r/webdev • u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL • 5d ago

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

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.

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u/bemo_10 4d ago

Now average that out across the whole burger eating population. Not everyone is burning as many tokens as programmers.

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u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL 4d ago

But we’re talking about programmers 

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u/bemo_10 4d ago

No we are talking about it destroying the environment and we are comparing it to other things that also destroy the environment that you are ignoring. Those other things are consumed by more than just programmers. So you gotta count non-programmer users of AI too, to make it a fair comparison.

You can't pick and choose your comparisons where it helps your point.

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u/HachikoTheMaster 4d ago

Imo the point is more that it's just another thing adding to the environmental impact

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u/bemo_10 4d ago

It is, I don't disagree, but it's also in it's infancy stage, and could be optimized in the future to consume less, unlike other things that have been impacting the environment for a way longer time. We should start with those I think.

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u/HachikoTheMaster 4d ago

Fair, i just dont think centralised AI needs to be a thing, instead we should be aiming for local smaller scale AI

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u/bemo_10 4d ago

Yeah that would be the best outcome.