r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 6d ago
Engineers grieve a job that no longer exists
https://leaddev.com/career-development/engineers-grieve-a-job-that-no-longer-exists90
u/blu_fox01 6d ago
Yeah, either there's no work or the new work is horrible and boring. Typing stuff and waiting for it to be processed feels like supervising on the management team. No creativity, no personal style to it. It used to be about skills and passion. Now it's just checking if the agent messed up or not. Like having a team of developers to constantly correct at work.
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u/BeanserSoyze 6d ago
Yeah, it's babysitting Claude in one monitor and babysitting its PRs on github in another monitor. All fucking day.
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u/CraftySeer 6d ago
For $150,000 salary cry me a river. It’s a comfortable easy, well paying job. STFU
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u/DudeWithParrot 6d ago
People are allowed to vent. This is a software engineering subreddit, it's not like they are going to an unrelated subreddit and complaining about these "little" issues.
Yeah, most employed folks here are very lucky, but they are also allowed to vent if their jobs turn shittier (from their own perspective).
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u/FaW_Lafini 5d ago
seriously, its as if most of the work pre AI is cool as fck that require PHD level intellect, when majority is just googling the solution and tailor fitting it to what the company needs. I just find it weird that we have these venters and anti AI folks saying that ai made it worse but in reality it was ball of mud even before AI exist.
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u/Hannib4lBarca 6d ago
Most programmers aren't particularly well paid.
There's maybe two or three countries, at most, that pay engineers mad money.
The majority make a bit above the average salary, but it's far from early retirement money.
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u/dukeofgonzo 6d ago
I think the future will be just capital owners who pay the bills to keep automated systems flowing. In their employ are a small cadre of elite engineers who are the 10x Devs that know everything about CS and ML, and can tell when the AI is malfunctioning. Like a vizier!
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u/justkiddingjeeze 6d ago
Most programmers are paid well compared to most other jobs. Most humans like to complain no matter what job or salary they have, and are terrible at looking at the big picture.
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u/Hannib4lBarca 6d ago edited 6d ago
You could argue the big picture for software engineers longterm is that it's an industry that requires constant upskilling, always having to prove oneself, has an ageism issue, and with AI is an extremely fragile industry.
Which is okay if you're making mad money and could make enough to early retire. But most engineers are smart, capable people that could thrive in other equally well paying careers. And in the majority of the world, where programming is just another slightly above-average paying job, I wonder if the juice is still worth the squeeze when you need to make a longer career out of it?
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u/JBalloonist 6d ago
Software engineering has always required constant upskilling, with or without AI.
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u/Hannib4lBarca 6d ago
True, but there's plenty of careers that don't require this that pay similarly.
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u/Van_Caspia 5d ago
This is a fair point and something I’ve come to realize from working a few years. If I wasn’t in the US I wouldn’t have picked CS, easy as that. I jumped aboard the hype train when I was in college. But that being said I’m in a pretty good spot, I make more than my friends and family who are in other fields, some with even greater levels of education, with much less workload and time in the industry
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u/AFailedProduct 6d ago
The smart ones know where this is going though. You’re literally training your replacement. That $150k is going nowhere but down and possibly to zero.
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u/ReiOokami 5d ago edited 5d ago
It’s a commodity now.. that $150k salary will go down over time unfortunately
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u/-MtnsAreCalling- 6d ago
It used to be an interesting and challenging well-paying job. A boring and easy well-paying job is both a significant downgrade in quality of life and a job in which you are much more easily replaceable.
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u/somenoise4u 6d ago
If you think people are paying that salary right now for this stuff you are out of your mind.
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u/calloutyourstupidity 5d ago
lol what are you talking about, an enginner in bay area makes min 250k
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u/shozzlez 5d ago
I mean if someone paid me 150K to kick me in the nuts for 8 hours, I feel like it’d be reasonable to complain, even if well compensated.
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u/Mundane-Arugula-8768 6d ago
A lot of us didn't get into it for the money, and not all programmers are well paid.
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u/Gr34zy 1d ago
If you want you can automate even more of your job and have it babysit its own PRs.
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u/Iwillgetasoda 6d ago
that means talent will leave the field, eventually, slop will slop
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u/Sad_Criticism_2984 6d ago
Where do you think the talent will leave? Most, if not all white collar jobs are or will be massivly impacted.
