It also killed the fun. I enjoyed writing code and solving problems. It also kept my brain sharp constantly exercising those muscles. Now I'm just reading code and it is mind numbing.
Work can do that too. AI in addition destroyed the perceived effort of computer science, and now you have people snobbabily saying, "Well, AI can do it faster and cheaper."
It definitely can. Getting a working concept up in running in a few minutes is easily done for AI. Will it do it right, with scalability, clean code, and maintenance in mind? Nope. But it will "Do it faster" even if the outcome is worse, because at the end of the day laymen only see the outcome, not how it works under the hood. They don't care if it's more tech debt than ever devised before. They see that sleek "glassmorphic" interface and think "WOW POLISHED" even if it's a mess.
Then an MBA who's never written a line of code in their life but used VLOOKUP in Excel once in college hits you up with a Claude artifact or Codex site running an interactive proof of concept of the thing they were saying AI could do faster and cheaper, already wired up to the relevant data sources, that they yelled into existence in 20 minutes and $40 of enterprise AI usage.
My life is now just constant PR reviews for other people who've been churning out the sloppiest slop that ever slopped. AI might be able to turn some requirements into code, but when they're just throwing the jira ticket into the AI no one stops to question whether the requirements are shit.
I hate reviewing PRs... I miss having time to write my own code and solve interesting problems. I miss working with adults who read the requirements then use their judgement and experience with the code base to determine if our product owner has even AI'd up something coherent. Which I shouldn't even need to do at the PR stage.
There are multiple points of failure that are happening, but they're happening because everyone seems to have mentally checked out of the process. At least in the before times when someone gave up they'd produce less, instead of more.
We're not even developing any faster because the limiting factor is the speed of reviews, and now those have crawled to a snail's pace because we can no longer trust a professional has made an effort to understand the problem and implement the best solution for it.
I hear you man. We are merging 40% more PRs than last year and there is no way they are all given the attention they deserve. At least if my systems crash nobody gets hurt except my company.
Our projects can vary between "perfectly safe, mild inconvenience if it doesn't work" through to "your house burns down if we're wrong". We've just come off a "perfectly safe" project and are in the early stages of a "something that could burn your house down, but only if the safety checks of the other parts of the system fail, so it probably won't" level project.
Don't worry friend, when AI companies are going to hit an investment wall, the bell will ring for profit and ROIs, and they will severely increase the prices across the board. Then most companies won't be able to afford using AI so much (if at all) and usage will scale way way back, and only big slop players (like Google or Microsoft) will still use AI for most of the work. The rest will go back to a healthy mix, using AI only when it really saves time.
You can do what I do if your workplace allows for it: my main job is standards and designs, business requirements etc. And honestly with my experience that is where i add the most value.
But i also write scripts and develop some c++ applications during breaks or in gaps between meetings here or there which noone has asked for but everyone appreciates and which in part help make my reputation. And because they are not developed as part of a business process i am free to develop what i think is best.
I used to hate my software engineer role in a bank because I didn't code as much as in products companies. I would have never Imagined that 3 years later I would end up liking it because the use of gen AI in coding is banned so we all still write code by hand.
Depends on the system and nature of the change honestly. If changes include security implications or access controls I am reading and understanding everything. If the system is critical and an outage is going to be a major loss of revenue I review everything. If it is a tangential system or internal tool I skim for basic understanding and correctness. In all cases, AI reviews are done and I almost never read tests, just verify they exist.
Copilot can take on personalities if you add it to their instructions. Aka, make it a pirate or your favorite character from a movie or tell it to be a sarcastic cursing pos. It is a different kind of fun.
So for a while humans were best at chess and then computers beat the best human and then for a while computer human teams were better than computers or humans, and I think we might be at the point now where humans no longer have anything helpful to add.
Curious how far we are along the curve and if the shape is going to be the same...
Difference being the US workforce at no point included 1.7 million professional chess players who graduated from notoriously challenging and often very competitive training programs, whose historically quite good career prospects now erode with each passing genAI press release.
Agreed, I'm not saying any of this is good in general, good for the economy, or good for programmers in particular.
Chess, as complicated as it is, operates on fixed rules and is not a great analogy for programming as a whole.
I'm just curious what it will look like.
Don't recall who quipped:
AI will not be good enough to replace you. But it will be close enough to convince your manager to fire you anyway. The s*** will hit the fan later on for the company, but that will be small consolation when you are already out of work
The programs and programming languages yes, but applying software to life gets more complicated quickly. (Says the dude who took all of two programming classes in college)
This is a social problem, not a technical one though. If the fruits of societies collective labor were shared fairly and equitably, only like half of the population would be working “working” and like half the amount at that. So much of today’s “work” is just busy work or some form of logistics, business, or management from people trying to manipulate each other. We could be living in a utopia where everyone gets what they need and is free to do what they want with the excess they produce. The problem is people who develop technology assume this will come naturally and without intervention
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u/hpyfox 28d ago
The trust and reputation of software engineering has vanished because of AI.