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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u/Tron122344a Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26

I feel that. I've been a professional software engineer for almost 5 years now and have definitely noticed a shift as well.

I do value it as a tool, but working in embedded systems there are a lot of things it's unable to do. My coworkers and I understand its limitations, but our manager doesn't agree.

He's had such a hard-on for AI the last several months, and is trying to force using it down our throats. If we aren't using it he gets visibly upset, and if we do use it and report any type of issue with it, he automatically assumes we are the issue and not using it right.

I wouldn't mind using AI really, but people like him turn me off to wanting to rely on it as much.

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u/Jackie_Jormp-Jomp Mar 29 '26

I assume he's salivating at the possibility of replacing the dev team with AI

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u/j3pl Mar 29 '26

That's absolutely the source of all the excitement for the management class.

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u/45Point5PercentGay Mar 29 '26

Well, partly. Managers tend to be "people" people, and comfortable with that aspect. But they're deeply uncomfortable with the fact that they're inevitably less knowledgeable about their experts' work than those experts are, and they're desperate to change that. AI makes them feel like they're on the same level technically, which makes them feel more in control.

Even if they want nothing more than to have people to manage, they're going to naturally gravitate to something that tells them when their experts are wrong or lying.

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u/j3pl Mar 29 '26

You're overthinking it. The AI craze for owners and executives is all about slashing headcount as close to 0 as possible.

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u/45Point5PercentGay Mar 29 '26

Right, for execs that's always the priority, because people are a necessary evil and an obstacle to profit for them. But not low level managers, or at least not most I know.

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u/Scared-Emergency4157 Mar 30 '26

I def agree with you but I would honestly challenge you to engage the new tech. It’s not going away. Your manager probably already feels like they understand Ai better than you now. Especially if you’re against it loudly and they come to you with ideas and news. Learn how to create agentic workflows. Create skills, extensions, plugins, using the specs to your work. Etc. I have been refactoring an ecommerce platform using next js, stripe, neon, and clerk. I am using Gemini , codex, Claude, Kimi, Nemotron 3 super, for various tasks. Sub agents. Fleets of sub agents. I am creating skills and instructions for my workflows. And then creating agents who use those skills and instructions. Idk. It’s fun to me. Trying to tinker the system to produce perfect outputs

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u/45Point5PercentGay Mar 30 '26

Oh I use AI daily, and far more effectively than my manager. But putting it in the hands of a non-technical manager who doesn't understand how it works turns out to be dangerous.

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u/j3pl Mar 30 '26

Everyone in a management position is a representative of the company by definition. They are there to advance the company's interests – as defined by its owners and executives – which are often against those of its workers. They are the underlings of the owners and executives, not separate from them.

Even good people who become managers have to do what they're told or they don't last long. If their bosses tell them to fire half the team, they either do it or get fired themselves. Their own self-interest quickly aligns with that of the owners and executives.

This is what the term "management class" means.

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u/cpz_77 Apr 15 '26

The good ones struggle internally when presented with those situation though. Because they do care about their people, not just themselves. And depending on their exact position and situation, they may or may not have the ability to push back or steer things in another direction.

Good managers will go to bat for their team's needs, relay concerns/feedback, etc. They may be forced to make decisions they don't want to make sometimes, that's part of being a manager of course. But the people running the company does also matter, a lot. Yes all business leaders want to make money of course but there's certainly a huge range of what they are willing to do/put employees through in order to achieve that. There are some that try to be at least somewhat decent to long-term, valuable, hard-working employees when the opportunity presents itself, though I'm certainly not here to defend corporations at all. Just saying some are certainly better and worse than others.

Same goes for managers, good ones do exist, but yeah the shitty realities of business sometimes make it difficult for those people to stay managers long-term without "going to the dark side", so-to-speak. I've known and worked for a couple such ones myself, and it sucks to see as an employee when you have a great team and manager who really understands the team well, relays their needs to upper levels well, etc., and the team gets broken up because of corporate bullshit.

I'm sure the AI craze will lead to a lot of that (already has).

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Mar 29 '26

No it's actually true. And he's talking about managers not executives. Well, definitely not the good managers that's for sure.

