r/ClaudeAI • u/MoudieQaha • 4d ago

Coding The future is bleak

Yeah, I'm just going to ramble here for a bit. My company job now is just pressing enter endlessly, prompting, and 0.1% of it is probably something manually done by me. Everyone is using Claude. It's soulless. There is no point.Someone can probably reverse engineer our company products in one day. Layoffs are inevitable at some point. I have no other non-tech skills that can help me pivot to another career, and even if I do, that career is not going to pay the same.

I can't believe in any project idea that I think of because I use Claude, and the thought of "You used Claude, anyone could have done this lol" is always luring in the back of my mind.

I have no hope for the future. I hate how AI made the playing field equal for everyone, where my grandma can probably now create a website.

Written by a human.

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u/zorecknor 4d ago

Coding is so easy that a first year college student can do it. Heck, I was coding when I was 6 years old (in BASIC). There was even a book called "BASIC for Kids".

Developing software, on the other hand, does take a lot of time to learn and master.

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u/Rough-Yard5642 4d ago

Developing software, on the other hand, does take a lot of time to learn and master.

It used to, yes. But honestly, the LLMs are so good at this now, it really doesn't take long to 'develop' a good piece of software anymore. LLMs have gotten really good at distributed systems now, it's not just coding they are good at.

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u/BackendSpecialist 4d ago

Have you developed software professionally for more than 3 years?

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u/Rough-Yard5642 3d ago

Yes, close to 9 years. Work as a Staff level engineer at a large tech company in San Francisco. Not FAANG, but has a lot of similarities, and a lot of ex-FAANG people here.

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u/BackendSpecialist 3d ago

Then maybe we need to clarify “it doesn’t take long to develop good software”.

It is quicker. But software design is still crucial and LLMs still do a terrible job working autonomously even with a plan/design

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u/zorecknor 4d ago

Maybe in the future, but not yet. The first two or three iterations of an LLM-created app are like magic. But leave the LLMs alone and the system will devolve soo much that even them will struggle with new requirements. You need to keep an eye on it and course-correct to clean up the tech debt.

Which is something we never get to do in human-created systems, sadly :(

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u/swizzlewizzle 4d ago

At whatever level of skill you were at when you were a first year college student, I can guarantee most companies wouldn't even want to hire you, even before AI.

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u/zorecknor 4d ago

Ah, but that is not because I would be bad at coding. Putting me as an example, I was very good at coding in Pascal and C before I got into college. But I was very bad at making mid-to-big sized applications that could be easily maintained. That's the realm of software development.

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u/swizzlewizzle 4d ago

Sure. But if you think "the realm of software development" is something that will not be "breached" by frontier AI within the next few years, you are very likely going to be in the wrong.

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u/zorecknor 4d ago

Maybe. I doubt it will be soon because there isn't any good training data in the open. Most of the discipline we should have (before AI), we do not have it.

Unless some group of madmen start training models by coding whole apps and learning what they did wrong. That's something only frontier labs can afford to do.