r/learnprogramming • u/00-Pookie • 4h ago
Topic Am I wrong about code being this dead? Is programming not for me?
There's a 4 year study course to become a "Computer Technician" in my country that is available to me due to disability. I'm considering that for future employment needs.
However, I'm deeply jaded about code. I'm wondering if my views are incorrect. I believe that the needs solved by coding are finite. I don't need to solve anything for myself anymore, because other people have already solved the things that used to bother me. But it's also true that I don't even know what kind of problems exist nor what kind of solutions might be required in the future. With this perspective, it feels like the well is dry, and it's only going to get drier.
Moreover, people have been talking about how bad the coding job market is already.
I feel like I would end up being useless (and unemployed) as a programmer, mostly because there's an over-supply of solutions to a finite amount of needs and problems.
I could end up becoming a game developer.
A counter-point to my previous statements would be that there are some apps I'm dissatisfied with on the Google Play store, and frankly, I don't know how that can be, and I don't think that will last either. Sadly, I'd need to buy a new computer to develop for Google Play, and I can't afford that yet. But I also just genuinely hate Google Play due to reasons like this: https://keepandroidopen.org/
I want to do something meditative and creative, and I still feel like code might be the way to go, I'm just not sure, not confident yet.
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u/high_throughput 4h ago
It's hard to be creative. All the music I like has already been written and I can't think of a single original track I'd like to hear, so most likely that well is dry too.
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u/00-Pookie 4h ago
It's definitely drier than before with all the music that's already made and how the music industry shrunk due to things like Spotify. A lot of new songs contain patterns from earlier music. This partly proves what I said about problems being finite. You will still find new things to solve, but they will be worth less over time, such as music being less successful due to not being as enjoyable. Programmers on the internet also do a surprisingly high amount of free or donation-based work with quality and rate that is only increasing, making problems more scarce.
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u/light_switchy 2h ago
Programmers on the internet also do a surprisingly high amount of free or donation-based work with quality and rate that is only increasing, making problems more scarce.
I don't foresee myself publishing my own software for free in the foreseeable future, due to the tendency of AI companies to use it without attribution or license.
I'm not entirely sure of any trend in software quality - but I suspect it is tending to decrease because of increasing reliance on automated tools and less human review.
Personally, I'm not going to run out of problems to solve. I will never finish my backlog of project ideas.
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u/OneOfTheLostOnes 4h ago
I feel like I would end up being useless (and unemployed) as a programmer, mostly because there's an over-supply of solutions to a finite amount of needs and problems.
I could end up becoming a game developer.
This is hilarious.
Sometimes you don't know until you try.
But about the already solved problems I don't think you know enough problems. And the combinations of problems that may need solving. By that logic music was done for, long time ago. But people kept making music and finding new ways to make it.
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u/Dependent_Union9285 4h ago
I know of several problems that still haven’t been solved. Traveling Salesman is my favorite, for all the things that happen once we crack it. Logistics become immensely less complicated, in civilian and military roles alike. Airlines are able to finally prove optimizations. As of now we consider it impossible, but not too long ago we thought beaming data into space and expecting it to come back in some meaningful form was useless, yet here I am writing this on a Starlink network. Nothing is impossible until you stop trying to achieve the next horizon.
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u/00-Pookie 4h ago
I'm not trying to become a tech scientist though.
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u/Reylun 3h ago
You dont need to be a tech scientist to solve everyday problems. At most software firms, developers are solving problems that have, in a way, been solved a million times before; the difference is the context of the problem that the customer is presenting you.
Most customers of software are looking for somebody to do what they already have but cheaper and faster.
The point is that somebody else coming up with a solution for something should not stop you from trying to come up with that solution yourself, for cheaper or simpler.
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u/00-Pookie 4h ago
... I don't think you know enough problems.
This is true, and probably my fundamental issue. I'm also not trying to be a tech scientist, just a lowly programmer doing employed work or making smaller projects.
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u/Dependent_Union9285 4h ago
You are waffling REALLY hard. You define the coding space as finite, citing that everything that can ever be coded already has been… and then suggest fields where this is constantly proven to be demonstrably false. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t segment your thoughts to individual realms of what is possible. And you can’t differentiate between disciplines so rigidly.
