I have been a developer for 6 years; I hold an undergraduate degree, have completed various professional training courses, and am pursuing a postgraduate degree in AI engineering.

I have always been passionate about this field—I’ve been active in programmer communities, built several applications, and worked at a few different companies—but I now feel there is no longer any reason to be so deeply dedicated to this area.

It’s not a matter of lacking knowledge or connections; rather, it feels as though the inherent value has been lost. In the age of tools like Claude, anyone can create a custom game just for themselves, and social media is flooded with AI-generated content. The more I study in my postgraduate program, the less joy I find in building technological solutions—everything is simply moving too fast.

I fully understand that professionals who love this field must adapt to these new changes. But how can I adapt while still finding the same joy I once did? Does it make sense to stay in the field if that "old-school" sense of fulfillment has vanished?

Just because I love this field doesn’t mean I’m bound to it; thankfully, I have the option to pursue a different profession—though I also realize there’s no escaping AI at this point.

I’d like to hear your perspectives. For those of you working in the field, how are you adapting to this revolution? For those who are transitioning to other careers or leaving the industry altogether, what are your plans moving forward? I truly love technology, but I currently feel as though I’m in a fog—having dedicated so much of myself to a world that, in many ways, no longer exists.

Honestly idk what I’m doing, as a student with no work experience the only thing i can do is keep learning, building and try to land an internship but with each passing week the technology evolves and it makes me rethink everytime if whatever I’m doing is even enough for the current standards or not

To the people who have been in the industry for a while now, is it normal to go through this phase? Like you ever had this moment where you thought everything is doomed but you still held on and made it out just fine?

Any tips on how to keep the mentality to keep going forward no matter what would be very welcoming

Hi everyone!

I'm a university student working on a research paper about whether AI will replace software engineers or transform the way they work.

I'm looking to interview a few software engineers about their experiences, how they use AI tools, which tasks AI can handle well, where it still struggles, and how they think the profession might change in the coming years.

Interview details:

\- Format: Audio-only Discord call.

\- Duration: Approximately 20–30 minutes.

\- Language: English.

\- Availability: This Saturday, or Sunday, you can tell me the time frame and time zone you are available at one of these days and i'll try to accommodate it.

\- Preparation: I can send you the questions beforehand if you'd prefer to prepare your answers in advance.

Privacy and anonymity:

\- You don't need to provide any personal information, including your real name, the company you work for, or where you live.

\- You can participate using a pseudonym.

\- I won't identify you in my research paper.

\- The paper is strictly for a university school project and will not be published publicly or uploaded to the internet.

\- You can skip any question you're uncomfortable answering.

\- I won't ask for confidential information about your employer or projects.

\- And you can make any requests before the interview if u want to add or change or ask anything

I'm interested in hearing honest opinions from developers with different levels of experience, from junior developers to senior engineers and tech leads. You don't need to be an AI expert, and I'm equally interested in people who use AI regularly and those who rarely or never use it.

If you're interested in participating, please send me a message on Discord (.rb3) We can coordinate a suitable time there, and you can ask me any questions or request clarification about the project before deciding whether to participate. I can also send you the interview questions beforehand if you'd like.

I'd really appreciate your time and help with my research. Thank you! 🙏

With AI getting better at writing code, I've been wondering how many people are still genuinely interested in learning programming and understanding how things work under the hood.
I'm not against AI at all. I use it myself. But sometimes I feel like there's a big difference between getting something to work and actually knowing what you're doing.
Do you guys still spend time learning new concepts, digging into documentation, or trying to understand things deeply? Or do you mostly just learn whatever you need while building something?
Also, what keeps you motivated to learn when AI can already do so much of the work?
Just curious how other developers feel about this, especially those who genuinely enjoy the learning process.

I love computers, learning how things work, programming concepts, languages, functions, system design, all that stuff. I can spend hours learning about a technology or thinking about how to build something.But I don't enjoy the actual process of coding that much. I like understanding code more than writing it.

I like figuring out how things fit together, designing systems, and coming up with ideas. I really enjoy using AI tools to help bring these ideas to life, combining existing code and technologies, and figuring out how to make everything work together.It's weird because I do like the coding part in theory.

I just don't enjoy sitting down and doing it for hours, especially when there's a lot of debugging and repetitive work.I'm interested in AI/ML, cloud computing, and system design, but I'm not sure if these are the right paths for someone like me. I don't expect to avoid coding completely, and I know I need to understand what I'm building. I just don't see myself enjoying a job where I'm writing code all day.

Has anyone else felt this way? What kind of career did you end up choosing? Am I overthinking this, or should I be looking at roles that are more focused on designing systems and building products than coding?

Every language gives us primitives, built-in methods, operators, and I/O with inherently known outputs, like how adding two integers with + gives an integer, or reading a file gives text.