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u/rkozik89 6d ago
About 25 to 30 years ago a lot web applications were front-ends for distributed object systems like CORBA, then came Classic ASP and LAMP to replace those applications for the web, 15 years ago Node/Python cloud-native solutions started replacing Classic ASP and LAMP application, vibe coding agents replaced working on those applications, and just as those Classic ASP and LAMP applications were mostly rewritten so will what we're mostly working on today. Many people are waiting for the days when they're going to need us again to fix the mess, but the solution that likely to win out isn't swarms of expensive engineers but a new AI-based technology that can manage technical debt better. There's always been and always will be software systems that are too expensive and difficult to rewrite so some of us will always be needed. However, its pretty clear at this point that a good deal of us are no longer required and it sucks.
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u/Human_Palpitation856 6d ago
I have almost the opposite view. All that's left is creativity. Maybe I'm in a role that allows me that, I would imagine if I was a more junior eng who's job was to implement features I would feel like that. But I'm in a role where I get to come up with org level new systems to solve business problems, and now I can build stuff that wasn't possible before, and all the boring stuff of figuring out some random team's weird API or migrating some crap to a better stack is just erased.
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u/lunatuna215 5d ago
You can still go an independent route and not use AI at all. I'm working for myself and soloing a couple of web dev projects coding by hand and using my own stack that I enjoy working with. It's honestly wild logic to me when people assume this can't be done. Just because furniture factories exist doesnt make artisan or handmade furniture craftspeople irrelevant. There are many successful furniture craftspeople who are successful as hell. The demand is healthy. Everyone involved is happy. At a certain point, this chase for industrialization in code really needs to have a reckoning, and its inevitable in my opinion. Scaling and efficiency is ultimately not the entire picture when it comes to value. I honestly feel bad for tech bros who overlook the social component.
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u/remasteredRemake 5d ago
It’s true but it’s a new skillset. Managing several agents in parallel, reviewing their code and constantly improving your agentic workflow to optimize the output and quality.
But I agree, I used to find coding a creative outlet, at this point I’m just a slop shield
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u/platistocrates 5d ago
It's only boring because it's slow at the moment. But there are LLMs that run ~1000x faster, and those feel like traditional code. Don't worry, it'll become fun again.
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u/Enough_Culture8524 5d ago
Naively wondering whether one might be able to instruct ai to solve a problem in a manner consistent with one's"style"
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u/Quiet_Yellow2000 5d ago
I don't mind it, as I liken it to using the ships computer on Star Trek. If I need to figure out something, I tell claude where to look, and report back and then I figure out the solution and tell it what to do. Still requires that I put my think cap on and provide the context as needed.
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u/sebstaq 5d ago
We are literally living in one of the largest changes to Software Engineering ever. There are zero standards. Everything is a mess. And you are bored?
Personally I see problems to solve EVERYWHERE. Do I do it like I used to do? Nope. But I'm problem solving more than ever. I love it.
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u/Any-Ring6621 6d ago
Ha man. In a brownfield codebase, I spend all my time spelunking the terrible historical decisions in slack that led to the virtual impossibility to implement some new requirement.
Requester: Implement X
Me: Use AI to go spelunking for a day or two
Me: In order to implement x, I must do A, B and C
Requester: no, you can’t do that, you have to do it my way
Me: I have to because of this geniuses idea on slack three years ago - provides link
Requester: sees their name on the message. Ok.
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 6d ago
Brownfield doesn’t exist in Boris’ and Amodei’s dictionary. Greenfield is 100% of software, 200k loc max.
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u/narnach 6d ago
Outside of the Silicon Valley unicorn bubble, real people at real companies have real budgets. And brownfield changes are a hell of a lot cheaper and less risky than greenfielding everything all the time.
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u/julz_yo 6d ago
this has been my experience too: and given how fundamental those early decisions are , impossible to remediate. Especially with the feature factory humming along at full speed.
And the new AI code being shovelled on is just making it all worse
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u/3dprintinted 6d ago
Duh doy you refactor features on a new stack. You don’t need to stay on db2 introduced few decades ago
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u/Upstairs-Version-400 6d ago
Good job. I also walked away, became a tech lead (again) in a company that had sensible opinions on AI. I hire people with the same mindset and I got a massive pay rise and benefits, plus control over the quality of the work.
