r/cscareerquestionsCAD • u/SeaFox2142 • 5d ago
General Is this what SWE has become?
⚠️Disclaimer⚠️: I've been living under a rock with this whole AI thing and yes, I'll be talking about things that are very outdated.
I'm returning to my studies in SWE, and I'm outdated on all this AI thing.
Before my break, I used VS Code to do MERN stack, IntelliJ/Eclipse IDE for Java, PyCharm for Python, etc...
Now I asked the AI about what tools people are using nowadays and it listed Cursor, Windsurf, Claude code, Replit, and VS Code + Copilot.
Just out of curiosity, I went to watch a video about Cursor, and then my jaw dropped: the guy was simply talking to it and it literally made a whole Mario-style game in seconds, all editing was done by using the 🤢mouse🤮 and didn't touch a single line of code. Just voiced the prompts. Some / commands for the prompts and that's it.
Later on, he downloaded the project to the desktop version of Cursor IDE and kept going there with a local agent. I couldn't believe they gave permission for an agent to access it's files! I mean, privacy concerns is zero nowadays, as even though there's probably policies in a .config file saying the agent can't access this and that, I believe these things go rogue and will access the whole machine at anytime. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when. And I believe it will also creep and access whatever is connected to the LAN. Not even sandboxing it might be enough to stop it...
Anyway, the guy went ahead and was reviewing the code (finally I could see SOME code, at the end of the video) and again, he was just selecting the lines and giving the agent a prompt to make the changes he wanted.
So, is that how professoinal coding is nowadays? Are people actually giving full AI (and who knows who else) access to their machines at home and at work?
That's just very dystopian for me, I'm still in disbelief.
I hope that with an isolated machine we're at least safe privacy-wise...
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u/ilpikachu 5d ago
Yes I'm at Fanng I don't open ides anymore all just prompts and ai reviews
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u/Butt_Plug_Tester 5d ago
Not reading the files over in an ide is crazy.
I’m also at faang, and there are some -10x engineers that send several 2000 line PRs every day, and naturally have u maintainable dogshit that constantly breaks, so they make more PRs to fix what’s breaking in production and so on. The managers love these people because they ship out so many features, and have great stats like LoC and PRs. I hate these people because they create problems/waste time for the rest of the team and making them look bad. These people are the ones that do “spec engineering” or just describe a feature and expect the ai to implement it E2E.
Then there are people that use AI to do software engineering, where they break down a feature into minimal, functioning parts, choose each design and implementation detail, and have AI implement/review the parts. These people have virtually no errors in their code, and ship far less lines and PRs. Managers hate these people because they ship slower and with worse stats - especially since their PRs are human reviewable, they will likely have more revisions/changes which pop up in management metrics. I love these people because they create 0 work for the rest of the team.
Are you the vibecoder or swe
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u/lord_heskey 4d ago
Not reading the files over in an ide is crazy.
depending on the change, reading the PR sometimes is enough. im somewhat in the middle of it all, i plan deeply with AI, verify, ask probing questions based on what i know, dont know etc and i probably review the plan a few times. In some bigger features ive probably taken longer planning than developing.
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u/Ambitious_Eye9279 4d ago
I stop reading in IDE and just let it publish PR. I read and review the code in PR since early 2026.
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u/8004612286 5d ago
Assuming the change works I just have AI raise the PR without reading it over, then leave comments in the PR without publishing them, and tell the AI to address them.
This works far better than watching the changes in an IDE and tryna paste snippets in, especially since if you ever change a line it says some shit like "lOoKs LiKe xyz wAs mOdIfIeD, lEt Me ReVeRt tHaT fOr YoU"
Minimizing this too "are you a vibe coder or a swe" is a crazy false dichotomy.
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u/Cel135 5d ago
My work doesn't use or allow AI in any form. ChatGPT is actually a blocked site.
I spend my days in an IDE writing code that is manually reviewed by my team lead and product owner, who leave comments on when I need to improve it till it reaches the proper level of quality they want.
Its great, I improve at coding every day, the world isn't completely doomed. A lot of companies are fucked and brain rotted with AI now though.
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u/Botaz2 5d ago
Damn that’s crazy I hear almost every FAANG promotes and ships code with AI as they say AI can definitely write 10x better code than humans can.