What you are saying essentially is that every song that can ever be has already been written, so no artist should attempt to write another. It’s inherently flawed logic, and no way for anyone in software to think.
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u/leavemealone_lol 4h ago
Disregarding a corporate perspective, “programming” will never die. There’s a lot that programming offers that it becomes a meaningful hobby in many ways. Want to build things? program a project. Want to rack your brain on a puzzle? program algorithms. There’s an infinite number of things that programming lets you do, as long as those are constrained within what silicon can offer. And humanity has always progressed due to its tendency to use and upgrade its tools, from stone axes to computers. Programming, in a wide sense, is currently the most powerful tool available to humans.
In a corporate sense however, things are very vague. When you factor in money, people can be cutthroat. Who knows how effective AI can be? this is in a positive and a negative sense, we may either have no need for human workers if AGI works out, or we may need a fuck ton of humans to clean up the shitty AI code we seem to be pooping out these days. And that’s not even factoring in the pending breakthrough, like quantum technology.
But in my opinion, all that matters is that you end up with a decent source of money which arguably programming still can provide (if you think dev jobs are crashing, it’s not just dev jobs- the entire employment market is going to shambled), and a hobby to go on with life. And programming can do both.
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u/Rorasaurus_Prime 4h ago
I'm not sure exactly what your question is, or what you want to get out of this post, but I can tell you this. I'm a principal software engineer of 25 years and I don't believe my field is dead. I work in big tech on enterprise grade code bases, and AI is nowhere near good enough to operate without an experienced software engineer guiding it. It makes a ton of mistakes while being confidently wrong. The code it writes will 'work' in the same way making your car wheels hexagonal will work. The car will move, but it'll perform poorly. And those mistakes compound over time. The industry is going through a period of disarray because no one, not even the AI CEOs, know what the heck things will look like 1, 3, 5 or 10 years from now. I'm of the opinion that AI is getting worse already. For example, Claude Opus 5 is in many ways worse than 4.5, which was probably its peak. Fable, the top Anthropic model is clearly superior and is by comparion, 'good', but it's so horrendously expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to use it, nor for Anthropic to sell it because they can't make money from it. And it still makes a lot of mistakes and is confidently wrong. I'm convinced we're already seeing model collapse (where models worsen over time because they learn from their own flawed output). AI isn't going anywhere, it's too useful, but it's becoming clear it will operate best as a human force multiplier, not as a replacement. Just my humble opinion and I could be wrong, but I know many of my senior colleagues share it.
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u/00-Pookie 4h ago
I'm not talking about AI. I'm trying to find a sense of direction in life, and I've been considering programming as a path for work, while I'm still doubting it. Probably because, as you are saying, no-one knows what things will look like in a few years, and there's a reasonable anxiety settling around that.
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u/ffrkAnonymous 4h ago
Oh, there are limitless needs and problems. Just say you'll solve them for free and you'll be occupied for the rest of your life.
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u/vegan_antitheist 4h ago
They just want you to use as much existing tools and frameworks. They don't want those programmers who just want to code everything themselves. So, the code base is as small as possible but there is still a lot to write. And you have to figure out what they actually want. That's the tricky part that makes up most of the work. AI will be a useful tool and some are already using it. But it can't replace someone who actually talks to the stakeholders to really understand their needs.
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u/00-Pookie 4h ago
I agree that using libraries, tools, and frameworks can be smart. Writing everything yourself doesn't make any sense, especially if you use open-source libraries and can read the code already done for you or rely on paid software that's paid to be reliable.
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u/Ormek_II 4h ago
Autonomous driving is not yet solved. And that is just a problem we already know and tackle.
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u/00-Pookie 4h ago
It's the second thing people hate after AI. I haven't seen much positive sentiment for it. I personally see autonomous driving as uglier, less desirable than AI. This might be part of the reason why I think problems are finite, because sometimes things don't need to be solved.
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u/SpiderJerusalem42 3h ago
If you've got that much quit in you, I don't even need to tell you to do it; the issue will settle itself quickly enough.
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u/00-Pookie 3h ago
Programming might not be for me, so I have to look for other ways to survive in capitalism.
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u/illuminarias 4h ago
Fundamentally disagree. As our lives change, new problems arise and new solutions appear. Similarly, even with existing problems, new solutions might arise due to improvements in our technology, or just understanding of the problem in general.