Software engineers / programmers: how’s it going?

At my company a few AI-related slack channels were created with all the devs invited, presumably to help people get set up with whatever LLMs we're getting access to. I left all the AI related channels as soon as they popped up and am just plugging along sans-AI like normal. I know some of my coworkers are using it (some AGENTS.md and skill related fluff showed up in the main repo I work on), but so far I haven't really noticed any difference one way or another. Basically the equivalent of shoving my fingers in my ears and going LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. We'll see how long I can keep going like that.

Before I answer the main questions I'll just say I've been working full time in the industry as a backend engineer for about 7 years now. My mid-to-large size company is very pro LLM assisted programming. We have not yet fully given in to the vibe, but are are continuing to trend towards integrating the LLM into most or all processes.

How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?

The way the velocity of change feels in the last year since the year before is less to be sure. Much of my daily work involves using LLMs. I wrote recently that I feel somewhat conflicted about this, but day-to-day, my output has increased significantly and I have not seen a degradation in the backend services I work on. Ultimately, I'm happy to be using these tools to work on things that are less exciting, and spending more of my brain power on higher level problems.

Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?

There are certain types of work for which LLMs can feel like a cheat code, so in those ways, I enjoy work more because it's honestly still really fun to give an LLM a simple task that would take me 30-60 minutes on my own and watch it do it in less than 5. There are other times where I'm in a 2 hour Teams call looking at someone else's Claude session, and Opus 5 is just chugging and going down all sorts of different rabbit holes and in those moments I enjoy my work less because what are we doing right now.

Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?

That is challenging to quantify, so I'll say that I feel like I'm working the same. The shape of the work is dramatically different in the last year or two versus before that. Some days feel like more work, others feel like less.

Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?

I am still hopeful. I've written before that I don't feel my field will be replaced yet, though I do have enough experience to still bring value to an organization. I think organizations with the right mindset will continue to hire and train junior engineers, and my optimism is saying that the organizations with the wrong mindset will not survive the next 5-10 years. I think there will be a reckoning for the orgs that commit themselves completely to the slop. It's an uncertain time, but I'm still hopeful.

Have you found any useful tips or advice for thriving in the current landscape?

I can't really answer this one. One of my previous jobs made me miserable, and I was there for a year and a half because I just couldn't get hired anywhere else. That sucked, and I would imagine it sucks for just about everyone else in the same situation. So if you're struggling with the current landscape, I'd encourage you to talk to some folks about it. Everyone around here seems friendly enough. Heck, shoot me a PM if you just need to get something off your chest. Talking about it, and trying to find joy outside of my career is what got me through that time. Eventually, I got hired somewhere else and it's been the best time of my career. I also realized that even though my previous job was pretty awful for me, it was not a waste of time. I still experienced growth because of it. So if nothing else, try and find the bright spots.

Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles?

I wrote an article almost a year ago that, upon reading it again, I have decided is not that interesting if you don't already know me. So in brief, even before LLMs I felt like my trajectory was in flux, and to be completely honest: that has not really changed. In recent years, I've felt that as I've continued to grow and continued to surround myself with other engineers vastly more brilliant than myself, that my understanding of software engineering and my place in that world will change. Ironically, that change is the only constant in my career.

Though, I did just tell my wife that if my job disappears I'll try to be an electrician. Something I can do with my hands that still feels like I'm solving a puzzle.

Honestly, it's going fine, but I can't say that I love what I am seeing in here. I now spend about 30% of my time cleaning up LLM slop commits by members of my team. SWE with decades of experience now struggle to even explain what the code they put in a PR for does. I have a feeling we're seeing a honeymoon phase of some developers feeling like they have a "cheat code" that lets them do more, but sooner or later, they won't be able to work without the "cheat code" as their skills and knowledge will have atrophied. I have no idea where the industry will end up, but the only winners I foresee in any of the scenarios won't be us.

My feelings on this topic are just super mixed, but to give context I've been doing fullstack/now mainly FE for 7~ years, and was super into programming growing up too.

