Companies have stopped hiring, and layoffs have become more and more common. Job postings are rarely found. New types of roles are appearing and disappearing so fast that it is now nearly impossible to get experienced in something and then get that job. Even if you prepare for a role, by the time you finish preparing, that position might also be gone.
And also, let's be real, there is no denying the AI advancement happening right now. Claude Fable 5 and GPT 6 Astra are doing great. They are capable of handling so many things with less effort. And they will get even better after a few months, more powerful than they are now. And things will only get worse.
You might be thinking of moving into some other role, maybe becoming an architect, moving into system design, management, or something that requires more decision-making. But eventually, those things will also get replaced or covered by AI sooner than we can even realize.
Thinking of taking more responsibility or ownership? Yeah, maybe that helps for a while. But what if one person becomes enough to handle an entire side of a company that previously needed 100, 500, or even 1,000 people? AI could make one person capable of handling a huge amount of responsibility, decision making, planning, implementation, and coordination. So even the "just move up the ladder" idea does not feel completely safe anymore.
I have spent almost 16 years in this software development field, got a computer science degree, and after all of this, this happened. It seems like my entire life got ruined. I think most of you people might also be feeling the same.
Anthropic, on one side, is warning that in the worst case scenario, software engineers might have to move towards fields like nursing or becoming electricians. And the speed of advancement happening here is quite unprecedented.
Are we done? Is our entire life a waste, then?
What do you think? I want to know your thoughts. I want to live up to the reality.
Top comments (3)
I think the uncomfortable part of this discussion is that the fear cannot just be dismissed with “AI will create new jobs” or “move into architecture.”
If implementation, analysis, coordination and eventually parts of decision-making all become cheaper, then yes, it is reasonable to ask whether organizations will simply need fewer people. That possibility is real.
But I think there is still an important distinction between automation capability and organizational substitution.
Making one engineer dramatically more productive at coding does not automatically mean one person can replace 100 engineers. Those 100 people also represent domain knowledge, production ownership, independent review, incident response, security boundaries, conflicting requirements, customer context and accountability.
AI can help with all of those too, of course. But then another problem appears: as generation becomes cheaper, verification and decision quality become the bottleneck.
I have been running into this constantly in AI-assisted engineering. The model can produce an implementation incredibly quickly. The expensive question becomes:
Is this actually the right thing?
What assumptions did it make?
How could it fail?
What evidence would make us trust the result?
And eventually even:
Can we trust the system doing the verification?
So I am not sure the useful career strategy is to search for an “AI-proof role.” I doubt one exists.
I think it is more about moving closer to work where decisions have to remain connected to evidence, consequences and real systems, while using AI aggressively for everything it can accelerate.
And I would not call 16 years of experience wasted. If anything, that experience becomes the context that lets you distinguish plausible output from sound engineering. A model can generate a lot of code. Knowing what should exist, what must never happen, and what evidence is sufficient to ship it is a different problem.
The field may absolutely become smaller or change shape. I do not think anyone can honestly promise otherwise. But “the field is changing dramatically” and “everything we learned has become worthless” are still very different claims.
That distinction is where I think the real discussion is. 🔍🧠
I don't think your life is wasted, but I'll skip the comforting version. What actually changed for me is not which tools I use — it's that the part of the job that was typing code now takes a much smaller share, and the part that was deciding what to build, what to refuse, and what "correct" means for real users hasn't gotten easier at all. Sixteen years of context about why a system is shaped the way it is is exactly the thing a model cannot reconstruct from the repo.
The honest risk isn't replacement, it's compression: fewer people needed per team. So my bet has been to stay close to the parts with consequences — ownership of a system end to end, on-call, talking to the people who use it — rather than positioning as a specialist in one framework, because framework churn was already eating that identity before any of this. What does your day-to-day actually look like right now? The gap between the doom you can predict and the annoyance you actually experience is usually where the real answer is.
Job Market Internationally so much shrinked and became competitive. This is bad for newcomers and charlatan 🧑💻 @zonayedpca