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.

  • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    3 hours ago

    I’m a CS instructor now (after two decades of industry), but it’s unclear how long this job will exist despite my modernization efforts. When I think about what I’d do instead, one of the top things is working for a non-profit or public-sector gig doing Good and heavily leveraging AI to get the work done (using my SE skills to keep quality up). I figure it won’t pay much, but I’m old enough now that the nature of the work has more value than the money.

    And after the workday, I’ll hopefully have something that I’ve never had in any other coding job: enough energy after work to code my own projects.

    Hopefully.

    If I had a manager who was telling me to review huge, unreviewable PRs every day, I’d just punt that to an AI with piles of tests. Under that management direction, there’s nothing you can do to save the product; you can only postpone its inevitable demise.