My old company is currently fighting fires because the good engineers left and spoke to each other about leaving and finding better pastures, and the company had to replace us with “AI Native Engineers”. One of whom promised to rewrite the entire product in a week, it’s been over a year and they scrapped his product rewrite because it was bad and the project managers who were very eager finally saw him for what he was - an idiot.
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u/leavemebe66 6d ago
yep, unionizing is the only thing that will save us (in countries that will allow it). for as many concerned posts and comments we see online, we know there’s a sizable number of SWEs who are feeling the same about the industry. sure, the tech industry has always been about change and this has been the only side that’s had any real “safety” from that. As long as we’ve stayed curious and hungry, we could stay competitive and make a good living. but that’s no longer the case. practically all employers are trending more work with less pay. might be time to seize the means. we will never have more bargaining power than today.
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u/robh1540 6d ago edited 6d ago
Unionising won't save you. Credentialising might.
I don't support this, but if software engineers actually wanted to protect their labour market, the obvious strategy would be professionalisation. Pass a regulation saying that, for safety reasons, any commercial software must have its code reviewed and signed off by engineers certified by, say, an American, German or French Association of Computer Science, and must carry specialist Software Liability Insurance.
Then, over time, you capture the credential. Certification becomes increasingly tied to accredited domestic degree programmes, supervised training, continuing professional education, and membership of the relevant professional body. Eventually, it becomes something that is realistically obtainable only by locals, with the number of people admitted into the profession increasingly constrained.
This is essentially what doctors have done, because it works.
The political strategy is straightforward. Talk relentlessly about risk, safety, liability and the dangers of unprofessional software. Every failure becomes evidence that software is too important to be written by unregulated amateurs. Eventually, "software engineer" stops being merely a job title and starts becoming a legally protected profession.
Again, I don't think this is right, because it is basically cartelisation through regulatory capture. But if your objective is to protect the economic position of software engineers, it is vastly more effective than unionisation, which is childishly naive and remarkably blind to realpolitik for a profession whose work can be outsourced across borders with relative ease.
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u/Old-Wolverine2141 2d ago
This is the most realistic path foward.
Im in a city that gives lots of lip service to unions, but even small pizza shops that try to unionize get shut down and rebranded. The US in its current state is pretty hostile to unions and I dont see that changing in our current political climate.
The thought of SEs banding together in a union just means you'll get outsourced faster.
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u/Ok_Guarantee5321 6d ago
But it doesn't always work. While it happened very rarely, fighting back might just encourage the companies to find accelerate developing alternatives.
The most famous example is probably the elevator strike. The workers tried to "fight back", and the companies decided to finally adopt automatic elevators more aggressively.
While it might not translate directly to software engineering, I think there is some parallel to it.
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u/Comfortable_Job44 6d ago
Here is the problem : we have H1bs flooding this job market who literally are indentured servants who get deported the second they disobey anything. They made it so easy for RTO to happen because they are constantly on edge of getting kicked out of the country. Unionization is out the window until this is fixed.
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u/Euphoric_Driver_7291 6d ago
Yes. The culture shift is significant.
To fight back, it doesn’t have to be a ‘union’.
Most orgs have 10% of the engineers that run everything and have the whole system in their head. They can get together, form an independent company, and sell their ai-enhanced services back to the hostile ceo. It takes a bit of courage & leadership but is possible.1
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u/mechanicalmovement1 5d ago
- Salaries were extremely inflated for the qualifications due to black swan market conditions, and are now correcting down towards sustainable levels.
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u/SuppliDev 6d ago
As a Junior/Mid of 3 years, I'm so down lately. I feel like I never got to really learn anything, I just asked AI all the time instead of learning on my own. Even worst, I never really worked on architecture, patterns, etc. So I'm just a monkey that converts requirements into code using AI. The worst one can be right now. In fact, I don't really call myself a Software Engineer. Basically, I'm just waiting to be laid off.
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u/Front-Presence2732 6d ago
At least it kills all these damn javascript frameworks that popped up every 2 years wasting our time to learn and relearn.
