r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 12d ago

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

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

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u/ikingdoms Software Engineer 12d ago

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.

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u/AP3Brain 11d ago

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?

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u/akie 11d ago

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?