I worked for FAANG as a software engineer. The company has been pushing us to use more AI in work. At the beginning of 2025, coding by AI was mostly useless, maybe autocomplete some statements, required a lot manual correction. By end of 2025, it could do about half my work by creating very complex structure that worked with context containing millions of lines of code. What used to take me weeks of work now can be done in days. The improvement in productivity is not only real, but huge.
In only 12 months, AI coding has grown from a middle school student to a software engineer with at least a few years experience. I still have a job because AI still doesn't know 'what' to code, rather than 'how' to code. But with such kinda of growth, I have no idea whether it'll come for my job in another 12 months.
For those out of tech industry, most of your experience with AI are still via chatbot or grammar correction, or document summarization, or creating some funny videos. But AI can be much much more scary than that. I feel scared to even imagine how the world will look like 3 years later. Without some kind of protection, 80% of white collar jobs will be wiped out. For people who think AI is a bubble, you will change your mind seeing how it does our job with first hand experience.
This is a stock subreddit so I've been thinking how to benefit from this era. A natural thought was NVDA, GOOG, MU, TSM. But they all feel weak lately. I will still hold GOOG, but would like to learn more ideas from this sub.
Posted by huyou007
26 Comments
It’s fine, we’ll be out of fresh water soon, everything is fine.
That’s funny, because the vibe is completely different in r/experienceddevs
At best, AI is a shitty intern that never really learns anything.
I agree, the vast majority of Reddit is completely oblivious to the insane improvement various coding agents have had in the past few months.
Opus and Codex are absolutely insane and only getting better, I am still bullish on AI and investing across the whole AI pipeline from raw materials -> chips and memory -> energy and infrastructure -> companies who benefit from applying AI.
Recent market moves especially these past few days have sucked but fundamentals haven’t changed, I am still bullish long term and see the recent dips and short term price movements as a way to lower my cost basis before the next leg up. Bullish!
I can approve myself.
I work as a mechanical engineer in an energy corporate.
They are pushing as well too much in Ai.
The work that someone of the IT would have done, we are using Ai.
I find it terrible difficult for those who will come out from universities and find an entry level job.
I think there will be an economical and social crisis before we jump to another time of our mankind!
Investing into energy & rare earth minerals.
I also work in tech and I acknowledge how fast AI evolved. However, economically, they all operate at an insane loss so that the end users get them for free. To improve further, you saw the Cap Ex spending posted by tech giants. Will we have enough data centres to power AI? Otherwise who’s paying the bill when we’re not subsidized 99%. No one will pay Open AI/Anthropic $20,000/mo for their agents, at that point SWEs are cheaper again lol.
Millions of lines of code, so no testing done, no proof reading? Immediate deployment to prod? You dont talk like a software engineer, whats the reason for this post.
Coding is a way to make a machine do what you want it to do.
Prompting is a way to make AI (machine?) do what you want it to do.
So prompting is coding without the complexity of learning syntax.
If cars began to fly, everybody who can drive a car could potentially fly the car. Would you trust an average joe or a pilot to fly it though.
It’s not just software engineering. I work in data science and had lunch with friends in my last company. They cut the data science team by half – one person is able to do 3x the work with AI now. More layoffs are planned in 2026.
It won’t take 100% of jobs, but it doesn’t need to for our society to feel it. The unemployment rate during the great depression was “only” about 25%.
Be interesting to hear what your friendly software testers have to say about the software being written 😂
We’ve seen what a total mess it’s made of Windows 11. As a tester I can’t imagine what it’s like to test as I’ve not had to touch any such work so far but I can’t see it being a pleasant experience.
People aren’t going to like this, but I also work in big tech. AI has improved significantly, our whole orgs uses it all the time and we are getting productivity gains that are only increasing. We were all pretty annoyed at first since leadership was forcing us to use AI, but now it’s standard and we would be much slower without it. If you think AI is shit and useless and you work in tech, in my opinion it’s a skill issue.
As bad as Henry Ford was at least he understood who was buying his products.
These plutocrats seem confused about where their wealth comes from.
Lol I’ve worked for MAG 7 and Fortune 10 companies most my career (save that one time I only worked for a Fortune 75).
AI is a great tool, when used correctly. But AI right now is the “big data” or “blockchain” or whatever the preceding tech hype train terms were. Tech loves to overpromise but the delivery is always made more complicated by the practical realities of the enterprise customer base that takes a long time to change gears.
I’m thinking of having AI makes my trades for me. For example, I give it a chart with instructions for entry/exit when certain conditions, levels are there. Problem is, I don’t have a clue on how to set something like that up. lol
It has a limit and were pretty close to it. The more it does the more energy it needs. We literally cannot build datacenters fast enough to keep up and energy infrastructure cannot magically double up every year
This isn’t speculation — it’s reality, in tech and far beyond it. Many people assume AI won’t affect their jobs, that they’re somehow insulated. That’s the same false sense of security people had before the internet rewired how we live and work. AI will be just as transformative.