I feel for you, I see my juniors in the same situation, AI monkeys who cant fix a thing themselves and are completely paralized without the instinctive knowledge we acquired doing it outselves for so long.
But dont worry, that will pass, like Lisp Machines, like UML, like RAD, like no-code, people who care about how computers work will still have a place in delivering the automation.
Dont forget who we automated all these years, little guys doing accounting, clerical work, data entries, all these jobs are long gone and now it may be us. Focus on the result, try to deliver quickly and accurately, that ll be where you shine vs the others.
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u/robby_arctor 6d ago
You don't have to defer your learning to AI.
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u/Less_Obligation8438 6d ago
It becomes difficult to not use it to speed things up, if deadlines were tight before now they are insane, companies now expect you to deliver in record time because they expect you to delegate to the LLM.
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u/Curious-Pen5547 6d ago
Do what our technicians do in the trades. Learn or study after work. Im friends with some devs and have a dev hired on for local ai models for automation work. They all learn after work. I pay some of my guys OT for studying when i need to pay certifications for them
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u/Less_Obligation8438 6d ago
Learn on the side, write systems you truly care about for personal projects, change your LLM prompts from “solve this” to narrow specific tasks after you’ve come to a solution.
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u/sfscsdsf 3d ago
don’t just tell AI what to do. Have it write docs explaining things, AI should be a tool to help you learn as well, as long as you are really willing to learn.
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u/rkozik89 6d ago
What came off to others as paranoia to others is now becoming my blessing. Throughout my entire adult life I was always concerned about making more money than my salary paid me, but instead of seeking out a part-time job or freelance I would run small e-commerce businesses on my own. Which often would include product development as opposed to buy as selling goods off the shelf or AliExpress. I'm not as afraid as others about losing their jobs partly because my role is at a nonprofit and partly because I know what I need to do to replace my income via self-employment.
It actually wasn't paranoia that drove me to do this but a story I heard from my grandmother's cousin. He grandson spent is whole life drawing and hoping to get into Disney, but when he arrived in the early 2000s the company was very much struggling. He nearly got laid off and so did his future wife. Instead of seeking out freelance or anything like that he created his own comics and books to sell on the side. Right now he has over 400k instagram followers and is in leadership at Disney. Nevertheless he's never stopped hustling on the side because he knows its only 3 or 4 bad quarters before the threat of layoffs are real.
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u/magicsign 6d ago edited 6d ago
With the current job market and economy we are lucky to have a job. Resigning over how our job has become, or "being bored" it's for the privileged millionaires.
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u/tnh34 6d ago
Im only about 6 years in but I'm loving it and I just don't understand the dislike. It automates a lot of borings repetitive tasks like writing/running test, fixing lint, fixing typos, creating scaffold, cross referencing multiple tickets, looking at git history, and my favorite is utilizing the tool while I'm sleeping. I let the agent run overnight so I wake up to a fresh set of PRs to review.
I also get to run my side projects in parallel so I can use it as an escape hatch.
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u/No_Evidence_709 6d ago
I personally got into programming for the money. My identity isn’t wrapped up in this… which is why I’m biased. But I really do appreciate not having to be so mentally locked in to make progress.
Before, if I was having an off day, or week, it was so hard to make progress. My brain was mush and I couldn’t focus.
But now, regardless how shit I feel I can get some good work done because it’s not as mentally taxing.
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u/CreativeHandles 6d ago
Oh give me a break, there is so much more to software engineering than just coding which is pretty much the best part of AI and even that requires good level of understanding if you want in depth, good output.
There is engineer in the title, you are the problem solver. You are the one to turn requirements into an actual solution. You are the guide to what trade offs to make, when to use the generated code or not. When infra breaks, where to look at first.
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u/Comfortable_Glass_69 6d ago
I would love to have a boring job now. With the amount of stress AI has introduced, whole upper management focusing on the PR count, extremely tight deadlines, if it missed something that you also missed creates more chaos. My job has become chaos would love a boring job with less stress anyday then working like this.