Since the language or runtime already provides all these foundational behaviors, couldn't a smart compiler just trace through everything using flow analysis to figure out the exact types of variables across an app?

Working programmers: if someone asked whether to start a software engineering career in 2026, what would you tell them before they invested serious time in it?

I'd want to hear about both getting hired for the first time and the years that follow. Would you recommend the path you took, or would you start differently now?

For someone trying to make that decision concrete, I'd suggest building something small and then trying an unfamiliar problem from a technical interview question bank. The bank is on PracHub; I run that and LandOffer. Spend time debugging the problem and explaining why your solution works. That gives the conversation more to work with than a general claim that tech is either booming or doomed.

The application stage has its own time costs. Agent autoapply and autofill can reduce repeated submission work when someone is ready to search. I'm curious what you would tell a beginner about the work and the prospects before they reach that stage.

Hi, I need to know. Do you create separate email to have things like posthog, revenuecat,... signed up with this email? If so, which provider do you use? Im looking into something that's not going to ban my email because it wants to. I'm not sure about Gmail. I've been coding for 5 years, but apps with no backend, no error handling, paywalls,.. just a chill coding :D Now I have a new project, mucn more serious, with those things, and I'm thinking it's good to put everything on one email so I know where everything is. However facing a problem of banned email and being unsble to get into the products is scary. Thank you for any tips!

Hello!

I've been working on a comic and I wanted to post it online so people could see it. Although, I don't wanna post through one of those third party websites like webtoon, I just want a website you can scroll through to see it.

I, however, have 0 coding experience so I am looking for advice. (T - T)

I currently work for a company that requires me to essentially vibe code. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science and I spent the first two years in school without AI. The last two years I heavily relied on it to learn and get through school while also keeping up with a job to afford school. This heavy usage of AI has made me feel like I’ve lost brain cells and like I can never manually code again. I was wondering what everyone’s opinions are on vibe coding and if you have any ways for me to break out of this heavy reliance on AI to write my code.

I was working on a C# system that needed to populate and use the contents of an array every frame (you'll have to trust me that this was necessary). As an example:

void Update()
{
    int[] arr = new int[100];

    for(int i = 0; i<100;i++)
    {
        arr[i] = rand.Next(0,(i+1)*2);
    }

    //...

    Foo(arr);
}

This felt wrong, since allocating an array every frame and letting the garbage collector deal with it seems wasteful, so I experimented with pre-allocating the data instead:

int[] arr = new int[100];

void Update()
{
    for(int i = 0; i<100;i++)
    {
        arr[i] = rand.Next(0,(i+1)*2);
    }

    //...

    Foo(arr);
}

This seemed like an improvement, and I saw other things I could pre-allocate in other methods, until eventually it seemed like a third of the variables were now a field - I'd obviously gone too far.

That had me wondering, when is this a good idea? Are there any good rules-of-thumb for when this kind of thing should be used, if at all, and what on?

The array per frame allocation seems like a pretty clearcut improvement, but what if the variable we were pre-allocating and reusing was an object or a struct? What if we weren't working with a method tied to updates? I've tried to do some reading on it but haven't been able to find anything specific, so I'd love to hear what other people think.

I am a freshly minted C++ Qt developer in that I just completed an online course for C++ and the basics of the Qt framework within the past few days.

I am looking for video tutorials on how to build a GUI application using the Qt framework using Qt Quick and QML. For reference, I am not completely new to programming. I am a full-stack mobile and web developer who has been developing both types of applications for years. My tech stack in React (Next.js)/React Native on the front-end and pure Django or Django REST Framework + Django Channels on the backend.

What originally got me into web development was Corey Schafer's Django tutorial series which guided me through developing a web application using Django assuming I already knew HTML, CSS, and Python. That is when I learned that I learn best with YouTube video series I can follow along while the instructor explains what I'm coding. Is there any such series for Qt Quick and QML like building a notepad app? YouTube search results only turn up outdated tutorial series using Qt Widgets which IS NOT what I'm using and am avoiding because I want to construct the UI using QML files, not the widget picker.

Thanks in advance for your help!

I need to speak to a premium plus adult 😬

Iv been professionally in software for 4 years now. Ive mainly been a FE dev and dabbling in BE now for the past 2 years. Ive been using Supabase and now transferring over to VPS as my BE. But i completely forgot about AWS and Azure etc. I feel like im at a crossroads. I dont know what to learn. Ive done my first freelancing project and used supabase but they just annoying me. What is the best path that will make me a better developer and make me better employable.

Kind regards

Hello Everyone ,

I want to learn C++ from scratch and gradually advance to an expert level. Could you please recommend the best YouTube playlists, websites, or other learning resources for a complete beginner?

I would really appreciate your honest guidance and suggestions based on your experience.

Hii y'all! I just want to know programmers' opinion about this since we need a prototype product for our research and a website/app just fit right for our chosen problem...we have a few months to make it work and we have zero experience on stuff like this.