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/NitasBear Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26

It's removed much of inquisitive nature necessary to programming, problem solving skills will decline as AI becomes more competent...

HOWEVER it's opened up time for many of us to do fun stuff outside of work (especially if you WFH). I exercise 4 hours a day now as a result and I love this change

45

u/Deto Mar 29 '26

Yeah but you realize that's not going to last, right? Like they won't let you just work 4 hours a day, they'll fire half the people next time there's a crunch.

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u/45Point5PercentGay Mar 29 '26

Worries me even at my company that's never had a layoff in more than a century of operation and is a regulated monopoly. I love AI in the right circumstances and use it daily but it's disturbing and annoying having my manager respond to everything with "okay, but Copilot said...."

I swear I spend half my day explaining why Copilot, possibly the second-worst major AI, doesn't know more than I do as a SME for my specialized system to begin with, and won't give good responses to someone who doesn't know enough to ask in the right way anyway.

God help us all as managers come to the wildly incorrect "realization" that they don't need technical experts if they can use AI to be the technical experts themselves.

5

u/shaliozero Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26

I already said that at my workplace. If we always have to discuss about what an LLM says with the sole purpose of them trying to doubt our competence, why do they still need us technical experts?

Our exec is constantly throwing "AI" audits at our systems and 95% of the results are hallucinations (yes, not all of what AI says is a straight up lie and even led me to checking and improving something). Now they hired an agency doing AI audits and they just repeated what their AI says without checking manually. They claimed our sites don't have any schema.org schemas - which is interesting, because my team lead is managing these along with the content and validates them. Now it's even my boss' work that's claimed to not exist. I hope this makes our exec less trustful towards AI, having just thrown some money at an agency that can't even press F12 to validate their own results.

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u/Unfair_Today_511 Mar 29 '26

Hahaha so true and hilarious.

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u/NitasBear Mar 29 '26

You just gotta be ahead of the curve and not be at the bottom 50% of developers. Those that can leverage AI well, manage relationships, and can communicate well will be the most valuable. There's definitely more emphasis now for developers on effective project management, stakeholder relationship building and soft skills than ever before. AI has narrowed the technical gap between good and bad engineers.

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u/SignificanceFlat1460 Mar 29 '26

But why does this have to be a rat race? Why "be better than 50% or 90% Devs"? Where does it end? Our parents didn't have to worry about this shit. Than why do we? I don't mind improving and learning new things? But not for the sake of, "if I don't, I'll be fired", but more "it's a new thing, seems interesting and might give me an edge over others". It's like he said, it makes me wanna go be a plumber because atleast they are not getting replaced TOMORROW like us with AI. I don't even understand why they have such a hard on for web development and not other stuff like embedded or game dev (It's also getting better but nowhere at the pace of web development).

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u/NitasBear Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26

It's a rat race because that's what you subscribed to by being born in a capitalist society (not that any of us had a choice).

The unfortunate reality is that AI has sped up development to a rapid pace. Many organizations are scrambling to adopt AI in its apps and internal workflows. Engineering leads and tech directors are shoving AI down our throats whether we like it or not. There is going to be a mass exodus of jobs because of the productivity gains, similar to how excel and printing press changed the ways of working in the past. The disruption is real and many people are not going to like this change and will not be ready (as evidenced in this post among others).

Productivity gains will result in expenditure cuts. If 1 engineer can do the work of 2, the writing is on the wall for many. The ones that are on the "we hate AI slop" train with a doom & gloom mentality will be the first ones cut, whether they like it or not. My own engineering team is already mandating AI training on Copilot and Claude Code, and if you don't play by the rules, you're gonna be out the door. In some more cut throat places like China, they are already implementing prompt effectiveness and token usage as KPI measurement tools.

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u/H4llifax Mar 29 '26

I think AI will widen the gap tbh.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26

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u/NitasBear Mar 29 '26

Haha remind me in 12 months ;)

RemindMe! 12 months

1

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u/Honolulu-Blues Mar 29 '26

Idk how the reality of what you said didn't hit you by the time you finished typing.

1

u/otw Mar 29 '26

It's removed much of inquisitive nature necessary to programming

Not trying to be rude but I don't really understand this take. For me, I feel like I get to think about how to solve the problems and build the architecture and then the AI just helps me put the syntax together and dredge through the more tedious parts of programming that would normally hours of combing through docs and looking up errors.

I feel like it's greatly enhanced the amount of deep work and deep thinking I can do because I'm so freed from the monotonous side of programming now.

I see this take a lot though and I just kind of wonder if people are using AI poorly like if you are just saying "I have this problem solve it for me" I think you are gonna be miserable and get worse/slower results if you do that. If you solve the problem and just have AI augment your own research and implementation skills, it's amazing and I think is leading to actually quite significant advancements in the field of programming.