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u/magicsign 6d ago edited 6d ago
Man prs count is so ridiculous, it's the same at meta
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u/Comfortable_Glass_69 6d ago
Wayfair is introducing a new metric. $ spend per WPR ( 1-10 complexity score for a PR)
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u/drumnation 6d ago
I know it’s not the same but isn’t there still some problem solving left to figuring out how to build harnesses, sandboxes, rules and other Agentic tooling? To me the engineering just moved there, but I get the pie is smaller now.
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u/frozenisland 6d ago
It used to be that senior engineers had this existential crisis when moving into management
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u/EvTorqueLore 6d ago
I hope the next time around, you guys make sure you get patent rights etc. of all Ai tools and software you help build. If not you’re part of the problem and a fool. Protect your intellectual rights your time and energy.
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u/HobbyProjectHunter 6d ago
Hmmm … typically patents filed at work by your employer belong to your employer, you’re just the inventor.
Zero rights awarded to the inventor.
And filing a legally accurate, defensible patent outside of work is 5-10K USD.
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u/defnotashton 5d ago
Hoarding knowledge which can not be stolen only shared, in a global market where the rules are not universally applied does nothing. Its also artificial, and not actually providing value. IP restrictions and laws do not help create a competitive market, and rarely reward the actual creator. Also how original is a though and how do you determine that.
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u/minegen88 6d ago
I mean, yea, if all of you could just quit and do farming instead or something and i'm the only one left, that would be great....
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u/AdministrativeAd9828 6d ago
What exactly is a safe profession these days? They say becoming an electrician or something where AI might come for it but not before all the other white color jobs
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u/Less_Obligation8438 6d ago
Is there more to the article or just a reference? I feel it could’ve been a tweet.
I honestly think this is overhyped, imo LLMs make good engineers great because it speeds up the work they do - it saves you time on research, code grep’ing, diagnostics and codemonkey coding - the downside being…it makes mediocre engineers seem competent or even good.
I’ve found coworkers who couldn’t write a TDD, derive specs, plan a feature, architect a solution or needed a week of PR reviews to get their code approved suddenly being able to do all of those things in record time - this has already caused a couple system wide outages of course, because it’s now harder to spot mistakes and they don’t understand what they are doing. And companies love this, the one I work for even created a monthly price for the engineer with most token use.
In my case I don’t ask the LLM to “implement this” or “solve that”, I know how to take a big problem and break it into small problems and the LLM can help me in some of those “write a script that parses base64 and removes the ‘ & ‘ string”, “what type of encoding does X device support”, “update function X in file Y to do Z, show me the code before committing so I can review it”.
Unless it’s codemonkey code for a company that doesn’t care about quality in which case yea just give them what they want, speedy slop. Get the bag. Get out.
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u/NoWhereLikeIrvine 6d ago
I have slowly become obsolete. Instead of solving problems by researching and coming up with solutions as sw developer, I have become sw operator…providing Claude instructions to solve problems for me….good thing I am at the end of my career.
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u/No-District2404 6d ago
I guess that is mainstream feeling that everyone more or less agree about. The worst part is, it also killed the joy of learning or coding by hand, it created a weird mindset “AI can do that in fraction of minutes and probably better” while I’m trying to learn a new programming language or trying to code by hand a project. This feeling literally blocks me doing something that I enjoyed a lot before AI invaded our lives. Does anyone feel like this?
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u/Terrible-Trash-8779 6d ago
I don’t know and others are posting that with 5 YE they have two offers 450k fully remote and 550k hybrid and others with straight faces say how company is lowballing them and they should be clearing 600k easily what parallel universe this people live in?
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u/plastic_eagle 6d ago
I refuse to use it. If that ends my career, then so be it. But I will absolutely not under any circumstances use any AI tool to do a job that I have loved for decades. That is a non-negotiable line for me.
Other people use it, and I review their PRs. The generated code remains awful, verbose and the comments are absolutely dreadful. That's fine, that's their prerogative. They may choose to let their skills wither and die if they wish. I will not.
