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 setup a private GitLab instance for myself and have been doing some personal coding on the side. It’s been refreshing. I even have used AI with it but I don’t feel the pressure to ship and I have been reviewing and adjusting all the code it generates.
For work I’ve been getting closer and closer to “vibe coding”. I added a testing framework and have the AI do test driven development and generate tests for the code it writes. That at least catches some of the bugs. But the expectation at work seems to have shifted to “if we ship bugs whatever. Well just issue a hotfix”, “bugs used to make it into production before, why is it an issue if they do now”.
When it comes to reviewing PRs they’re 30,000 lines and it’s exhausting to review those day in and day out. I’ve just stopped reviewing them, if something breaks it breaks.
My main concern with this is when something breaks that’s actually important like security or payments related. In fintech that could be a very costly mistake.
I think having an ownership stake also makes a bit of a difference for me. Code I own and care about I actually take the time to refine. Code that if I leave I don’t get to take with me is just code.
I like to think of it as designing mass produced furniture versus designing a custom woodworking project you are going to hand make. The mass produced one has deadlines, manufacturing will probably mess it up, it doesn’t need to be perfect, at the end of the day you won’t even get to own the design you came up with.
The woodworking project doesn’t have a deadline, you can take as much time with it as you want, adjust it, re-cut the parts if they weren’t perfect and you get to keep the blueprints you designed.
The woodworking project probably isn’t scalable or financially viable but there’s no doubt the end product is vastly superior
Mass produced furniture, like IKEA, goes through a very rigorous design process and have very high quality standards. They can spew out tonnes of product from an assembly line because the whole process is designed to be highly reproducible.
I think a slop factory is more like a restaurant that has decided to only cook using microwave ovens and decided that it’s too costly to check if the meals are served raw or over cooked 😅
That’s probably a better analogy. I actually didn’t mention IKEA intentionally because their furniture is pretty good 😂