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.
I hate to say it, but this sounds like copium. Do you still see loads of well-paid furniture woodworkers? Nah, it’s all replaced with factory IKEA stuff. Sorry, but nobody will pay for “artisanal coding” when they can get whatever they need from the AI for free.
Loads? No, but the ones who do good work are well compensated. Just need rich clients.
Not a reasonable analogy. Coding isn’t like making the furniture, it’s like making the assembly line that makes the furniture (or an assembly line that makes assembly lines that make furniture, etc.).
It’s true that a factory doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) care about deeply understanding each individual screw in each individual item. But it does (and should) care about how its assembly line is laid out — or at least the process of how that layout was determined, or the process of how that process was determined, etc.
But they will organize school trips to see us in museums, right?
(in case it’s not obvious enough, I was joking)