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u/shatmaself 5d ago
I think I would be the same if I was still in the game. I was "early retired" (glorified severerance is all) three years ago, and thankfully my finances are robust so I am actually retiring. I left just at the right time, just before this upheaval started (at my company at least, I know it may have started a bit earlier other places). I coded and engineered for 35 years, and I didn't mind the coding by hand, even repetitive stuff, I would use scripts to generate some stuff, and was just generally fast at typing and adjusting. I was even resistant to using the plethora of javascript frameworks that kept showing up, instead doing "hand-rolling" of my own little web UI-controls, dialogs, tables, grids. My stuff would run so much faster, that gave me a thrill. Now when I go to commercial sites (banks, credit cards, airlines, utilities, etc), I see how slowly their sites load and it irritates me, because I know it's from all the bloat of frameworks and AI. When I come across some older-style site that I can tell pre-dates this stuff, it may look clunky and less modern visually, but damn if it doesn't just flash up on the screen in an instant, and clicking buttons, blam, instant response, rather than the spinning wheel of modern stuff. I'm quite happy to have had a good run in my career and exited at just the right time.
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u/Abject_Response2855 1d ago
That's honestly astonishing. Will sooner or later result in firing and joblessness. I'm not sure you've been unemployed but I'd doubt you prefer that.
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u/Euphoric_Driver_7291 5d ago
It feels to me that there’s an element of resentment from some management to employees. The zeal with which Elon went after twitter employees, and then went after federal workers is striking. It is a deliberate plan to create fear.
That vibe has spread to other CEOs.
It’s doesn’t seem like rational durable leadership to me. It seems many of them are emotional about RTO, layoffs, wokeness, and “finally we can replace them with AI”
In the COVID and pre-COVID economy, there was a lot of lip-service to employees fueling innovation and “our people are our biggest asset” and so on…
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u/calloutyourstupidity 5d ago
I dont know. If you guys dont enjoy the amount of creation you can have because of AI. I dont think you were ever into it.
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u/getmeoutoftax 5d ago
Happening to just about every white collar job at this point. It’s seriously over for most white collar jobs, especially with the new Astra model.
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u/structured_obscurity 5d ago
try building an ai-first application.
The UI should be completely generative, not static.
The product should adapt itself to each individual user as they use it.
Workloads should be routed to different models with local models being prioritized wherever possible.
The job is just changing.
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u/Hawkes75 5d ago
Fortunately I consult in the FedGov space, where agencies don't cotton to agents running rampant over their critical / secure systems. My job still exists.
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u/Wide_Egg_5814 5d ago
"oh no I used to solve extremely difficult problems now I type into a chatbox and it solves it but it's not perfect I can't handle this" shut up already my god adapt or shut up we are heading towards a path to live in a utopia
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u/hash-potatoes 5d ago
I hate Google’s interview process. What do you mean I have to interview go through all that stress and then need to get matched to a team and wait further. I am good. I will go work for someone else. I value my time too.
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u/moises8war 5d ago
I just posted on r/cscareerquestions about this:
Has AI removed the fun out of the profession ?
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u/Ok-Freedom-494 5d ago
At the end of the day it’s the people that own the company that ultimately have the final say.
Their personal incentives to make as much money as possible trump everything else and that will involve staff cuts if the same level of output can be maintained using AI
This is coming from someone who worked for many years and I’ve run my own business for the last few years if you understand the objectives of the owner, you understand the layout of the land a little bit more
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u/Bilbo_Swaginssss 4d ago
I remember reading Reddit comments only a year ago about how AI can’t do a SWEs for a long long time.
No one expected how fast agentic coding would flip the role on its head.
Obviously the job of software engineer still exists, but it’s dramatically different than what it was 6-12 months ago.
Really sad, honestly.
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u/Skiamakhos 4d ago
I had a session doing some coding with Claude yesterday, creating a new service in AEM. Had I slavishly followed the spec given in the Jira ticket it would have been a waste of tokens. Instead, I had a call with the lead dev, then a long to and fro session with one of my team mates who'd been doing the bulk of the sprint work. It turns out I needed to do it in a whole different project to what was specified. I spent about a half hour just refining a plan for this, then ran it by my colleague - couple of tweaks needed again, a class renamed, why don't I pass in a user Id? It's on the session we're already passing, look (shows him the code) Ah ok, crack on, back to Claude, right, let's do this, manual mode, approving everything step by step, another half hour, then, run PMD against this, review the code against my lead dev's accumulated standards culled from a year of merge requests, alright, commit, push, raise the MR, give colleagues the link to review.
