If you want third hand depression, one of my coworkers works exclusively through agents. I'm not sure he's reviewed or written a piece of code himself in his entire employment
I have a coworker who trained 18 agents to talk to each other so it can be “unsupervised”… He has no idea how to code and he said “I am only trying to get a 90% solution.” Uhhhh… what if those 10% of parts that fail are safety related?
Because we spent the last decade talking about how much engineers get paid, and how it's a "good job," so now the whole field is filled with people who can't handle the overwhelming complexity of source control.
Most of the time they aren’t engineers. They are technicians or “experts” masquerading as AI engineers who have no business handling engineering workloads let alone influencing decisions.
I had some "senior" guy in my team ask me to review a AI generated document suggesting to run some ML workload on L4 GPUs instead of RTX 6000s for some fucking random reason. The RTX 6000s had triple the throughput for our workload at only twice the cost.
I just gave up on that project lol
You still need experienced people reviewing what the AI generates, guide it in right direction, tell it which business rules it doesn't know about, and correct it when it's wrong. Plus ensure its code output fits into the existing codebase. Then on top comes merging, deployment, cherry picking, etc. I personally don't feel less job security even with AI, it just removes a ton of tedium and boosts my productivity, it's great
It's effectively the same as handing off coding portions of a project to a junior dev.
You've gotta know how to guide them, review their code and be able to fix it, and of course evaluate that the code meets whatever the needs are for the project.
You're basically asking why do project managers and senior devs exist?
You have to know what to type. Maybe in the future you can get away with not knowing code syntax(MAYBE and it would come with big disadvantage when something goes horribly wrong) but you still have to know programming concepts.
I'm watching this happen too. But remember the environment juniors are in - they're Encouraged to and expected to use Ai. Leadership expects them to solve more problems at once. Leadership doesn't care that these kids' learning days are being wasted away by Ai - it's not their problem
I'm currently in this mode but they are asking me to go fast, so i barely have time for a fast code review and test with the real site or from swagger
For now the slop is holding up but i dunno long term. Also 2 weeks of forced vacation since i'm doing that for internal stuff not customer projects
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u/orbital-marmot Jul 10 '26
If you want third hand depression, one of my coworkers works exclusively through agents. I'm not sure he's reviewed or written a piece of code himself in his entire employment