Software Engineering has forever changed - What's Next

[@aunguyen84]

To be honest, after 9 years in tech including a year at my ongoing tech startup, I feel exhausted to keep up with all the changes of the industry. Definitely would not recommend my kids to join this unstable industry 🤒

[@cody_codes_youtube]

I might have a video on this topic soon. I kind of agree with you, but I think many people are feeling this instability pain and I want to talk about it

[@PMSTACKER3000]

I have a friend that is older that was heavily recruited to come out of retirement during the pandemic. He had experience programming in obscure operating systems and was even programming during the time of renting mainframe time. Apparently, a lot of big companies had still not updated their OS, and all of the engineers were dying off. Also, he may have been in the 1979 World Disco Championship. After hearing his story, I found it ironic that technical obsolescence could be an employment advantage............

[@cody_codes_youtube]

It 1000000% is. Think about COBOL programmers!

[@PMSTACKER3000]

@@cody_codes_youtube COBOL was his thing along with VB and, I guess, Unix.

[@henson2k]

Projects still take long time to finish but companies no longer hesitate to advertise and publish unfinished products. Worst case scenario there will be updates to fix worst problems.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@henson2k hahaha. The forever struggle between sales, product and engineering

[@henson2k]

@ micromanagement won

[@Fenix-mz5il]

United States: 2023: Over 191,000 workers in U.S.-based tech companies were laid off in mass job cuts. 2024: At least 95,667 workers at U.S.-based tech companies lost their jobs. Global Figures: 2023: The total number of tech layoffs was approximately 262,735, marking a 59% increase compared to 2022. 2024: The tech layoff wave continued, with more than 150,000 job cuts reported.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@Fenix-mz5il you should go back further. Look at the FRED job charts. Essentially all the jobs that were added in 2020-2022 were the layoff numbers you’re listing. So we added like 300k jobs in tech, and then in 2023-2025, we shed about the same amount of

[@ifecoAE]

Blame Joe Biden for that, the US economy shrank under him.

[@brianrountree4499]

I think you nailed the dynamic that goes on in the programmer's economy, Cody! During boom times, there's this huge type of expansion in IT where it's not so much software maintenance as it is software replacement. As soon as the true economy takes a nose-dive, software goes into this almost pure maintenance mode. I suspect that A.I. isn't ending jobs as much as it is scaring off new hiring. IT does this cycle between all maintenance, which then later transitions back into this cycle to replace everything with the newest thing. Software just waits for that next cycle to hit and then tries to be on the leading edge of capitalizing on the next craze. Software and most of IT is not a steady industry, which is why it routinely pushes the "shortage" narrative, which is almost analogous to saying something like there is a shortage of part-time workers in this country, or IOW it's a ridiculous argument that this industry makes to share with people who are trying to make decisions over their own future. It should also be said that a lot of companies wait through many tech cycles before they finally upgrade their technology, and this has always been true. I'd say we're firmly in a tech recession at the moment. In the past, these bust cycles could easily last for five years or more. When there is an upcycle, it's more like musical chairs, where one has to find a chair before the music stops.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Thank you so much for commenting! This is super insightful and my 15 years of experience kind of only knows the stories of the dot com bubble and then the feeding frenzy a couple years ago. I appreciate the insight and I would agree with your analysis!

[@aura2301]

Do you still believe the job market for software engineers is improving in 2025?

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Yes. But slowly. It will never get as good as it was in 2021. That was a crazy time to be around

[@Tverse3]

I am optimistic about this, we will need even more software engineers in future.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@ yeah I agree. It may not happen right away though

[@enthiranipalasingam127]

Hi, I just discovered your channel, I love the fact that you answer to the comments. As a student in SE, which advice do you give me?

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@enthiranipalasingam127 first off, thank you for the kind words! And secondly, stuck around because I want to address those questions in a video I’m filming today. Especially as a student

[@WestTechLol]

🤖Good stuff! Legacy code overhead is real. I spend 95% of my time reading code, not writing it. I don't see AI ever making that job any easier - "How do I change an engine on a 747 while in flight?" is basically now THE JOB.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

1000000%. Those are the skills I want to keep and ride off into the sunset with

[@kelsey_roy]

I use AI to help me read code

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@kelsey_roy perfect

[@anth9623]

Really enjoyed the insights. I think you're absolutely right. Speed will increase, but could create long term maintenance issues. Like everything in software, everything is a trade off

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Thank you for the kind words! I really appreciate you taking the time. And yeah, I don’t feel many are making the right trade offs nowadays. Let’s see how it all plays out

[@insertname5421]

IDK which AI are you guys using, so far all LLMs I've tested are shitty at code

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Depends on what kind of code. I just use ChatGPT for higher level conversations about strategies and example code. Never larger than a basic module

[@insertname5421]

@@cody_codes_youtube so, not that disruptive as the clickbait title makes it seem, right?

