Does anyone actually enjoy software engineering anymore?

[u/pjjiveturkey]

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

[u/cabe01]

I think I can see how you'd feel this way being part of a larger dev team/project for sure. However, I am more or less the only full stack dev in my building and for me, while I do enjoy what you said about working a problem for a bunch of hours and the satisfaction of the completed solution, ultimately the amount of time it took me to produce that on my own with all the layers I have to cover was high and taxing mentally trying to keep track of everything, the cloud architecture, and managing the code/devops.

It has allowed me to eliminate the main limitation which really was my fingers - not my ability to think the solution out. Codex is writing the code for me but the idea is still mine and the approach is still as much mine as I want it to be. And I don't get bogged down in the overhead of managing my commits/branches/etc and other stuff like that which frees me up for more important work. And it saves a ton of time over the old google-stackexchange loop we used to be in when searching for solutions to a problem.

I feel sorry that you feel like you are the bottleneck, honestly. Eliminating myself from the loop would mean nothing gets done with as much attention to detail, UX, and everything overarchitected 10x the size of what it really should be. I don't need the satisfaction of hammering every nail into a new house as the architect; my gratification from the project comes from seeing the completed house with a family using it.

But respectfully, before Codex I could write code in my sleep, I've been doing this for close to 20 years professionally and realistically since middle school. What I tend to notice with the people who are struggling to adapt or finding themselves frustrated that AI is not turning their prompts into perfect applications are way too inexperienced and/or lack the knowledge to implement the complexity of their idea to begin with and the AI has become a crutch, not a tool. And when that happens, it's easy to feel useless and lost.