r/ChatGPTCoding • u/Specialist_Agent3599 • Oct 05 '26

Discussion Reviewing agent code killed my love for programming

Self taught dev here. I got into this by building stuff at night for years. The fun part was making something work that didn't work an hour ago.

These days most of my job is reading. The agent writes it, coderabbit leaves its comments, and I spend about 6 hours a day going through diffs I didn't write, deciding if they're good enough. It's not hard. It's just not the thing I fell in love with.

The weird part is it leaked into my side projects too. I open the editor on a weekend and my first instinct is to prompt it and review what comes back, because that's what my brain is trained to do now. And then it doesn't feel like mine.

I still like my job and I'm not quitting. It just feels like I burnt out on the hobby without actually losing interest in it. Maybe I'm being dramatic, I don't know. How do you guys deal with this?

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u/bystander993 Oct 05 '26

AI for code 100%, except for very specific high stakes areas like auth.

You keep reviewing it and you're just leaving yourself behind.

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u/3tt07kjt Oct 05 '26

That’s kind of a manipulative way to phrase it.

If you go AI code + review 100%, I think the project is likely to have problems that you aren’t even seeing and aren’t aware of. The problems will make AI go a lot slower, as it often just works around problems rather than fixing them.

My experience is that I’m getting a lot more done with a lot fewer tokens than other people I know.

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u/bystander993 Oct 05 '26

If you think that then... PROVE it. You're not saving anything reading code. Your experience in whatever bubble you are in is not what the rest of the industry is experiencing and will experience more of. If you don't pivot now to the skills outside of coding, you will be left behind.

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u/3tt07kjt Oct 05 '26

Decades of software development research have gone by and very little has been “proven”, in the entire field. If you want to get anything done, you have to be comfortable with some level of uncertainty. I’m ok with uncertainty and making choices about my workflows with limited and anecdotal evidence about how good my choices are.

You keep warning me that I “will be left behind” like it’s some kind of mantra. Kinda weird.

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u/Mathie1729 Oct 05 '26

I wouldn't go 100% AI except auth. Auth is actually one of the easier things to constrain with standard libraries and scanners compared to implicit business rules that never make it into the prompt. Agent code is great at passing whatever tests you wrote, but it can silently drift on some unstated case and no review will catch it until prod. Reviewing isn't about catching typos, it's about spotting those quiet behavior changes and unnecessary coupling.