasy. In practice, maintaining tools that help you scaffold common code patterns take more time to create and maintain than it does to copy, paste, and edit. Turns out LLMs are REALLY good at "make me this thing that is 90% the same as another thing I've built / you've seen before, but with this 10% being different" Also, by your own metrics, laziness is a virtue, and copying, pasting, and editing is much easier and lazier than maintaining boilerplate tools. So it's not even following your 3 commandments.

AstroBen 8mo ago

There are many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars being poured into the smartest minds in the world to push this thing forward I'm not so confident that it'll only be code monkeys for too long

Nextgrid 8mo ago
Until they can magically increase context length to such a size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're safe. It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs replacing every office worker, rather than any action to that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous) limitations that make this unlikely.
- esafak 8mo ago
  Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you. You both search for what you need. Models can already memorize more than you !
  - Jensson 8mo ago
    > Models do not need to hold the whole code base in memory, and neither do you Humans rewire their mind to optimize it for the codebase, that is why new programmers takes a while to get up to speed in the codebase. LLM doesn't do that and until they do they need the entire thing in context. And the reason we can't do that today is that there isn't enough data in a single codebase to train an LLM to be smart about it, so first we need to solve the problem that LLM needs billions of examples to do a good job. That isn't on the horizon so we are probably safe for a while.
    - esafak 8mo ago
      Getting up to speed is a human problem. Computers are so fast they can 'get up to speed' from scratch for every session, and we help them with AGENTS files and newer things like memories; e.g., https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory It is not perfect yet but the tooling here is improving. I do not see a ceiling here. LSPs + memory solve this problem. I run into issues but this is not a big one for me.

notnullorvoid 8mo ago

Agreed. Programming languages are not ambiguous. Human language is very ambiguous, so if I'm writing something with a moderate level of complexity, it's going to take longer to describe what I want to the AI vs writing it myself. Reviewing what an AI writes also takes much longer than reviewing my own code. AI is getting better at picking up some important context from other code or documentation in a project, but it's still miles away from what it needs to be, and the needed context isn't always present.

jauntywundrkind 8mo ago

Yes. And I'm excited as hell. But I also have no idea how people are going to think about what code to write when they don't write code. Maybe this is all fine, is ok, but it does make me quite nervous!

Nextgrid 8mo ago
That is definitely a problem, but I would say it’s a problem of hiring and the billion-dollars worth of potential market cap resting on performative bullshit that encourages companies to not hire juniors to send a signal to capture some of those billions regardless of actual impact on productivity. LLMs benefit juniors, they do not replace them. Juniors can learn from LLMs just fine and will actually be more productive with them. When I was a junior my “LLM” was StackOverflow and the senior guy next to me (who no doubt was tired of my antics), but I would’ve loved to have an actual LLM - it would’ve handled all my stupid questions just fine and freed up senior time for the more architectural questions or those where I wasn’t convinced by the LLM response. Also, at least in my case, I learnt a lot more from reading existing production code than writing it - LLMs don’t change anything there.
- Anamon 8mo ago
  I agree that they can be used this way, and it would be less of a problem if they were. However, the current evidence we see from universities is that those who use LLMs to actually learn something are in the minority. The dopamine hit of something working without having had to do anything for it is much stronger.

JeremyNT 8mo ago

I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself. The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it. So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed. I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.

Nextgrid 8mo ago
You hire the junior developer because you can get them to learn your codebase and business domain at a discount, and then reap their productivity as they turn senior. You don’t get that with an LLM since it only operates on whatever is in its context. (If you prefer to hire seniors that’s fine too - my rates are triple that of a junior and you’re paying full price for the time it takes me learning your codebase, and from experience it takes me at least 3 months to reach full productivity.)
- joquarky 8mo ago
  > then reap their productivity as they turn senior What companies are retaining employees long enough for this?
  - jsrcout 8mo ago
    Plenty of places, actually. Maybe not so much in the companies people here tend to be familiar with. It happens all the time where I work (smaller company far from the Bay area).
wtetzner 8mo ago
> why would I ever hire a junior developer Because a junior developer doesn't stay a junior developer forever. The value of junior developers has never been the code they write. In fact, in my experience they're initially a net negative, as more senior developers take time to help them learn. But it's an investment, because they will grow into more senior developers.

plomme 8mo ago

I think it’s naive to think that not every part of our jobs will worryingly soon be automated. All the way up to and inckuding CEO. This is not exciting.

strken 8mo ago

LLMs are a threat to the quality of code in a similar - but much more dramatic - way to high level languages and Electron. I am slightly worried about keeping a job if there's a downturn, but I'm much more worried about my job shifting into being the project manager for a farm of slop machines with no taste and a complete inability to learn.

yread 8mo ago

Nevermind coding where is the llm for legal stuff? Why are all these programmers working on automating their job away instead of those bloodsucking lawyers who charge hundreds of eur per h.

kstrauser 8mo ago
It’s happening as fast for them. I literally sit next to our general counsel all day at the office. We work together continually. I show him things happening in engineering, and each time he shows me the analogous things happening in legal. This affects everyone.
ndiddy 8mo ago
They are, you probably just aren't hearing about it. There's been loads of cases over the past few years where lawyers use AI to automate their legal research, then get admonished by the judge because their court filings contain fake quotes or reference court cases that don't even exist. A few examples: https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-lawyer-fine-ai-regulation/ https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-la... https://natlawreview.com/article/judge-issues-public-admonition-12000-sanctions-hallucinations https://natlawreview.com/article/judge-issues-public-admonit... https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Mezu_v._Mezu_USA_29_October_2025.PDF https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Mezu_v._Mezu_US...
throw234234234 8mo ago
Domain knowledge and gatekeeping. We don't know what is required in their role fully, but we do know what is required in ours. We also know that we are the target of potentially trillions in capital to disrupt our job and that the best and brightest are being paid well just to disrupt "coding". A perfect storm of factors that make this faster than other professions. It also doesn't help that some people in this role believe that the SWE career is a sinking ship which creates an incentive to climb over others and profit before it tanks (i.e. build AI tools, automate it and profit). This is the typical "It isn't AI, but the person who automates your job using AI that replaces you".
sneak 8mo ago
There are many. My friend (a lawyer and a programmer) wrote one from scratch in the basement. This would have been a 4 person startup before.

Dumblydorr 8mo ago

Why is that safe in the medium to long term? If LLMs can code monkey already after just 4 years, why assume in a couple more they can’t talk to the seniors’ direct report and get requirements from them? I’m learning carpentry just in case.

squirrellous 8mo ago

If you believe juniors are already not safe, it’s only a question of time before seniors are in the same position. First they came for the socialists, etc etc.

zaphirplane 8mo ago

The output is a feature, a bug fix, a product.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]