Software engineers can't write code by hand anymore
11 posts across 3 communities in the last 30 days; 82% from r/cscareerquestions.
“Yes, for like 4 years, the issue was that back then, early 2010s, software was better paid and less stressful, nowadays, I feel that software has become quite stressful, pay is still better.”
“Engineering is not writing code. Writing code by hand used to be a major part of software engineering work. It no longer is. It turned out that for 90% of engineering roles, writing of the code was just cognitive labor that can be automated. But the rest of the job still…”
“We've barely scratched 0.000001% of the digital age and yes software engineering is already dead. Fast forward to year 3400 zero engineers, but taco stands and plumbers are the last seven figure jobs in the galaxy. Turns out AI can rebuild the entire universe it just can't…”
Multiple posts claim that AI tools now handle coding tasks, reducing the need for manual programming. Engineers report that even senior roles no longer require writing code from scratch, with managers explicitly stating this shift.
SOURCES (36)
“Tell me what other field has as much training data lying around on the web as programming does. Maybe natural language and scientific literature, but that's it. [re: All CS related subreddits should be renamed r/cscope]”
“This is industry standard now. Either get good at this kind of work or accept that your skills are going to become obsolete. Coding by hand is a waste of time in professional settings. Refusing agentic development in 2026 is like insisting on writing binary or assembly in the era of COBOL. possible, but not efficient and a waste of time in professional settings. [re: Company going full agentic]”
“Even if you never hand write code again, you won’t be able to effectively design and maintain systems without skills. [re: Devs, if you don’t code aren’t you worried about losing your skills set?]”
“Yes, for like 4 years, the issue was that back then, early 2010s, software was better paid and less stressful, nowadays, I feel that software has become quite stressful, pay is still better.”
“Like i'm just not interested in it anymore as its not only oversaturated but also because you don't write code manually anymore and just feed everything to AI instead which just doesn't seem exciting to me. I've just been going for more support type roles instead. submitted by /u/SureLook_BeGrand [link] [comments]”
“Browsing through the Ask Hn: Who Wants to be Hired and Who's Hiring, and I'm still seeing coding skills like python being listed as attributes, especially on the Who Wants to be Hired. In the presence of an LLM, are these skills still relevant to the hiring process? What are the technical skills needed to pass interviews now?”
“Software will always exist, in fact, more will exist in the future. How we build it will change. Enterprise software, even with AI writing a lot of the code, is very difficult to build and manage.”
“The skill of coding is worth very little, but all the other skills of being a software engineer are way more important. A) Learn how to create applications with AI and B) Learn all the other important skills of being an engineer.”
“Going from C++ to Python is quite transferable. Python is easy to pickup. Going from Python to C++ is far less transferable. Companies do prefer you have some experience in the language, but they are usually somewhat flexible there.”
“My Grandpa was a Software engineer at Boeing, won industry awards in the 80s. His two degrees were a Bachelors and Masters in Agriculture. How he became a software engineer? Digitizing and using early computer science in livestock sales, forecasting, and predicting how to improve livestock yields. I lucked out as well as I do not have a technical degree but got an "in" in the 2010s thanks to being a veteran. Still have to solve these absurd technicals in 45-60 minutes though. Which mos”
“Engineering is not writing code. Writing code by hand used to be a major part of software engineering work. It no longer is. It turned out that for 90% of engineering roles, writing of the code was just cognitive labor that can be automated. But the rest of the job still requires human reasoning, human soft skills, human access control; understanding the problem space, working with stakeholders, data model design, system design, architecture trade-offs, distributed systems, containerization and”
“No one uses punch cards anymore. Coding was fun. Didn’t want coding to go the way of the punch card. I don’t think the average person still uses punch cards in their free time for fun either.”
“Lol. Pretty much none of us are willing on novel problems. Everything that we have done has been done by others in some manner. LLMs can certainly handle this, and has solved previously unsolved mathematics problems. Secondly while I agree that LLMs themselves are plateauing, we are only about two years in to agentic coding. We have room in terms of squeezing more performance out of LLMs AND this is the worst LLMs will ever be.”
“Your courses in CS was never about coding, it was about the fundamentals of it. I use ai daily and instead of looking each line of code, i look at the architecture (cs fundamentals help). Ai right now is good at writing code, but not so much for architecture choices I’d say yes there’s a point, cus we need to train the next generation. But economy and corpo doesn’t give a fuck so idk”
“You're good, OP. Most of us don't write code anymore. If you lose the muscle memory for syntax, you'll still be able to read the code produced and step through the logic if you ever need to. If you're worried about it, force yourself to write code without AI or auto complete for an hour a day (or whatever you think is appropriate). I personally couldn't write even a basic app without at least auto-complete or without being able to google it. Will I ever be in a situation wher”
“We've barely scratched 0.000001% of the digital age and yes software engineering is already dead. Fast forward to year 3400 zero engineers, but taco stands and plumbers are the last seven figure jobs in the galaxy. Turns out AI can rebuild the entire universe it just can't unclog a toilet.”