How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?

Pretty much all of it, I changed jobs recently because in my last role I could see the writing on the wall, they wanted us all to become "product engineers" and essentially stop thinking about the code at all, they even fired a few people who they didn't deem to be using AI enough. In my new role the approach to AI is far more engineer-led and I can actually keep doing things properly (for the most part), which is much more enjoyable. With that said a ticket that would've been given a 5 or 6 day scoring previously now will get like a 3 because the company expects the code to just appear even for big features, which it does, usually... so that adds a certain amount of pressure to deliver more.

Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?

Definitely less, but to be honest it's hard to separate my enjoyment of work and AI with my growing general disinterest in tech. The last few years especially I've drifted away from enjoying coding for fun and it's become just a job, but I'm fortunate to work in this industry regardless. In general I think AI models are just morally wrong, they only really exist because of the millions of hours of free labour people uploaded to the internet. With that said using them is now unavoidable, there's one or two people at my company that refuse to use them and I don't see their careers lasting until retirement (which is a long way away for me unfortunately..), other companies may be different.

Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?

The same really, but my output is definitely higher thanks to the LLMs.

Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?

The industry will go on, I wouldn't say either really. There's always going to be software that needs writing (and fixing). Now we're writing software faster we can also do things incorrectly faster. I do fear for the next generation as at the moment there is essentially no hiring whatsoever of junior engineers, but that could also be a wider economic thing as no industry is really hiring young people at the moment. I do think it will pick up again, but the roles might look quite different.

Have you found any useful tips or advice for thriving in the current landscape?

Don't ignore AI completely and try and block it out, unless you have other career options lined up anyway. I'd be surprised if there's a company left in a few years that isn't using AI at all.

Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles?

I feel lucky to have already been working for quite a few years before AI became a thing so I don't feel completely insecure, but will software engineering exist as a career for 30+ years until I can retire? I really don't know, I wish I could predict the future. If I was 18 again and looking at the current state of the software industry, I wouldn't be going into it, I'd be learning something closer to the hardware like electrical engineering. I've been doing a ton of quite heavy DIY recently and really enjoying it, so a trade would be my backup but I can see that being tricky to get into too.

How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?

The last year has been mostly continuing to scale how much AI I am using and for what. A lot of eliminating friction in general, which has definitely speed me up. Scripting everything is now on the table, and I find using skills to develop the general shape of a problem useful.

However, there are certainly caps on the return. Review and QA has become a major bottleneck, and while you can speed up review with AI you ultimately still need a human(s) to sign off. The other major bottleneck is system architecture/cohesion. As you increase code velocity this is harder to coordinate.

Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?

I still enjoy it. I'm still solving problems at the end of the day. One thing I dislike is there is more juggling, in that you can and probably should be waiting on multiple agents at once, so there is a baked in increase in context switching. However, context switching is easier now, because you can automate the hardest part, starting something new (maybe this is just the hard part for me).

Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?

About the same I think.

Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?

Definitely think the writing is on the wall for us. I don't think this is a viable career in five years, at least for someone new. I think there will be a a tail where experience is going to give you a soft landing though. Maybe I will change my mind if things start to slow down but if anything it feels like things are speeding up.

Have you found any useful tips or advice for thriving in the current landscape?

Don't look to your job for self worth?

Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles?

Probably but I am still hoping not.

I'm a college graduate with a non-CS degree who got hired out of college into a Software Engineering Role. I have "senior" level experience and work in a city with a large tech industry. I perform well at my company, but I don't work at a FAANG or adjacent company. I don't consider myself to be an excellent engineer, but I try my best with my work.