[@jc-aguilar]

@@insertname5421I love the silent response, crickets

[@FuZZbaLLbee]

Try something like cursor. I built a POC website with an API backend in a few lines

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@FuZZbaLLbee yeah, I’ve heard cursor is pretty okay. POC and boilerplate work is excellent for AI

[@eman0828]

Benchmarks doesn't mean jack. Can it write complex software and not have any bugs? Highly doubt it. It's all hype.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@eman0828 it’s worth talking about. The benchmark work tasks are sometimes the most difficult low level problems in software. But you’re right. The other 95% of software work does not revolve around those kind of tests.

[@ascourter]

Considering maintenance is key in any new software project. Great video Cody! 🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Yo! Thanks for watching homie! Good luck in 2025!

[@Sanvi-j3w]

So should I go for my masters in machine Intelligence and data science? I am scared don't know why

[@cody_codes_youtube]

It’s scary to commit to more school. That’s a deeply personal decision. You should consider more school for the sake of being more of an expert in that domain. It does not guarantee a job, or a raise. Maybe if you find a company that needs direct work in that domain, then yes that will be a slam dunk. But there are no guarantees in this world.

[@ali-13392]

Thanks🤖 Do you offer coffee chats / 1:1 consulting as well Cody? I want to discuss some questions with you which are currently bothering me a lot.. I want to switch jobs, but confused about few critical things

[@cody_codes_youtube]

I do! Shoot me an email that’s on my KZbin profile

[@RyanLee-z2o]

Hey Cody, Wanted to send you an email with some questions about pursuing a MSC but can’t seem to find it. If you could help pointing me in the right direction that’d be great. Thanks for all the info you give out!

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@RyanLee-z2o I don’t want bots to snag the email here but if you go to the channel details, you’ll find a field called email, and you can click another button to show my email

[@RyanLee-z2o]

@@cody_codes_youtube Figured it out, I had to hop on the desktop and off of the mobile

[@DavidDLee]

Make AI fix and maintain the code, make small improvements and make new releases. Also, carry the pager.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

That’s an incredible amount of inherit trust to have in AI, and also the trust in the prompters telling the AI what to do and what it needs to do to maintain. Just saying “maintain this for me” is an empty and ridiculous prompt

[@DavidDLee]

@@cody_codes_youtube It's not all just LLM and it's not completely viable yet, but AI Agents could, one day, do all that.

[@sarveshkhanvilkar3400]

So what do you think should I learn basic tech like html,css,js or just the foundation os, networking, DBMS as college student

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@sarveshkhanvilkar3400 it depends on where you want to take it and your personal financial situation. I’m still pro-college, but it’s a hard decision to make due to the cost. The software world is not just webdev. You can do many things.

[@marcotroster8247]

I'd say you should be familiar with regular development before you enter university. Studying is good if you go into AI or something math-heavy like crypto.

[@marcotroster8247]

I don't agree. The programs I've created as a freelancer run and run and run for years now. My client installed them on all kinds of machines and operating systems, but cannot make them die yet. It's still good without any maintenence effort. Each program took me maybe 2-4 weeks. On most projects I've worked as an employee, this wasn't the case at all. People kept adding features like crazy and let this thing grow to a maintenance nightmare. AI won't help them at all if they can't keep the features to the point and stop generalizing all the time. As you said, rejecting features will become more important.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

You’re doing it right. Simple quick applications, doing one or a couple things perfectly right. That’s wonderful. That’s where we need to go, even as employees of companies. I’d love to connect with you if you’d like, because I think we both freelance and are of like mind

[@kristianlavigne8270]

The AI reasoning systems will shortly be able to continuously refactor the code to reduce technical debt. That’s a given. Game over 😅

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@kristianlavigne8270 yeah right dude. If I can get anyone or anything to reduce our tech debt, that would be HUGE for everyone. You have no idea how many systems go on for decades with tech debt

