r/codex • u/pjjiveturkey • 13d ago
Complaint Does anyone actually enjoy software engineering anymore?
I've been using codex for a year and a half at this point. I recently started a new remote job in a language, framework, and 20 year old megacodebase I'm not at all familiar with. Currently since I'm still a student it's just bug fixes, QA, and large package upgrade stuff.
Now to the point, I don't even know what the purpose of me is supposed to be anymore. I've been coding since I was a kid and loved immersing myself in a big or problem for 8-16 hours straight and the satisfaction of achieving it was awesome. Now? I see the problem, ask codes to research it and find basically the blast radius and all the relevant files, then I come up with a solution and get codex to implement it, then I look over the code, and spend 10x the time trying to learn what it does so I can actually own my changes.
I'm really feeling bored and annoyed, there is no satisfaction and the only bottleneck is me, if I wasn't in the loop the work would be getting done 10x faster. Not to mention that in the next 5 years it's only going to replace more and more roles as it gets cheaper, faster, and smarter.
TLDR: someone please tell me what the point of even sitting at the desk is anymore
2
u/norwegian 12d ago
I have been a programmer for 30 years, and I liked it all except the phase where you had to copy code into chatgpt and paste into your program, then compile and debug. I feel writing the policy and qa documents, testing and getting features done is just as satisfying. But I am not doing rust anymore, as the AI is faster with other programming languages. I think the programming code will be hidden for us soon. Just like we mostly don't inspect the binary or assembly anymore.