But good to hear at least some companies aren’t going all in lol
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u/killesau 4d ago
c2c (clanker-to-clanker) communication, no but I know this has been a rhetoric since before ai, "humans write bad code" well...humans invented code so 🤷🏽♂️
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u/nullptr777 4d ago
I'm sure AI does outperform most humans. But most people in general are fucking idiots, and unfortunately even this industry is no exception.
A highly skilled human can definitely outperform an LLM in quality though, and they always will because LLMs are fundamentally flawed. They're trained on our work, not the other way around.
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u/AboveTheRim2 4d ago
Do you work in national security ? lol this is so interesting.
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u/Cel135 4d ago
Cannot say where, but the main reason we don't is security risk.
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u/AboveTheRim2 4d ago
Gotcha. Still shocking that there’s zero use of AI. I work at a Faang and even the most secure lockdown orgs are using AI. I assume your company will change course soon because I just don’t see how any company can remain competitive without it.
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4d ago edited 14h ago
[deleted]
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u/Cel135 4d ago
Cannot say where. But my job is basically just cleaning up tech debt. We're taking our massive code base and slowly untangling it and making everything inside modular.
It's actually very fun, I get to work in dramatically different parts of code every day. I was updating one of our dev tools. I found out there's a bug for it where if certain things return null, it just straight up opens infinitely. (The logic being if it failed to open, try again). It wasn't part of the scope of my story to fix that, so it's just still there LOL
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u/AbbreviationsOwn921 4d ago
There’s a whole cohort now who prompted their way through school and interviewed their way in with leaked question banks like gothamloop, and they genuinely cannot do the thing when the AI’s answer doesn’t work.
I watched a mid-level stare at a stack trace like it was written in sanskrit last month. asked him to walk me through why his own function worked and he opened a chat window to ask. and it clicks: this person didn’t learn, and the interview was just a vibe check they gamed. The tools got a thousand times smarter and a slice of the people got proportionally more helpless.
Very soon you'll be sitting next to someone who’s been ‘coding’ for three years and can’t read a log without a copilot holding their hand. We built a pipeline that selects for people who look productive on demand and filters out the ones who understand anything.
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u/squeasy_2202 4d ago
We built a pipeline that selects for people who look productive on demand and filters out the ones who understand anything.
Oof yeah
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u/nullptr777 5d ago
Idk what the average corpo is doing since I don't do this for a living, but I've been writing C++ for years and AI (even a good one like Claude) is pretty shit if left to its own devices IME. It's a useful tool for sure, but no way in hell I'd let it autonomously code with how regularly I have to yell at it for poor design or doing something blatantly stupid.
Most of the AI-generated PRs I get are complete dog shit as well. The code works, but the architecture is almost always needlessly bloated and the complete wrong approach. The amount of state it wants to introduce for a system that needs little to none is downright concerning considering how many people/corpos seem to have gone off the deep end with agentic coding.
And yeah, as someone well-versed in security, the privacy and security implications are also also extremely concerning.
Personally, I use Neovim and Claude in my browser lol. I copy/paste what context it needs, and I use it more as a rubber duck and snippet generator than anything. I'm still very much steering the architecture, and owning every line of code.
Just my 2c. Take it for what you will.
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u/8004612286 5d ago
Using the browser version of AI and then saying it's bad is crazy.
That's like using training wheels on a bicycle and complaining you can't go more than 10kmph. Like sure - that rider won't win you the tour de France, but the bike is holding you back.
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u/nullptr777 4d ago
Again, it's given all the context it needs, so it should be able to come up with a good answer. I'm not going to let it commit for me and trash my codebase when it's proven itself to be a fuck up more often than not. And I am not the least bit interested in being an AI babysitter.
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u/8004612286 4d ago
How could it be given all the context it needs and then your criticism is that the architecture doesn't fit in?
You're not giving it your code base to reference. Nobody says blindly take it's code.
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u/nullptr777 4d ago
Wtf do you think "give it context" means? Of course I'm giving it the code base to reference lol. It still consistently does the dumbest thing possible when I tell it I want to add a new feature.
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u/_TRN_ 4d ago
While I agree with you overall, I think you're underestimating how much a good harness improves the models. I'm not sure why you're using Claude in the browser when you can just use Claude Code in the CLI and get a better experience. You also save time by not needing to copy paste relevant parts of your codebase.
