June 7, 2026
Ctrl+Alt+Existential Crisis
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
Coders are spiraling as AI turns hard-won expertise into a "use the bot more" memo
TLDR: A longtime coder says AI at work is making years of specialist knowledge feel less valuable, especially after being told to use the bot more. In the comments, readers swing between despair, jokes about becoming robot handlers, and arguments that maybe machines taking the grind is actually the point.
A veteran software engineer went public with a very 2026 panic attack: after spending 10 years building a career in online payments and finance, he says the rise of large language models — the chat-based artificial intelligence tools now used at work — is making his carefully earned expertise feel frighteningly less special. The real gut punch came when his manager basically told him his planning documents were too slow and he should lean on AI more. That’s when the author realized the bot could suddenly connect years of niche knowledge into neat plans at a speed that felt, frankly, career-erasing.
And in the comments, the mood was less “calm debate” and more collective existential dread with a side of dark comedy. One reader summed up the vibe with brutal simplicity: “nobody cares anymore.” Another chimed in that this was the first post to perfectly capture their own anxiety, adding, “Not sure what’s next.” Oof. But the thread also veered into gallows humor fast. When the author floated turning a woodworking hobby into a job, one commenter slapped that fantasy down by saying artisan furniture probably isn’t exactly a safer bet than artisan software. Meanwhile, another delivered the most memeable line of the discussion: “We will work for the robots, steering them to steer us.”
That split is the juicy part: some readers hear doom, others hear liberation. One AI optimist argued this is actually the dream — let machines do the forced labor so humans can do what they love. In other words, the internet can’t decide if coders are being replaced, demoted to robot babysitters, or accidentally being set free.
Key Points
- •The author is a backend-focused software engineer with 10 years of experience, including work in finance, bookkeeping, and payment processing.
- •He built specialized expertise in payment-system topics such as PCI compliance, ledgers, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, escrows, and idempotency.
- •After joining a finance-focused company, he was given ChatGPT and Claude Enterprise accounts and encouraged to use AI for research, writing, and coding.
- •His manager told him to use more AI when producing design documents meant for both engineers and product managers.
- •He says LLMs were able to speed up writing and help connect domain and technical trade-offs in payment-system design, which made him question the value of his accumulated domain knowledge.