Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I'll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don't believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of "vibe-coding", but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can't spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What's even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would've taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn't a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It's a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don't know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don't think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
My own experience of almost 2 decades as a Freelance senior software developer, mostly coming in to work on top of and even fixing existing codebases of large custom-made applications which were for years in Production in mainly large companies, which generally had layer on top of layer of different coding styles and even design approaches because multiple people worked in them each thinking "I know best" and doing their own thing instead to trying to work within the existing style, is that getting to the point of understanding it at all levels takes many months, and that's even after one is experienced enough at it to have discovered shortcuts like learning and identifying the coding and design style of specific engineers and even their typical mistakes (people tend to be pretty consistent in the mistakes they make) as a way to accelerate understanding, detection of problems and figuring out were and how it's safe to change code and design without it cascading to problems elsewhere.
All this to say that picking up and fixing a real life system in Production which was mostly AI created and hence doesn't even have the patterns for coding and design choices and mistakes that humans have, will take many months, maybe more than a year PER SYSTEM even for somebody who is senior and highly experience at it.
So fixing the AI produced stuff will have giant costs which probably more than offset the savings at creation time from using AI.
Now, some would say that you can just get the AI to regenerate the whole thing to fix it, however that has two problems:
So, yeah, full regen just at best moves the problems around and pisses users off.