I still try and do some coding by hand. Agents have improved massively and they’re now really capable but I can’t see how anyone is going to fully automate the software development process. If there’s even the slightest chance that an agent can go off track and cause an outage, you’ll need a person to sort it out. If nobody can understand the black boxes that these things make when unattended, who’s fixing that shit? I’m yet to work for a company that is okay with a production build being down for any period of time.
There are companies running the narrative that their developers don’t write code anymore but unless they plan on fully automating the process and taking humans completely out of the loop, I don’t see how that is sustainable. There will be a point when developers realise they have no future at your company so they’ll leave, taking their knowledge with them. The bridge between your software and your business is now an LLM. That’s a huge amount of trust to put in something built on probability and has a limited context window.
AI isn’t disappearing but at some point there is going to be some high profile events that even the CEOs can’t ignore. Their job is money and if something in their business is losing them money, they will change it. That could be outages, customer dissatisfaction or their development ‘team’ is now costing them a fortune. It just sucks that we have ride this shit out.
An unemployed programmer here who quit their job 6 months ago. Also have a baby on the way.
To answer your question - people who are totally burnt out. Some of us have been in the trenches for a long time and when you start to spiral, the world gets pretty dark. I’m not rich, I was just broken.