[@ManducaFlown]

I suspect that the opposite of this is true. There will be more SWE. It might change (we don’t generally write assembly or use punch cards anymore). However this iteration of tech is going to create more maintenance and rework than ever in the history of computing. The true impact of AI is not in making SWE irrelevant. It’s that it will change the locus of production to bring it closer to the individual and away from the organisation. It’s more likely that AI will reorganise business itself than make software engineering obsolete.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@ManducaFlown sorry if my video wasn’t clear, that’s almost exactly what I was saying. I didn’t go into it because I’ve done that in other videos. But yeah, right now the labor market is tight, but it will expand and there will be a spike in need in the near future. I don’t think it’ll go away at all

[@ManducaFlown]

@@cody_codes_youtubeyea, I know that was the eventual conclusion 😊. I don’t think people should panic. Rather: 1. Learn about AI, how it works and how to use in your own applications. 2. Use AI to assist you and do LOW VALUE tasks (but do not outsource high value thinking and design to it). 3. Focus your own work on high value work that AI cannot do. For example I have been involved with development of functional graph computation algorithms in Python. Co-pilot is completely unable to offer anything in that department as it just doesn’t understand what we are doing. Conversely, if you find yourself writing boiler-plate code or doing things that can be automated, stop - this is what AI is going to replace in the near term. 4. Focus on engineering, communication and problem solving, not ‘coding’.

[@unhandledexception1948]

These are very disruptive times, Senior devs have invested years of their lives to master a craft which is now become commoditized, I think it is safe to say the majority feel upset and the ones at the end of their career even mourn that investment.

[@alquemir]

That is the worse, years of investments in specific tech stacks and depreciated knowledge, so that your knowledge can be thrown in the bin. It is really frustrating that a lot developers spent the prime of their years working in a dying field.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

I don’t feel that way at all. I think the problem is the perception of what it means to be a programmer. People overlay expectations of other white collar jobs onto what they think programming should be: I learned my skill and now I get to do that same thing for 40 years. That’s not true. Programming is always evolving and the frameworks, technologies, and hardware are always changing. It’s always been that way

[@unhandledexception1948]

@@cody_codes_youtube Yes, but the fact that modern LLMs are able to code at my level, after 12 years of spending long hours to learn those skills can't but be felt as a loss and even though it open new doors, it does take much of that sense of mastery one had on the technology... in all honesty there isn't much thrill in prompting and then seeing the result, that sounds more like a business analyst role

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@ but you are ignoring the fact that you understand the output. If the output breaks, then you can easily see, “oh, from my 12 years of experience, I see why this component the LLM spit out doesn’t work well here”. Your long hours provides deep understanding of what you’re building. If a business analyst tries to do what you do, they could maybe get something working but things will fall apart the moment there is a mistake or confusion.

[@unhandledexception1948]

@@cody_codes_youtubeYes, I do agree with that remark, still something that was part of my pride in having a certain skill has been lost ... A bit like someone really good a doing square roots by hand, the day he was handed that scientific calculator ;-)

[@LukeAvedon]

Great thoughts. Per 6:10, I am curious what the demand will be for more hardcore debugging skills with faster velocity and a lot of AI generated schlock. My biggest hope is we will start moving fast enough that we can finally smash the fake Agile corporate SCRUM, and the whole concept of endless meetings to write out how we are going to change a button. However, I think this might be optimistic delusion on my part. Like you, I'm not worried about the demand for developers decreasing.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

There is this story about an old mechanic that comes to a military shed to fix a huge broken drill. He walks around and looks at a few things, then he walks over to a certain spot and hits it with his wrench. The drill starts working and he hands over a bill for $15,000 to the manager. Manager is mad because he thinks the price is way too much. The mechanic shrugged and said it took him 20 years to find the spot to hit. I feel like AI generated legacy code bases will be that situation

[@LukeAvedon]

@@cody_codes_youtube exactly!