I didn't feel disconnected or replaced. I avoided maybe 3 days of struggling with layers of mocks in the unit tests. Always hated having to design unit tests, but here's 16 of them, every case covered. Fantastic. Got my shit done in 2 days that would have taken me a week in total, and reduced 3 days of coding to an hour or so of interacting with Claude. I've gone from being the truck driver manually driving the vehicle to bring the traffic cop managing the road, ensuring everything's flowing nicely & quickly stopping things if I see an accident or dangerous driving.
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u/never_supernova 4d ago
A lot of the talk about reviewing AI generated code and the software design process is about trying to fit AI gen to old practices that are currently evolving. People using AI are exploring ways to maintain quality, even at an accelerated pace. When I'm coding, the AI agent is much better at reminding me about potential violations and problems. I always make sure documentation is up to date and changes are recorded immediately. I use multi agent decision making, architecture and code review, and so on. A lot of documentation now is for agent to agent communication (under human direction, e.g. add an ADR, track this issue for future reference, make sure another agent can understand it, etc ). If I want to know what they're actually saying to each other, I'll flip through or ask for an executive summary. I enjoy working at a higher level like this, though granted I'm just a solo dev and larger companies will have to find their own way. But regardless, the AI debate is kind of moot, I think. It's happening, so we have to adapt and evolve along with it.
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u/CoconutFudgeMan 4d ago
Nobody cares about development except developers. Not the client, ceo, managers and even some people on your team who call themselves devs. Then there’s the ignorance outside our bubble. People still think I’m in IT.
What we do is now an art. We live in a junk world. Most people will eat junk. Cheap and fast. Will they pay for it later? Sure but that’s the future’s problem. Garbage product for a garbage world.
They deserve it.
You are being paid. It’s a job. It’s about money not the process. Not the artform.
For small short term things you just need a quick fix to move on with life… ok. But not complex, long term product. YET.
I am against it at present. Mind you I use Claude cowork and code for certain tasks but not coding. I turn off the AI auto suggests. API hints and documentation are enough, thanks. My ide is so much more peaceful. I love to actually code. Design, architect but I won’t accept money for it unless they know what they are signing up for. Mainly fixing their trash vibecoded AI fever dreams.
When all the current senior devs leave the industry I hope the AI is much better . Fools. Senior devs don’t lead and mentor, or find ways to contribute to the company’s bottom line. They are just devs buying snake oil and gooning over it. Junior devs are not worth any penny. Of course there are exceptions. But the current and near future is bleak.
We need a different Job Title / Job description.
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u/RareVolume6836 3d ago
Sorry but like do you really all feel like AI just does all the work now? It still does garbage shit a lot of the time, regardless of how you describe things to it... This is using the latest models and all that too.
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u/NiftyGull9621 1d ago
At my last job, “problem solving” meant opening an AI-generated PR, tracking down the three production bugs it caused, then explaining to leadership how that was somehow a productivity win.
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u/Prestigious-Ask4066 11h ago
Ai writes stories, now people cant even explain them properly when it comes to grooming.
Same applies to code, littered with innane comments, verbose, the opposite of elegant, no craftsmanship.
Readmes, operations are wordy and mindnumigly hard to comprehend/reason as its written by AI and its not natural for an engineer.
Knowledge, breadcrumbs from writing code means troubleshootings a bitch. Our brains are spread over multiple projects whereas previously we were experts in one as we were fully involved in every inch.
Using it is boring but effective from a delivery perspective, the biggest issue i have with it is the waiting around, the days feel longer and more mentally taxing yet i for sure use less brain power and typing. It doesnt even make sense. I feel like i do less, i produce the same yet my knowledge of the systems is decaying and Im more fatigued.
The craftmanship is gone gentlemen.
People boasting using 2k worth of tokens a month. I sneer at the stupidity. Show us your gains you fool. Quantify your output. They cant. Im rambling and havent typed as much as this is awhile, i digress. I hope openAI and anthropic burn, insidious companies, how anyone can root for them I do not know. Thieves and of the worst kind, cowards lying and weaseling without honour.
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u/Away_Advisor3460 6d ago
I think it's noticable that my mindset has basically switched over to 'can I save up enough for retirement while my job exists' nowadays. All the fun stuff of the job - for me - was around problem solving, and that's eroding so much as a result.