I currently work at an “AI First” 🤢 fintech company, and we’re mandated to program agentically. I was fortunate enough to start working before the AI hype, but the environment right now is daunting.
There’s too much unmaintainable code slop and throw away scripts committed that I can’t keep track anymore. Each PR has so much diffs that it feels like someone had diarrhea and shat all over.
I try to manually review the code, but it feels like best effort at most. Like I may only understand 70% of the thing that I’m reviewing. What ends up happening usually is that I just ask the model and verify the output(which is horrifying I know)
I spend the whole day arguing with AI, reviewing, and pushing back against its output that sometimes I wonder if I am the one driving AI or is it driving me.
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Recently, I noticed that I’ve becoming more reliant on the model and that my skills have been atrophying. What would’ve taken me an afternoon if I program it by hand, would take me a week now if I do it now. I also find my head hurting and myself glossing over the code in code reviews and prompting claude to do even the basic of commands.
I get that there’s more to programming in software engineering (collaboration, dealing with people, etc etc), but I don’t feel like I am in control of the systems I am building anymore with the engineering aspect being replaced with babysitting and self lobotomy.
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Off work hours, I try to brush up by reading on system design and architecture books, typing by hand if I’m learning a new technology or stack, but I feel like it’s not enough to prevent from skill atrophy.
How are y’all coping and how do you recover from this? I am afraid on what skills that I’ll be able to bring at my next place of employment if I resign and that I’m becoming a jack of all trades master of none type of thing - having only shallow understanding.
At work? Do what they want you to do I guess. If they are mandating you mass produce slop, do exactly that. I’ve tried fighting against it. There’s nothing you can do when your coworker opens a 785 file PR (not an exaggeration) and it needs to be reviewed today. Your carefully crafted code can never keep up with the constant waterfall of whatever the fuck Claude/ChatGPT/whatever calls acceptable these days.
Your best bet at work is to direct the agents others will use. Use a strict linter. Mandate a strict formatter. Add to the instructions that tests must be written and must pass. Do what you can to force it to emit semi-acceptable code (or fail if it can’t).
Outside of work? What’s a coding agent?
Oh my god, the slop PRs with dozens of files abd tens of thousands of loc are insane.
I don’t even know how to review it.
My answer is usually telling them to go back and rethink the design, LLMs hate well encapsulated modules and they’re very good at spaghettifying your dependencies.
They can do a decent job understand the spaghetti, but they have no concept of what exists that didn’t turn up in the last 5 commits or a list of file names. So they reinvent the wheel every time.