[@ottofrank3445]

I guess developers will become like that guy in front of an orchestra. But data is still dirty and unreliable. It's like snake eating it's own tail.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@ottofrank3445 OMG. I can’t believe you used that phrase. I’ve been explaining the same thing to all my friends about the same days problem. Devs COULD be the orchestrators, but we still need to be able to say “wait, that trumpet sounds like garbage, and I have to fix it”

[@nilfux]

Tell that to the people interviewing ANYWHERE.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@nilfux tell them what? I think the market is super tight right now, but so is money and business loans to start new companies and business ventures. I’m super aware of how tight the market is, and have been mentoring people for years now

[@nilfux]

@@cody_codes_youtube Ah I see where I went wrong. I meant the interviewers methods of filtering talent. They STILL DSA, meanwhile none of them can do that, and it doesn't matter if they can. OK, use this abacus to solve for N. Nope, I'll wait.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@nilfux haha, sure. That’s true. The interview process is a little bananas. But it’s what we’ve got, so we gotta play our little games until we run the companies and can change the rules. Until then, we don’t have a place of power or leverage

[@nilfux]

@@cody_codes_youtube LeetCode is a plague. Nobody but Big tech should be doing that to people. It's stupid. I have been doing this 26 years, and because I forgot to memorize an algo I will never use does not mean I'm a bad hire. It's turned the market into a mess of people with all the time in the world and no lives willing to leetcode and work for less, but can't actually deliver jack shit. When it comes down to it. We hired phd who within 6 months delivered 0 code. He had no idea how to use any of the tooling or ANY of the other stuff required. But he could solve a LC HARD within the arbitrary time constraint.

[@_andrewpeacock]

🤖 Love it! Always love a Cody Codes video release day 👊🏼

[@cody_codes_youtube]

My man!! Thanks for showing up! Always appreciate your support

[@kenshiguy7727]

Hey interesting video. I think restraint was always an important concept in software engineering regardless of AI or not. Feature creeps and maintenance hell have always been a problem and I'm sure AI will only exacerbate issue.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@kenshiguy7727 exactly. It’s not a new concept. But something that will definitely be harder in the future. It’s still surprising how often engineers today don’t consider the maintainability afterwards

[@justaszakarauskas6068]

How about embedded software engineering? :)

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@justaszakarauskas6068 ChatGPT would be great for that! But most people go to webdev so that’s a flooded market currently. Stay there! I’m tempted to come back to embedded programming!

[@jordanhenshaw]

80% of software sucks and is way underdeveloped. 80% of codebases are thoroughly unreadable. If AI can change that, I’m all for it. And I can say that because the same 80% rule applies to every single industry without fail.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Omgggggg. Yes. I will praise the robot overlords to sort out my dependency tree nightmare. Also please backfill, and rectify the broken test suite

[@birukindrias4096]

am looking for job in laravel MERN django

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Good luck my dude. I don’t know much about that stack

[@GuitarWithBrett]

I was Sr software engineer then technical manager last 5 years .. I fully agree with everything you say in this video. Maintenance and working smarter not faster is imo often the differentiator that makes devs sr. We just did a huge rewrite for scale of our app as our v1 was not tenable for many reasons .. the main battle we faced was how to keep the code base as simple and main-table as possible while actually allowing high degree of scale .. AI or mid level devs couldn’t help with this as was really a tricky balance. Maintaining the app also requires Sr Roles to maintain 🤖 I’ve been telling devs to make sure to think about Value not just Velocity since if AI can generate code efficiently a human will still need to guide the balancing between value, maintainability etc

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Thank you so much for taking the time to share. And validating my stance! I try and mentor people to treat even a normal job like freelancing, which is negotiating value and determining the real need behind a task

[@WeiZhaoAI]

👍 Cody!

[@cody_codes_youtube]

🤘🏽 yeah dude!

[@langsor]

🤖 Thank you. This stimulates a number of ideas and questions. As developers leverage AI to be exponentially more productive and as code becomes more opaque to humans (I suspect) in this process, I would think it will be important to shift focus on *how* the code is written in regard to things like modularity, plugability, maintainability, testability, etc. Since I'm not really in the industry I can't say that this isn't already true or an existing focus and concern. Even if it is, I think AI can remove the cost barrier of development in how the pieces talk to each other, that might have been too time expensive when done by hand. I really don't know. Just thoughts.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@langsor they are great thoughts! I’ve just been in many rooms where even in the past 5 years, someone with a legacy system that runs part of the business asks how it works and no one still at the company actually knows. So it becomes this forensic code reading process. if the code has been built by AI, then that will be a more difficult process

[@langsor]

@@cody_codes_youtube I personally love meta systems and patterns. I think new patterns will emerge over time using AI. As a hobbyist coder I've only played with asking AI to write or refactor code for me a couple times. I find AI output to be opaque in the way that writing PERL is opaque, which is non-intuitive to how my brain works. Normally I can read code like a book, but not as easily with AI output. If I wanted to deep dive into using AI for coding what tool(s) would you recommend that you find most elegant?

