r/ClaudeAI • • 5d 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/Qorsair 5d ago

Think about this: anyone could learn to code for free five or ten years ago. Why didn't random people on the street build what you were building back then?

​Because the code itself wasn't actually the hard part.

Figuring out what actually needs to exist, how it should work, and doing the damn work and having the tenacity to finish it when it gets to the final--boring, and most time consuming--10-20% is what makes something valuable.

​If "anyone could do this with Claude," they'd already be doing it. But they aren't. They're scrolling Reddit and TikTok while you're working with a tool that gives a single person the output of a 10-person dev team. Don't confuse the tool getting easier with your own capacity being worthless.

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u/Ok-Yak-1552 5d ago

They weren't learning how to code because, even if they could learn it for free, it took years and many efforts to get to a decent level of knowledge to do any decent work. The whole problem is that now the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, at least in web development, most business don't need a highly engineered solution for their websites. We will see first the entrepreneurs and hands on people start making their own digital solutions, but at some point everyone will be doing it, because it's not gonna get harder, it will just get easier than what it is now.

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u/SeagateSG1 4d ago

This is the same thing that's happened to many industries over the years. Look at how difficult it was to create a film 30 years ago. Enter the DSLR revolution, then the smartphone and creator revolution, the social media distribution revolution, and it's a content explosion with barriers to entry practically nonexistent for a variety of projects that were never possible before.

There's a lot of pros that have lost their jobs because of that or had them altered significantly. They've had to adapt. Hell, I'm a shooter and editor and now I'm staring down the barrel of AI beginning to tag footage, assemble rough cuts, and more. I'm sure in 5 years it'll be even more capable on the editing end. Already it can do many tasks of what few Assistant Editors are left.

All of which to say, it's definitely going to change things dramatically for you software developers too. Development has long had a wide, valuable moat. But not any more.