1. How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?: There is more pressure to use AI, but I haven't experienced it making things much faster because I still have to vet and understand everything. It does help with getting the ball rolling on new things, quick lookups, or scoping out major architectural changes and generating docs from that for review. It mainly contributes to a sense of urgency around my work that I didn't really need, and makes the effort I put into my work feel devalued. I would be elated for Anthropic & co. to run out of compute. I miss coding more hands-on.
2. Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?: Less, but part of it was that I was at the inflection point career-wise where your differentiator is less about code quality (because, as AI proves, there's limits to how much people give a damn). Leadership qualities, mentorship, investigating issues, following up 2-3 steps into an issue instead of just one, etc. are what took up more and more time. I think if AI impacted that, it was in part because you could fuck around much harder not knowing much about the language (we had a lot of newly joined engineers using AI primarily as their means to write in this 'new' language). So there was more need to put my foot down. The other thing is that nothing delivered is impressive to people unless AI did it or is part of it, I think.
3. Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?: The same, maybe less. AI gives the illusion of work but is nothing compared to a flow state. But coding work, where you're the primary bottleneck, moves at a different pace than work where you're dealing with people.
4. Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?: Fearful / mixed. When I stop thinking about what others think, I don't really know what the future holds. Will code be less important? Well, maybe, but I don't see why we wouldn't lean into product skills and replace the PMs. Will designers be more important? I don't think people need rivetingly original designs and UX, nor a team for it. Will engineering still be important? I don't know, but I guess I don't see how it wouldn't take away every other 'email job' first. That would indeed decimate the shit out of the economy. I wonder if Rails killed more jobs than it created. I have had to come to terms with the fact that I have possibly peaked earnings; I don't see FAANGs as viable jobs right now with layoffs and the stock valuations feelings uncertain.
5. Have you found any useful tips or advice for thriving in the current landscape?: Err, no, except that not getting familiar with it will probably not endear you in the job market either. Conversely, I have yet to be sold on the value of trying to "engineer AI" outcomes; there are entire companies tasked with making the models better so I don't see any point in turning optimizing AI into work for myself. But I also don't care enough about AI to optimize token use. Most of what seems valuable was valuable before AI too: be very smart, improve at systems design, know shit about databases, and do your own tiny projects for extra $$.
6. Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles? Not really. I am more averse to being a manager, but I also see how 'proximity to management' gives you more salience with people doing the layoffs. I do think more about moving in with my parents and staying in the area (versus moving to a weaker job market). I do think often about an exit plan (buy something extremely modest with savings, do a modest job to eat.)

Having been laid off at the end of February, not great.

Background: Backend Software developer for ~10 years. I work for a small-mid size company that focuses on tech service.

How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?

It hasn't much. Some team member changes and usual sprint to sprint process adjustments. We don't use LLM, but our company formed a team to research possible uses for AI. But we're not invested in switching over.

• Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?

I like my work as much as in the past. I don't love it, but I enjoy it and like where I work and who I work with. So no it hasn't changed

• Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?

The same as mentioned in my previous answer

• Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?

I'm a bit fearful. I'll admit to having no experience with these AI tool, but I feel like there's necessary skills you need when building software. How can you judge what an AI produces if you have no experience or knowledge in what the actual code is doing?

I feel like a lot of companies will fall into the startup mistakes. Where they have to quickly put up an application. Which will have a plethora of issues. But the longer that app is in production, the more it's used. Which makes it hard to make major fixes or changes without effecting production.

• Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles?

Pre-pandemic I felt like I had a lot of options career wise. But now it feels like hiring is much worse. I'm lucky to be where I'm at, but if I had to find other work I would be concerned.

I'm a software engineer sorta early in my career, I've got <5 years of experience and have only really worked at large companies (1st with 15k employees, current with 75k employees).

How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?

• Work at my company has changed a fair bit but it's still software engineering at its core. The big shift now is instead of the majority of the time being the actual coding/testing, most of the time is now spent planning things thoroughly with LLM AI tools and breaking things down into small steps for the AI to do. My own work is actually unrecognizable because I got reorged into a new org where the work that needs to be done is very different. I still maintain the "Software engineer" title without the software engineer work. My own work is basically 99.99% done by LLMs (which is why I may sound a bit doomer about my personal role being replaced but I'll try to answer about software engineering in general). It's very open ended and I can technically "build" anything I want, but at the same time, the work is incredibly isolating and I'm not really in control.

Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?

• My personal work? I absolutely hate it. It's very open ended which is cool but it's incredibly individual. I mentioned this in my mental health thread post but in short, I don't know my teammates, my manager, or anyone around me in my org and I work alone. I am actively interviewing for a new job despite having been here <1 year. However, when I was still doing regular SWE work earlier in the year with AI, I honestly enjoyed it a bit more than before. I was able to quickly onboard to a new codebase and then work on multiple projects in parallel thanks to AI. My relationship to work (during this time period) I'd say was quite healthy because I could log off myself at 5:30pm but let the agents continue working overnight. My team and org was also quite careful about vibe-coding and outputting slop so we were always quite careful about not just what we wrote but also what we'd submit to the team for review. It took a while to reach that point but it only took about a month or two to adjust. We let non-SWEs commit code but they were held to the same strict review standards as engineers and they had to make understand what they were putting into our codebase with good documentation.

Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?

• Working about the same (prior to my re-org), and way less now in my new org. The time spent coding was instead spent planning things properly and making sure we were making architecturally sound decisions for things.

Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?

• I'm hopeful for the future. I think a few companies are starting to find that balance between getting too enthusiastic for AI and not being enthusiastic enough for AI and it'll take a while for this to proliferate through the industry. Some companies I've interviewed with allow engineers to use any model they like but they just have to remain within limits set by the company. Other companies let engineers either run free or not run at all with AI. I think the role of a software engineer will see a shift. From my limited progression, I was expected to only code up what I was given for my first year or so and then I was given more reign on planning out projects. I can see junior engineers being treated more like mid-level engineers, given a final goal and a set of requirements and then being told to plan within those requirements. I will admit I am a bit naive in this area due to being fairly early in my career but I don't see software engineering disappearing entirely.

Have you found any useful tips or advice for thriving in the current landscape?

• My main advice is to just give it a try. Like with anything new, I can understand the skepticism. I myself resisted AI for months. My company gave us a free week at the start of the year to properly learn to use AI. We'd had chats with engineers who incorporated the AI into their workflows to pass off the more menial work to the AI so they could focus on higher level engineering decisions. They walked us through the steps and showed their productivity gains. I think having that free week to explore as I pleased really helped break down some of that skepticism and embrace AI in a cautious manner.

Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles?

• Unfortunately it has. The re-org I've mentioned multiple times has put me in an org where there's no clear path for growth and performance expectations constantly change. I can't commit to a set of goals because by the time I'm 2-3 weeks into working towards them, things change and those goals mean nothing. I'm actively looking to leave a company I had worked so hard to get into and had thought about working at for years because of this change. I wish I could change to a regular engineering team but I'm competing against thousands of other engineers also in this org with me who are trying to leave.
• That being said, I won't be moving away from software engineering, just back to a more traditional role with hopefully a better captain manning the ship.

SWE at a corporation here, 5 years and counting.

We're developing plenty of AI integrations so if I'm not prompting an AI, I'm building tools that let other people use AI. That said less than half of my daily work is AI-assisted and I actively try to not increase that figure.

I think work has gotten equally more enjoyable and more frustrating. Sending GPT-5.6 Luna on a quest to figure out some niche API or dive into an obscure and unmaintained codebase reduces the amount of hair-pulling I have to do on a monthly basis, but on the other hand debugging both my own and my coworkers' AI slop is not fun at all. It's so easy to let AI write code that is seemingly unreadable for both humans and future LLMs. That said, it's definitely quite easier to go from idea to shipped feature while still ensuring a reasonable level of quality.

My relationship with work is the same, log in at 9, log out at 6, no more, no less. The workload is a bit lighter mostly because I can automate the tedious parts so much easily, but I figure this respite won't be long, workloads will increase once everyone catches on.

I don't think human software engineering is going anywhere. AI is just not good enough and I'm confident we're approaching a bottleneck with current LLM architecture that will probably take a long time to solve.

