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I don't know if my (software development) job will still exist in ten years
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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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I honestly don’t know what to do, and I don’t think anybody does. Coworkers, other professionals, therapists—there is no consensus.
I fucking love development. I went to computer camp and decided I wanted this career at age 10 before I even understood it was a possibility.
I want to be paid to know things. Not to supervise a guessing machine and guide it like a sycophantic lost puppy.
I cling to the hope that AI companies will burn through their revenue and will implode under their own infestors’ demand for ROI before they truly have something that wipes away the entire profession. I am a terrible gardener.
Honestly, I hope the AI companies implode as well - and am fairly sure they will; OpenAI's entire business model is that they will be AI gatekeepers and everyone will have to pay them for access - but even now, the only way they can make this true is by artificially inflating the cost of inference hardware. That's simply not sustainable - cheap inference accelerators will come from China (ok, maybe somewhere else but at the moment US industrial policy is doing its best to make it China) and then it's game over for that business plan.
But while that makes OpenAI et al a shitty investment prospect, it won't stop AI taking your job if you don't adapt. You would be amazed at the capability of models that you can run locally right now. All the major providers can go out of business tomorrow, and the guy who is running Qwen locally will still be twice as effective a developer as you are.
The genie is absolutely out of the bottle and not going back in. The choice is to either find a new profession (which is totally valid, of course,) or start learning now how to be one of the people who survives by learning to use the tools better than anyone else. LLMs are dumb as a box of rocks, they are always going to need an actual intelligence to understand how to actually use them to accomplish any non-trivial useful thing. The people who get that and learn that will be the ones who still have a job when all this washes out.
(The "herp derp no they'll replace you too the only thing to do is wail and protest" contingent are inhabiting a weird space where they believe that LLMs are (a) useless but also (b) actually super intelligent and will replace us. Both these things cannot be true... Reality is they're very dumb, but still very useful. These things absolutely can be true; my compiler has zero intelligence, but it's still extremely useful and I'm glad I don't hand write assembler any more...)