Is there a particular reason why you prefer it in the browser? You can tweak Claude Code such that it doesn't do auto commits and things like that.
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u/nullptr777 4d ago
Pretty simply, I don't trust it. It's probabilistic and therefore prone to hallucination, and it talks back to cloud servers. That isn't the kind of thing I generally reward with system access, and I'm not about to change my philosophy on security just because it happens to be a useful tool. It has the power to do potentially catastrophic damage, as well as steal my personal data, API keys, etc.
Should it do any of this? No. Does it have safeguards? Yeah. Do I have backups? Yeah. Could I sandbox it in a container? Yeah. Would it still have network access? Yeah. Can I block that? Yeah, if I feel like mucking around with firewall rules that I wouldn't have to otherwise. Is any of this worth the effort to me? No. Do I trust it? No.
And I'm not convinced that it's any better. I know contributors to my public project are using harnesses, because they admit it (and the volume is a dead giveaway), but I reject far more of those contributions than I merge because the quality, even at a glance, is usually shit. A lot of other open source projects are having this problem as well. The features and even the fixes are half-baked, or blatantly wrong, and simply not up to the standard a competent human can achieve by driving development themselves. These worthless contributions also take up far more of my time than I want them to, and it only makes me want to involve AI less. I've tried having AI review them for me, and it does the same thing it always does - blows smoke up people's asses, trying to tell me that the AI-generated PR overview sounds viable when it very clearly isn't a good approach. I'm actually considering banning AI contributions altogether, or just disabling PRs, at this point.
Maybe the problem is the driver isn't experienced enough, idk, and that's also part of the problem. Many of these PRs now come with walls of very convincing sounding justification, and when I dig into them it all falls apart. I no longer have any way of judging if the "author" (if they can even be called such) actually understands what they're doing, not without significant effort on my part anyway. It used to be obvious. Now, AI can make everyone look like a genius, even if they're borderline incompetent.
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u/_TRN_ 4d ago
Thank you for the detailed response. I feel like in a lot of these reddit threads, discussions about AI tend to be tribalistic.
All of these are very fair points. I personally physically sandbox mine on a spare macbook I have and just ssh into it but yes it's still valid to be distrustful regardless. I personally thought the trade-off is worth it but I'm not going to try and convince you there because obviously you know your own work better than I do. I realize that LLMs can have very limited utility depending on the kind of work you do.
Yeah, more often than not, PRs like that are just entirely vibe coded. I don't agree with that approach of using AI. I use LLMs pretty extensively but I never ship code I haven't read and understood. I never use AI to write for me either as funnily enough I find its writing of prose to be worse than its writing of code.
I understand your frustration with the drive-by PRs on open source projects though. I feel for the maintainers but I don't think the solution there is to outright ban all use of AI. AI gives the idiots more power to do harm but it also gives people who know what they're doing more power to do good. At least, that is what I believe.
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u/nullptr777 4d ago
Likewise, it's nice to have a thoughtful discussion on Reddit for a change.
Sounds like we agree for the most part. I do consider it a valuable tool, and I'd be a lot more comfortable with the idea of a harness if I could run a sufficiently powerful model locally. Maybe I'll look at setting something up in my K8s cluster, and sandboxing it on every level.
I've been tinkering with Qwen 3.8 27B, but mostly just for general chat and some MCP servers. I haven't tried it with a harness yet, but I don't expect it'll be smart enough for my needs there, plus I'm fairly limited on context with only 16GB of VRAM.
AI gives the idiots more power to do harm but it also gives people who know what they're doing more power to do good. At least, that is what I believe.
This I certainly agree with. The only problem is the signal-to-noise ratio now. I don't actually want to ban AI outright, but it has certainly crossed my mind in some of my more frustrated moments.
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u/anandkkpr 4d ago
Not every company uses AI freely and openly and without guardrails. I'm between jobs right now, the industry is experiencing a huge identity crisis and you, OP, seem to have hit the nail on the head.
As you can see already, the two sides of the argument, the two sides facing each other across these battlelines have squared off pretty evenly:
On the right: vibe coders and "AI can 10*x SWE" like magic - who are often less experienced and don't seem to be responsible for the longterm maintainability of the systems they contribute to...