The software engineering roles that have been highly coveted for the past 25+ years won’t disappear overnight, but they will be scaled back, reshaped, and concentrated. Humans still matter — but our role shifts from doing the work to directing it. The future is human-guided AI, not human-replaced AI.
There are really only two choices: adapt and embrace the change, or ignore it and scramble later when the shift becomes unavoidable.
And this won’t stop with coding. Entire industries are about to feel the impact. Finance and law, in particular, are ripe for disruption. Financial analysts won’t spend their time gathering and modeling data anymore — AI will do that faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors. The human value will be in judgment, strategy, and accountability, not raw analysis.
AI doesn’t eliminate work. It eliminates old versions of work.
And yes, this comment was spellchecked/grammar checked by AI
“The future will be sharply delineated between the haves and the have nots” – Peter Karp, PhD
I use AI to write Power BI DAX queries all the time. Sometimes it gets my intent wrong the first time, but after a few iterations, it usually nails it.
I can see many jobs going away but in the software world, I foresee a need for more software architects and not just coders. OP, you are going to be fine so long as you start focusing on architecture.
I had this epiphany recently. Just wait until you try using Slackbot AI. If you use Slack for internal enterprise communication, it has all the knowledge and context it needs. It integrates with so many other apps like Gmail and google drive. It saves me hours a week of planning, structuring, project managing, summarizing, complex searching etc. It doesn’t yet know what to do, to OP’s point, it still needs a director, but it does everything I tell it to do better and much quicker than I can.
I then realized it’s just a matter of time before these AIs start listening to our conversations and Slack huddles and suddenly the CTO will have all company knowledge at their fingertips, making us completely redundant. Do I trust that these AIs actually have boundaries and don’t spy on us? I don’t. I think they’re collecting all our knowledge and subject matter expertise and making us useless. The only white collar work left will be breaking down processes and silos between systems or teaching the AI how to do it all.
I fear entry level jobs are at the biggest most immediate risk, but white collar work is about to look for very different in the next 10 years. It’s just a matter of time before people catch on to how transformative this is.
To hedge my risks, I’m saving and investing like crazy and thinking about reskilling in a trade or healthcare, but for now, I’m embracing the AI and learning to position myself as someone more productive and on the ball because I leverage it to me advantage. That’s what companies want to see now.
You understand more than most. I wouldn’t listen to consensus here. Only to people who are coderw who understand. I’ve been in your tickers for a few years. I’m. Moving majority of my portfolio to mag 7 and ai stocks.
A product being good doesn’t mean it gets adopted. Use cases for AI need to be identified and business processes need to be redesigned around them, regulators need to create guidelines for AI use (and risk management departments need to believe those guidelines won’t drastically change in a year or two), tech-phobic employees and middle managers need to be convinced to use AI, and infrastructure needs to be built to let Google and Microsoft supply AI systems cheaply enough for businesses to all use them.
I’m sure AI will be revolutionary in the 2030’s. But it needs to go through lots of bureaucracy and adoption frictions first and there will be a lag time between having a viable product and figuring out the right way to use that product.
A neighbor of mine is a software engineer at Apple, he said he hasn’t explicitly coded in over 6 months
>…but would like to learn more ideas from this sub.
Actually, this sub can learn more ideas from you.
While many are dismissing the fact the AI is a revolution bigger than the Internet, you are seeing the real impact. At the rate things are going, AI will be writing a bulk of code in the not so distant future. Software engineers will become orchestrators of AI-produced code. The days of writing complex C++ are over.
So, dig down and let us know what *your* ideas are for the next big thing in AI. Once Software Engineers stop writing the bulk of code, what tools/technologies will be important to gluing it all together and releasing production quality applications? What kind of code is AI currently struggling with that needs more innovation? If AI is writing the code, who is telling AI what to build? How does AI help us figure out what customers need, even before they know it?
Top-tier doom porn. AI is going to replace *most trivial coding, but systems design, quality assurance and the perpetual need of a company to have someone to blame make me think we won’t see a horrible apocalypse in the white-collar space.
I work in procurement and AI is an absolute game changer for running my categories. Grabbing data to build baselines, creating bid sheets. Anything needed for tendering and contracting, it’s cut the admin part of any tender easily by 75%. As more companies feel comfortable introducing closed models to their business data it’s just going to get better.
Same with AI & medicine. Chatgpt used to be wildly wrong to medical questions 60% of the time and citing places like reddit and chiropractor blogs.
Now its right 90% of the time and routes me to all the pertinent studies, books, and society guidelines.
I also work at FAANG and it sounds like we work at the same one, because I’ve been in these same meetings.
I’m not even an engineer and the other day I used an internal AI development tool to code and debug an agent that could take actions via email. I dont even know how I did it. Pretty mind blowing.
Also agree w/ your view – most normies view AI and chatgpt as synonymous. It becomes way more eye opening when you see what it’s going via agents at the frontier of tech work.