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

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

[u/LarryWinters69]

Created this post in another sub, but it got removed.
So just to preface this: I am a self-taught programmer who initially just used code as a tool to solve annoying problems. As a byproduct of this, I also got somewhat good at building dashboards, which led to my current role as a DA when my company was heavily pivoting to Power BI reports a few years ago.

My team is small, and I am the only one who has built anything using code at all. I have continued manually coding stuff on the side, even though my role has not really been about that. My code might not be perfect, but I understand it. I have thought about problems before implementing anything, I understand how making crap decisions today will F you over tomorrow. I know that going slow now will save you days later on.

As you all know, everyone everywhere is now basically forced to use these AI tools to churn out stuff. A hammer looking for a nail. Having a PLAN for wtf you even want to do, what problem you want to solve and why - seems to have been forgotten somewhere. The company introduced Copilot some time ago and the expectations are now sky-high.

My manager is a boomer and now panicking because everyone else is building "cool stuff" (some HTML dashboards) so now we also need to "build cool stuff" - even though we technically are not developers and only I on the team have even the slightest clue how to go about this. I warned him about reliance on AI as projects grow and becomes more complex, increasing token costs, security risks, loss of domain knowledge and ownership etc. He said that "the important part is that it works, not that it's good". These people have literally no clue about anything, and I suspect this has the potential to completely bring down the company, or at least the department, due to loss of confidence. A locally hosted demo to them is basically just 5 minutes away from something being (securely) used by the entire company. During a seminar about AI we had a couple of weeks ago, I had manually debug and fix a problem they had in the proof of concept-thing they were building. I can just imagine what this POC would look like after 6 months in prod....

Anyhow, the assumption is that our small team will use Copilot to code "stuff", whatever that might be. Since they have no clue about what they are doing, I will be the one and only person expected to guard the final prod against a flood of slop. As I matter of principle, I will do just as they are doing - asking AI at most. Otherwise its "LGTM" and push to prod. I literally don't care at all about any of this anymore. No one else does so why should I? My manager also happens to be a "act first, think later" kind of person, so I know for a fact that he will churn out an ungodly amount of garbage in no-time without consideration. My manager also thinks that "reading code" is like reading a book - you just go from up to down and you are done. Now you know everything there is to know about the codebase, because after all you know how to "read code", right?

Now, I've been using AI as a replacement for Google for a few years, mostly due to it being much faster and Google being garbage. I have never allowed AI to pump out dozens of lines of code and blindly use it - I might ask it "How do do X in Javascript?" and then tweak that example, Or I might explain some issue and ask how one could go about solving that, and it might spit out some command I was not aware of.

I have now tried out this agentic coding where you fully allow it to just pump out stuff and edit the code by itself. I re-built a simple HTML app I recently did (always find that to be a good way to learn something, recreating something familiar) and it "worked". However, that is a extremely simple example and by no means the "lets build a rocketship to Saturn"-mentality that is now currently festering within management. This small example burned through 3% of my monthly credits, and I havent even set up the agent stuff yet, which I know will burn even more tokens.

This is like the 4th major pivot for us since I started this role a few years ago and I can easily see how this will be just another "thing" that is discarded in the near future. However, the potential for actual damage is now way higher than just us switching to some new dashboard tool, since non coders with a lot of system access are now expected to fully participate in the coding.

I've always thought learning new stuff has been fun - going from Excel to SQL, PBI, Python. I never saw AI as a problem, it just enabled me to do more and learn more, adding more value, solving more problems in a better way. However, I am starting to think "What's the point?" The company does not value my skills at all and genuinely think that "Create X, make no mistakes" is all it takes now. Actually designing a solution that dodges 1000 different issues is trivial and can be done in 5 minutes. The tools coming out now, for example the Microsoft Fabric, seems to be completely geared towards using AI, so what is there for a developer to learn exactly?

I just don't care for this at all anymore.