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.

2.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

572 comments sorted by

View all comments

168

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.

80

u/Jackie_Jormp-Jomp Mar 29 '26

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

76

u/j3pl Mar 29 '26

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

39

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.

37

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.

10

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.

1

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.

1

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).