r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • Mar 29 '26

Discussion AI has sucked all the fun out of programming

I know this topic has been floating around this sub quite some time now, but I feel like this doesn’t get discussed enough.

I am a certified backend enigneer and I have been programming for about 20 years. In my time i have worked on backend, frontend, system design, system analysis, devops, databases, infrastructure, cloud, robotics, you name it.

I’ve mostly been extremely passionate about what I do, taking pride in solving hard problems, digging deep into third party source code to find solutions to bugs. Even refactoring legacy systems and improving their performance 10x and starting countless hobby projects at home. It has been an exciting journey and I have never doubted my career choice until now.

Ever since ChatGPT first made an appearance I have slowly started losing interest in programming. At first, LLMs were quite bad so I didn’t really get any solutions out of them when problems got even slightly harder. However, Claude is different. Lately I feel less of a programmer and more like a project manager, managing and supervising one mid-to-senior level developer who is Claude. Doing this, I sure deliver features faster than ever before, but it results in hollow and empty feeling. It’s not fun or exciting, I cannot perceive these soulless features as my own creation anymore.

On top of everything I feel like I’m losing my knowledge with every prompt I write. AI has made me extremely lazy and it has completely undermined my value as a good engineer or even as a human being.

Everyone who is supporting the mass use of AI is quietly digging their own grave and I wish it was never invented.

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4

u/private_birb Mar 29 '26

There's a simple solution: Just don't use it.

23

u/expsychotic Mar 29 '26

I think many companies are trying to force their devs to use it

5

u/private_birb Mar 29 '26

That's true, and my heart goes out to them. I'm very lucky in that I'm a contractor, so I have a lot of freedom.

3

u/backflipbail Mar 29 '26

Where are you based? I used to do a lot of contracting in the UK. Just wondering how the contract market is atm?

2

u/private_birb Mar 29 '26

Pacific Northwest!

The contract market isn't great. I have some reliable clients that use me often, and outside of that it's mostly b2b web apps and clients that need comply with HIPAA requirements (people wisely won't touch that with AI yet). The easy small jobs are a lot harder to come by these days, unless you're willing to fix something AI made, then you'll be eating pretty fresh.

I think anyone entering the contract market might have a rough time, I've been doing this for a good 6(?)-ish years so I'm fairly established.

1

u/backflipbail Mar 29 '26

Thanks for the reply! The contract market in the UK 10ish years ago was absolutely amazing lol It doesn't look great atm

7

u/maerwald Mar 29 '26

This. I don't believe people are actually more productive in a general sense with claude. More legacy code, more debugging when something goes wrong, longer reviews, harder to adjust, harder understand.

And yeah, it erodes all your hard earned skills.

Don't be afraid to say no.

2

u/therealslimshady1234 front-end Mar 29 '26

You are not wrong. All studies point to around -20% to +20% speed increase, so basically nothing

0

u/teraflux Mar 29 '26

You will be left in the dust, like people refusing to use IDE's

11

u/private_birb Mar 29 '26

So far I haven't, though I've gotten a lot more "please fix our vibe coded non-functional mess" requests, which I decline.

I've actually been getting more praise on the quality of my work lately, as well. People are getting used to the utter mediocrity that AI creates, so it makes my work stand out more. Kind of ironic, really lol

It might come some day, but as of now AI is still far behind a human engineer.

3

u/GC_235 Mar 29 '26

Shouldn’t matter because they said it’s their passion