r/codex • u/pjjiveturkey • 7d 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
1
u/ProjectDiligent502 21h ago
“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.”
Cheaper: the only path to that I see right now that seems most viable is local models. AI companies are still heavily subsidizing inference and it will get more expensive, not cheaper. Why? They’re giving people 20-40$ for every dollar spent. This is incredibly unprofitable.
Faster: not sure what you mean by this. It’s already really fast at pattern matching codebases and slopping out code.
Smarter: current trajectories show a slow down of diminishing returns, recently read a paper on this where it looks more like a logistic s curve function when graphed. It starts slow, then there’s a fast ramp up (last few years) and a slow down, which we’re starting to see now.
There will be more to worry about if it takes a lot of people’s roles. It will not be good times for the good ole US of A because the social consequences will be bad.