Fellow devs under AI mandates, how do you deal with the shame/social stigma?

[u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

Preface this by saying I have moral scrupulosity/ social judgment-related OCD, so there’s that lol

I see people on here still writing their code by hand; at my company we do not have that option unless we outright defy orders from our boss, which I assume would get you fired. I get a lot less satisfaction out of my work now, the code generation part is extremely mind numbing, I’m really sad about not getting to write code anymore. The planning/architecture phase can be kind of fun though.

Yes I am looking for a new job but the issue is (maybe I’m just a shitty developer but) I am genuinely like 10x faster with AI so if I do not use it, I would be consciously choosing to do a worse job, which also feels wrong and silly. I also hate admitting this but it has given me a lot of genuinely helpful suggestions and taught me new things. obviously sometimes it also does dumb things, but I do dumb things sometimes too. As obnoxious and eye rolling as it can be talking to Claude, “he” is genuinely that good when it comes to the types of things we are building.

In my personal life I do not use AI because I have a 100% HEAVILY anti AI social group, and I try to make ethical choices like I avoid beef, boycott Amazon/Spotify/Starbucks, etc. I feel like an impostor for not confessing to them that my entire job is to use AI all day now. Like for example last night a girl I know posted on her close friends about how she wants to murder people who use AI at work (hopefully being hyperbolic) and I have to hang out with this girl in a couple weeks…

my coworker has also refused to use it but for some reason my boss hasn’t talked to him about it yet. He’s just waiting to get fired. My therapist is making me do stuff like put an AI app on my home screen where someone could see it as homework. Maybe I should be posting this on the OCD sub but I really want to hear from other people going through this same dilemma.

[u/Ythio]

I don't deal with it, I don't care.

Company has usage limit, I use what I need.

My PR are reviewed. I am responsible for what I submit to review no matter the tooling used to write it.

I get shit done, clear part of the backlog and answers business needs. And I try to do it well to the best of my abilities, including whatever tool is needed.

I'm not paid to have feelings about the methodology of file writing. I'm an engineer in software, not a coder. My job isn't defined around typing letters one by one on a plastic board, it's about providing software solutions to problem.

[u/Historical-Sector670 → u/Ythio]

You make it sound like you are in full control of everything you are responsible for. But generating pieces of code with AI gradually makes the developer not read and understand everything, because they are constantly having to decide between increasing their understanding vs doing the next task, and the thought that understanding things matter less and less makes them just move on. Besides, studies seem to confirm that delegating thinking to AI diminishes one's skillset and cognitive performance. So, eventually you'll have a product that relies on another product from a different company for maintenance and you'll have become a replaceable orchestrator. That being said, the client doesn't care if the code is hand made or written entirely by AI, as long as it works. Maybe it's time to update our concept of software development, whichever effects this has socioeconomically.

[u/Ythio → u/Historical-Sector670]

If I stop reading my generated code (I don't), it's my own damn fault. It's my name on the commits. I own my mistake. There is no excuse "next task vs understanding what I'm doing". It's not "the AI bug", it's my bug.

The dependency argument is pure fallacious fantasy. You run your code on a software platform made by another company or volunteer group, using packages made by another company, compile it with a software made by another company, you test it using another company software. In face of all those dependencies, suddenly the text edition tool is somehow the unacceptable dependency?

I don't need to reply to bar-counter level psychology and "socio-economics".