Regarding tips, I would recommend making sure you keep your mind sharp. I had a brief phase where I let AI do most of the work and I'd just review it and I could feel my skills decline. Now I've switched my prompting around by dictating the architecture and design myself and just telling to AI to translate that to code. I then review relentlessly to make sure I both understand what was written and that the LLM implemented what I asked it to, and nothing more or less.

I plan on staying in my current position for the foreseeable future and don't see any threats to that at the moment. The biggest change is that I have more energy for my personal projects because I don't tire myself out as much with tedium at my job, meaning work on those is a bit faster and more consistent than before.

• How has your work changed in the past year? How much of your daily work now involves LLM tools?

Quite a lot, went from using 0 LLM in January 2026 to a huge amount now.

• Are you enjoying your work more, less, or the same? Has your relationship with work changed in general?

It's similar, I might enjoy it more overall. It's less stressful, I'm working on projects I wouldn't care about before.

• Do you feel like you’re working more or less now? The same?

Probably more, I context switch way more. And I have my own side projects. If I'm not careful I can easily do 18 hours days. Having access to an LLM removes the excuses that I used to have. They are pretty amazing at removing mental blocks.

• Are you hopeful or fearful of the future (let’s say next 5 years) of SWE? Mixed?

I'm not that fearful, so far, the things I'm good at can't be done with AI. I see it now like a tool that can enhance what I can already do. The danger is when I work on something I'm not good at and then I say "good enough" without carring too much. I expect there'll be a lot of tech debt to go through at some point.

• Have you found any useful tips or advice for thriving in the current landscape?

Networking is key. You need a safety net so that you're not left with no options. You don't want to have to rebuild yourself from scratch if your situation changes.

• Has your career trajectory changed? Do you plan on seeking out different types of roles?

I'm taking accounting / management classes to diversify and have the ability to build projects. I don't expect to become an accountant, but I want to be able to understand all the statements, know if my (future) company is doing well, etc.

I think that even with LLMs becoming better, there will always be more problems to solve. Complete automation is a pipe dream. As long as there are humans, there will be things that can't be automated.

I'm kind of busy right now, so I'm not going to write much, but I've found that LLMs really help with the tedious parts of my job and speed up my work in areas that I'm not as familiar.

EDIT: To answer the question -- I'm at a very small startup where I was originally the only developer along with a CTO who did a little bit of development -- we now have a few additional developers/testers/etc, but still a very small team.

As an example... today I was adding a new feature that needed to comply with a standard protocol. I wrote it without much LLM help (just CoPilot as a fancy auto-complete, but it's still basically my code when I use that, it's just inferring where I'm going and finishing the lines for me). When I was done I needed to update a public facing document that described the edit, so I gave my code snippet to the LLM that my company licenses and the previous draft of the document (the boring parts of my job) and asked it which sections needed to be updated.

1. It noticed that I'd completely forgotten to implement an important section of the standard!
2. It told me which sections of the documents that I needed to edit. I didn't ask it for exact text, just a pointer to all of the locations that needed to be updated.

--

#1 could have gone months without being noticed, because I'm one of the few at my company (or anywhere) that knows that standard, and it would have likely had an urgent turnaround when a customer complained - and we're in a regulated industry where patches are a big deal with a lot of overhead.

#2 saved me a lot of drudgery, making the document edit a lot less tedious, probably saved me 4 or 5 hours.

I never ask an LLM to write production code from whole-cloth (I do sometimes ask it for scripts for automation tasks that I can review before running them), but I do sometimes ask it to review blocks or help me interface with a library I don't understand, etc. It has been extremely helpful for stuff like that and makes my work a LOT faster and makes the tedious parts go faster.

--

One other thing before I go, I've found it to be very good for code reviews. Giving it a piece of existing code and asking it to find race conditions, security holes, potential sources of a crash, etc... HUGE time saver and it has definitely prevented me from shipping some bad code more than once.