On the left: people who "own the code" and tend to use AI as a sometimes drop in replacement for StackOverflow and are wary of the code AI generates because, upon deeper inspection and experience with any greater degree of handing-off to LLMs, they've found that the code generated is bloated or inefficient or incoherent or worse, a house of cards. These folks tend to be more experienced and understand the difference between pattern and antipattern.
The lines are drawn, investors are salivating at the possibility that the next 200000000Gw data center will replace all human coders and are actively discouraging technical excellence in order to see their "free money" dreams become reality.
The folks on the left, for whom programming is an art as much as a profession, and have lived through last second deployment rollbacks (because of regression hell (due to insufficient automated testing)), they are feeling like an oppressed class who wants to migrate out of investorland - i.e. they want to leave SWE as a profession altogether - because the art they loved is now capable of being slapped into a canvas by a baby, and fingerpainted Mario games are being hailed as masterpieces. I've spoken with these people on tech worker coalition boards, they are veterans, they are currently employed at FAANGs they are across the industry and they are burning out.
Where will the dice fall? Unknowable at this point. Money is a powerful motivation and the genie-in-the-bottle promising free money is the sexiest lure of all. After all, if programming can be offloaded to LLMs, can't everything else? Privacy and security and maintainability and scalability and performance can all be damned for all the investors and their lackeys care. They don't need to deal with crap code - that's what SWEs are hired for right?
The irony is that a perfect storm is brewing that might well make that free money dream turn out to be a ponzi-scheme-reverse-mortgage-debt-repayment he'll for the same investors... Experienced SWEs are resigning, making their own companies and new generations are being told to study other fields, that SWE is dead. That mountain of cards, that is the codebase at the FAANGs and other major SWE employers, may well topple at a time when there aren't SWEs left to build the cards back up. What then? Let's see.
Personally, I fall on the left but know how to vibe/spec code. I was in the same state of utter confusion that the OP expressed - that was in January this year - vine code was still universally cool then (it's not universally cool anymore). I built a desktop rig with 2*24gb AMD GPUs and found out what it's all about (LLM assisted programming that is).
OP: I didn't need to invest the last of my disposable income on a local inference machine but I cared about privacy and security and refused to pay a cent to OpenAI and Anthropic (I still don't, I use Mistral when direly in need of a quick fix).
That said, the experience/cost was worth finding out that, no, LLMs aren't able to replace SWEs of experience and, given the pushback on data centers, it's a strong possibility that the 200000000Gw (fictional number btw) data center needed to host a human replacement simply won't be possible for another 100+ year's... Humanity would need to solve climate change and fusion energy before energy is abundant and clean enough - not to mention improvements to inference hardware (vRAM/RAM/GPU/CPU, etc) - to afford the inference at scale needed to replace the world's fleet of SWEs.
So, SWEs are faced with the choice: learn to generate crap and SOMEHOW keep skills refined enough to fix the crap they encounter when their managers allow them to... or leave the profession because, as most have said already, the shit has hit the fan and there's no putting it in the toilet until the people paying for it decide they've had enough.
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u/Professional-Ant9018 3d ago
Don't try to swim against the current. Focus on studying software architecture and using multiple agents. This is how software engineering is going to work. Even though there are still some purists on the internet, it's undisputable that this is the future. AI still have issues with dealing with very large context. And they still need humans to be able to translate what stakeholders actually need. So, prompt engineering is a real thing. Because most stakeholders don't even know what they actually want. So, if they were the people who actually wrote the prompts, it would deliver the wrong product back for them. At the place where I work, we have already made a bunch of products that generate a whole lot of revenue using AI. Keep in mind, though, that we do have experience from before the AI era, so we know the proper safeguards and the precautions to take to make sure AI doesn't go rogue or drop some production database.
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u/incarnatethegreat 2d ago
I've been a SWE for 20 years. Not writing code feels strange but I'm oddly getting used to it.
I'm over having to learn something from scratch and typing it out line by line, but I miss that approach to learning. Now I do it AI way and I have to sort of learn in reverse.
Granted, I like learning about Python, Go, and other Core Vitals for the Browser better and faster than I could before. Just different now.
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u/Top_Outlandishness78 4d ago
Say all you want but when 10 days of your work is 20 minutes of Claude Code with even better quality, the world is not waiting for your craft.
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u/jmking 5d ago
At some level or another - yes.