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@ honestly, I haven’t had good luck. My use for AI has been abstract where I have it diagnose code for me and I use it to make sure I know the fundamentals of what I’m writing. So it’s rarely about AI building my solution and most of the time using it to expedite my learning and debugging process

[@langsor]

@@cody_codes_youtube Thank you so much for the response. I remember you talking about that in a previous video. It sounds like that is how you are still using it, predominantly as a learning environment. I was talking with an old buddy the other night about AI and we were exploring ideas of what AI will likely never (or not very soon) be able to replace from humans. Storytelling came to mind. Even if AI evolves to a point where we can trust the black box to not corrupt data or hallucinate I doubt it will be able to replace things like *ideas* in the foreseeable future. Applying this to code development and the people who can see and reason the big picture and strategy will still be invaluable. But even in day-to-day activities I believe any real threat is a ways off.

[@isoaxe]

11:30 You might need to get an english-speaking editor for your videos or review the work yourself.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

I did review it and I felt I misspoke and also riffed too much on this video. Still wanted to push it out but I do appreciate the feedback. I still don’t have a lot of cash for editors yet

[@isoaxe]

@@cody_codes_youtube I enjoyed the video though, it's not like that took away from it in a big way. My comment probably came off as a bit harsh!

[@ClifCollins-k8d]

Thanks. Our computer technology does not work now. We have billions of applications (unfinished products), not technologies. Lets add more crap onto the pile. We are moving toward more land grabs of logic, and knowledge. Our hardware is a land grab of math, an application of numbers. We cannot add two numbers, only a range of numbers. Therefore any application built on the hardware application cannot, for all practical purposes, bypass this limitation. Fonts, communication, images, videos, memory, databases, files, executables, ... an endless list of proprietary logic and data structures, stops us from writing editors, compilers, browsers, and limits every application you wish to build. Programming (we have no engineering) is not going to change it will just get worse as "AI" wants to land grab all knowledge (just another tax).

[@cody_codes_youtube]

I think there will still be a population of people with this in mind and will leverage AI to work on our lower level technologies like you say. But I do think you’re on the nose about the industry. I think we will have a movement to getting lower levels of abstraction and logical weight in our frameworks

[@ClifCollins-k8d]

@@cody_codes_youtube What is, is and cannot be fixed. It's like trying to repair your boots while standing in them. Every piece of code we have is worthless. We can use what is as is. Logic built on another person's logic is what is, not what should be. Start over.

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@ you don’t understand code then. There is plenty of great foundational code out there, and entire industries and commerce built on top of that. Software literally running the world. Your tone is unnecessary, and not representative of the reality of today

[@ClifCollins-k8d]

@@cody_codes_youtube if you say so... I know of nothing that works. Compiler theory does not work. Databases know nothing of itself. No data sharing is possible. HTML is the worst logic I know of. Man years to write simple applications, that should take seconds. Computer technology has not improved in 249 years. Yes we can use a hand cart to carry stones, a great invention. Pretty pictures are also great. Drink the cool-aid, so I stand alone on my soap box. So "most people" think AI is not a land grab, like "Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Google" they just want to help humanity.

[@aura2301]

🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

YESS! Thanks for watching!

[@Ikbeneengeit]

Robot 🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Perfect! Thanks for taking the time to watch. I appreciate it

[@SM-ok3sz]

What a load of bs

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@SM-ok3sz go on, good sir. I honestly would love to know more

[@thehowerd8634]

Could you elaborate… I thought Cody had some really good insights

[@banderfargoyl]

🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@banderfargoyl nice!!! Thanks for taking the time to watch! I appreciate you

[@AsleepintheGarden777]

🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

@@AsleepintheGarden777 yeah buddy! Thanks for taking the time to watch!

[@hypnaudiostream3574]

🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Yes!! Thank you so much for taking the time to comment and watch. I appreciate it

[@OtherPeoplesComputer]

🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Yeah buddy! Thanks for taking the time to watch. Appreciate the support!

[@jamesdon2052]

🤖

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Yoooooo! Thanks for watching!