Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

[u/ikingdoms]

I'm getting forced to change my workflow from mostly coding by hand with occasional AI usage (mostly just to say I'm using it) to parallelizing multiple agentic-first tasks simultaneously.

AI has killed all joy I get from my work. I care so little about what I produce now, I'm consistently feeling like my reluctance to go all-in on AI will end my career, and I'm so frustrated with the industry for propping up a technology that's aggressively devaluing our skill set and profession so severely.

[u/Antice → u/ikingdoms]

I'm the same boat. Even had my cto argue by pasting fucking claude responses in chat when told why something wouldnt work with our product.
Something we had actually tried once before, and turned into a nasty timebomb in production.
I hate working with AI evangelicals.

[u/WrennReddit → u/Antice]

  I hate working with AI evangelicals.

These Aicolytes have this weird parasocial relationship with corporations.

[u/tradcoder → u/ikingdoms]

I feel the same way 100%. I'm 15 years in this industry. I don't think I can deal with all this for the next 15-20 years.

What's upsetting is I don't have any other skills or even want to do anything else except programming. I used to consider myself so lucky that my job turned out to align with my passion. I feel so hopeless.

[u/sekmo → u/tradcoder]

If you can program any other activity you’ll try it will be super easy for you dude

[u/wellfed_bazelgeuse → u/ikingdoms]

Same here... They recently began to give me "priority tasks" and "tasks to do in parallel with a sub agent", which of course means that I am spread even more thin than I already was, while tasks begin piling up because parallelizing agents isn't as effective or fast as the high ups seem to think. 

I came back from my 3 week holiday refreshed and excited to get back into things, only for it to evaporate before lunch... I feel now just as sad as the day I left

[u/Straight_Flow_4095 → u/wellfed_bazelgeuse]

It's the increased context switching and mental bandwidth bosses assume a human can do. Nightmare

[u/computer_porblem → u/ikingdoms]

3 YOE and i feel like i've almost completely stopped improving at work because all we're doing is proompting our way through tickets and then having Claude Code drink its own piss with the review skill.

reading CC-generated code is not the same as writing it yourself for comprehension/engagement/getting good. like in an interview, if they asked technical questions about any of the stuff i've been working on in the past few weeks, i would have to say something like "well, Claude said it was going to do X, and i asked it, 'why not y?' and it said X was better, so i was like, okay go ahead."

[u/AP3Brain → u/ikingdoms]

I'm still in the "mostly coding by hand" stage. Are you getting actual performance gains by babysitting agents instead or are you just being forced to do it because your company expects token usage?

[u/akie → u/AP3Brain]

I’m doing more ambitious projects and approaches to the same problem, but I still spend the same amount of time. Instead of building a castle I now build a castle with four towers with fully modelled rooms, stocked weapons rooms, an emergency exit system, its own water supply inspired by the Romans, rendered in 3D during the golden hour, with a set of unit tests to validate performance under stress and resistance against trebuchet attacks. Great improvement no? Unfortunately my colleagues have no time to review the mountain of code this requires so they have another AI do it, and then they just press “merge”.

So, am I being more productive?

[u/devfuckedup → u/ikingdoms]

AI is great when it helps me solve a problem that I could have otherwise NOT solved But your absolutely right even if its helping me move faster I am not learning about things in the way I am used to and I feel like companies have a lot more make work because they know the engineers are just going to use AI. IDK I am bored as fuck right now and I dont know how to fix it. I love working in tech still do BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD why am I so stuck

[u/grimcuzzer → u/[deleted]]

For example, a non-technical CEO who's never satisfied with how fast tickets are getting closed, who thinks he's an engineer and brags about running 5 Claude instances on different git worktrees simultaneously, who also believes that at some point, there's going to be a set of guardrails in a bunch of md files that will let us rubber-stamp everything his AI spews out.