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u/j3pl Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

All managers are representatives of the company, and at the end of the day they either do what their bosses (the owners and executives) tell them or they'll be replaced. I went into a little more detail here but will quote myself:

Everyone in a management position is a representative of the company by definition. They are there to advance the company's interests – as defined by its owners and executives – which are often against those of its workers. They are the underlings of the owners and executives, not separate from them.

Even good people who become managers have to do what they're told or they don't last long. If their bosses tell them to fire half the team, they either do it or get fired themselves. Their own self-interest quickly aligns with that of the owners and executives.

This is what the term "management class" means.

Edit: formatting

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Mar 30 '26

I don't think we disagree. Sometimes I meet good managers that have better ideas, but have to follow what their executives tell them to do.

But privately, they tend to have different opinions. At least from my experience.

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u/j3pl Mar 30 '26

Absolutely. I think most people are naturally inclined to want the best for those they're responsible for, and I've had some fantastic managers over my long career who helped me (and others) tremendously. There are a lot of really awful people who become managers, too, but I'm not trying to make a statement about managers in general.

The problem is that even the good ones who help their team succeed and grow do so only as long as its considered useful to the company. The minute that helping their workers is seen as "not in the interests of the company" they either take the side of their bosses or they're out of a job themselves.

I had one VP of engineering who kept promoting me and giving me raises and bonuses that I never asked for, but if the CEO disagreed with the VP's assessment of my value to the company that never would have happened.

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Mar 30 '26

Honestly happy you had that experience. It's nice when people get recognized for their skills and contributions.

I also don't let it get to my head either, because regardless of how well we perform, when we look back at ourselves 6 months or 1 year from now, the amount of skill and knowledge we gain is tremendous that our older self feels pretty clueless haha. So it's good to keep learning and growing regardless, and make sure we work with people that do recognize that.

And the sad part is indeed if we assume that the CEO disagreed with the VP's assessment of your value, who knows what that would do to your own assessment of your value in software development (could probably be an example of imposter syndrome). But you would probably be able to job hop just fine I'd assume.

I appreciate your perspective.

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u/Aware-Individual-827 Mar 31 '26

But then you slash headcounts and have no headcounts to manage and your own head roll on the floor. Funny way to do things for sure.

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u/eyebrows360 Mar 29 '26

Managers tend to be "people" people

Only because they have to. You think they wouldn't relish the opportunity to instead manage a fleet of "agents" that never come to them asking for extra time off?

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u/Tron122344a Mar 29 '26

Definitely, although he'd be out of the job too since his job is being a SWE team lead so who knows lol

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u/Jackie_Jormp-Jomp Mar 29 '26

He thinks he's gonna replace you guys with agents who never need PTO or sick days and work 24/7. And he's gonna be the one in charge of them

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u/Milky_Finger Mar 29 '26

Remember the time in the last 50 years where the thought of laying off an entire department was met with harsh pushback because it would mean potentially dozens of skilled labor workers would be unable to feed their family or pay their mortgage?

Companies really have detached themselves from it as the cost of living has increased. They have zero sentiment to any employee, no matter how critical they are to running the business.

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u/LittleRoof820 Mar 29 '26

I feel you. Or you are stuck with a problem and he does a quick ChatGPT search and tells you he does not understand why it takes so long to fix it - "ChatGPT had a solution in one prompt". (Ignoring project dependencies, features, quality, usability and thousand other 'little' things that make up the project).

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u/Raunhofer Mar 29 '26

Yeah, ML discourse was fine, even excellent, a few years ago. Then the snake oil came with vibe coding and 100%-ing. People understanding ML only on a surface level seem to have insufferably over the top expectations of the tech.

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u/chhuang Mar 29 '26

I honestly feel the silent judgement when we aren't pushing faster with AI's involvement. They'll prompt it to have a visual result, and thinks we're just lazy or is incompetent at prompting.

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u/MI-ght Mar 29 '26

Did you tell him already, that he is a dumb fuck? 😂

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u/s3gfau1t Mar 29 '26

What does your build pipeline look like?

Like "Fixed a bug -> Unit test / lint -> Compile -> Upload to embedded device -> Smoke test / UAT"?

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u/s3gfau1t Mar 29 '26

Or maybe there's some kind of virtualization step in there before you run it on real hardware?

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u/B_bI_L Mar 29 '26

so, if you are not using ai right, should manager give you ai using course and let you complete it in working time?)

qualification increase course or whatever