“the problem with SE is not that it will be replaced by AI but the fact that the job market is overwhelmed. There are are more engineers graduating every year while the job itself requires less and less engineers due to AI. nobody can say how it's going to look like in 4 years. if the situation right now is bad enough for people not to consider the degree anymore then it will more likely stabilize. if you enjoy programming already (not "i like computers") then i would recommend goin”
“4 years ago CS was way better than accounting. These days it seems like average CS grad has it way worse than average accounting grad.”
“We’re entering the end of 2026, what do you guys think about the future of SWE? Coding is solved, nobody writes code by their hands anymore. The other areas remain, but the value of human in the loop decreases every day. Looks like the industry will get smaller. I can’t see what I will do in 5 years and I’m having anxiety attacks. submitted by /u/ummetinlideri [link] [comments]”
“In my senior year of hs now and really interested in getting a bachelor’s in cs to become a software engineer or something within that industry. I really enjoy coding and don’t struggle with mathematics at all. The lifestyle is something I really like too. However, people say the market is tougher than ever to get a job and hold onto it throughout their careers. This scares me, and the last thing I want is to waste time and money on something that I could have avoided. Is it that bad or are peop”
“This post misses a couple of points1.”Writing software was never the hard part” - isn’t saying coding was easy. The comparison was against building a viable product. Doing business involves a whole lot more ambiguity than sitting in your room writing code. You could build anything and yet the hard part was building something that matters2. >> Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the endI disagree with this statement as far as Software Engineering is concerned. We kinda know. Every”
“My father actually wrote IBM mainframe assembly in the 1970s LOL, even to the point of occasionally submitting patches to IBM for OS/360 bugs he ran into (I think it was source-available, not open source, from his description). He still occasionally wrote COBOL and Fortran, and even some JCL (which sounded to me like the equivalent of bash scripts from how he described it). No reason to take pride in never using a high level language for anything. Especially like in this thread where we're t”
“The issue with the assembly analogy is that compilers are really good right now and probably better than 99.9999% of programmers writing assembly manually. Even if LLMs are better than 95% of programmers, that's still not good enough. I think we're early days still and there's a long way to go. You wouldn't say that people writing assembly in 1970s were doing it wrong, right? If anything, knowing how to write assembly in a world of COBOL programmers was a massive plus.”
“I regret engineering in general, should’ve been a dermatologist or something.”
“It is better at understanding code than your average software engineer. That's actually what it's really good at. That alone disqualifies the whole post”
“The entire point is we do not know. Cheaper could drive demand for needing more. Fewer people means smaller teams can produce more. It’s fine you already know programmers are now typists. That’s why you don’t waste your time arguing about it on the cscareers subreddit. You have everything figured out already that’s why you are very rich from all your options trades”
“The amount of “engineers” who call themselves “technical” that fail to write basic coding syntax or logic when I ask them to turn off Copilot is MASSIVE. While I don't think CS was ever considered an engineering degree, your comment comparing technical knowledge to a language syntax is quite dumb.”
“This is going to come out as very ignorant and dumb, but I remember a few years ago people saying that coding was the easy part of being a SWE and that most SWEs didnt actually write a lot of code anyways. So now that AI is mainly doing the coding wouldnt that just increase time to whatever else SWEs were doing back then anyways? Was SWE a couple years ago mainly coding? submitted by /u/AdObjective5502 [link] [comments]”
“They are mandating the use of AI and jacking up workloads. There isn't time to review everything. If you carefully review everything and your peers LGTM everything without reading it, you're going to be less productive than them.”
“Being replaceable has to do with the value you provide. A person who grinds to learn new tech, adapt to new tools, and provide value outside of coding (which is pretty comoditized at this point), is a lot less replaceable then someone who does nothing.”
“Question: since they’re now prompting and not writing codes by hand anymore, do they still need engineers to do the prompting (or not necessarily anymore)?”
“CS is def not valuable anymore. Maybe a few years ago sure, but as a senior about to graduate I have seen it all. Now I have friends who are getting there MBA's and they can create full websites with 0 technical ability. And if you look at the frontier labs the ai's have no sign of slowing down, anyone else saying otherwise is just coping. I currently am interning in big tech as a SWE and my manager said on day 1 "We dont write code by hand anymore" and I was shocked. Turns out”