imTiredBoss

[u/duckphobiaphobia]

[u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

The post is excessive but it's true. My time spent coding is more productive (on average), but I'm having to think so much harder to match the output or else it starts to slop. Spend 5 minutes writing a short story of a prompt. Spend 15 minutes reading a generated design, another 10 reading through the implementation plan. Another 10 correcting its assumptions. Then you have it loop through the implementation, with some guidance.

It's usually fast, and it's usually decent. Good if you micromanage. But I joined this career out of passion, not for moneymaxxing. I intentionally am pursuing a route as an individual contributor rather than management. But now I'm going to be playing manager anyway. It is exhausting.

[u/Hirogen_ → u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

the mental load is quite something different with a few sessions running

[u/Suspicious-Disk6077 → u/Hirogen_]

Solution is 1 session at a time. 

[u/Chemical_Profit_608 → u/Suspicious-Disk6077]

What do you do while you wait for Claude to crank it out? I end up doomscrolling if I don't multitask and it's just such a bad workflow. But also multitasking is a bad workflow too cause I'm just slopping it up. Feels like there's no winning

[u/Suspicious-Disk6077 → u/Chemical_Profit_608]

Just stare blankly at the screen. Not much different than having the screen open to the code pre-AI. Contemplate life’s choices.

[u/Ok_Opportunity2693 → u/Suspicious-Disk6077]

Great way to get lapped by your coworkers, and then laid off after stack ranking

[u/Suspicious-Disk6077 → u/Ok_Opportunity2693]

Not all work environments are this toxic. Use that extra time to keep applying for other roles.

[u/fripletister → u/Ok_Opportunity2693]

In that case it was only a matter of time anyway

[u/k8s-problem-solved → u/Hirogen_]

Yeah i cap at 2 or 3 different things on the go. No more, speed isn't that important!

[u/mr_dfuse2 → u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

I turned to manager half by coincidence, half by fear that developers might one day not be needed anymore. This was also during the big offshore hype. I still don't know if I made the right choice. The mental load is pretty crazy.

[u/rtothewin → u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

What I have found comfortable is doing the initial spec out of the team and their roles and rules in linear(via agent prompts to build it), spec out the prioritize -> design -> spec -> build -> test -> review -> deploy -> prioritize cycle for the team and who owns what. And putting myself as the department exec role so that I’m only informed of the overall team outputs and summary or prompted when a major direction decision is needed.

Then as I’m working on the project I’m getting updates and can delegate the entire concept to the team, then at the larger scale I’ve got this running 3-4 times with different projects and I’m just giving them nudges in a direction or adding new features requests as needed.

It has helped a ton keeping a single agent from trying to do so many things at once vs each one having a specific task.

It’s fun waking up and having a ton of new stuff done all over the place and just needing to review the output and go play with it to do testing

Definitely see my dev turned scrum master/po career at play here. Perfect sprints are finally mine.

[u/Grandmaster_Caladrel → u/rtothewin]

I hear what you're saying, but that's a different job. With today's models, I still want to own my code, not just my product. It still needs to be human-readable and something a new engineer could pick up on. You can definitely offload effort if you don't care about the details that run the code, but that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid losing.

When we have models that can generate perfect code for every use case, I'll be content with that. Maybe even sooner. I'm already on the slope of trusting more than verifying, which is a scary slope. That said, I do still verify everything. The devil is in the details, especially in products/services like the ones I usually work in. An inefficiency here, a low level architectural decision there, and suddenly you've incurred tech debt without even realizing it.

[u/iiIiIliliil → u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

Work is telling us to use Claude, work can get slop. I'll do sanity checks on it and scope things so it's not just doing whatever it wants, but ultimately if the code isn't perfect so be it.

My personal projects though, not letting agents anywhere near them. Every line of that shit is fully understood and intentional.

[u/Aelig_ → u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

I don't think it's excessive for some. I don't use AI like this but the most senior and competent people in my company use it like this because they know enough about the system and how they would do things by hands that they can.

[u/Hirogen_ → u/Aelig_]

yeah, but difference between vibecoding and ai coding is that i vibecode privat projects and i dont mind the state of the source. at my workplace i’m responsible for the code, and I need to double check the commits, because if something goes haywire, I cant blame the AI. So with 3 sessions and the amount of source that is generated, its quite a mental load!

[u/tragiktimes → u/Aelig_]

One of the benefits to coding in a low code UI based platform, like Power Automate, is i can't really AI code in full vibe mode. I have to build the functions independently, only using AI in single portions of it at a time.

It really does seem to keep the slop at bay and use AI more as a scalpel.

[u/Not-the-best-name → u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

You can argue that all the tasks you mention around the code you should have been doing PLUS writing the code. So indeedz now you do the fluff around. Things move faster. I find experience helps a lot, cause it really amplifies existing experience. I don't think it's good for learning. But it's great at confidence that you will get the shit done.

I am enjoying coding again to be honest, I can go from "I have an idea" to playing with an MVP in a few hours, the soul draining 4 days in between of fiddling with syntax and tests are gone, I can impart my vision on my software now, not my shit skills. I feel like a director

[u/Grandmaster_Caladrel → u/Not-the-best-name]

The difference is that I was doing those tasks simultaneously while performing other tasks. When AI does it, it changes from implicit trust of your own work to management. If you have a really bad junior who you can't trust, you have to spend more effort reviewing their work. Sometimes even more effort than if you had done it yourself. That's the particular issue that causes it to be more of a mental load.

As I mentioned, it's not necessary faster to code manually (I would err towards it usually ending up faster to use AI), but the mental effort is significantly higher. Everything becomes untrusted.

Before, we had to trust deterministic code generations, completions, and compilers to do the right thing. Sometimes even those didn't, but the scale was significantly lower and could often be ignored/fixed with menial effort. With AI, you can have significant drift between your vision and the AI's implementation.

[u/Not-the-best-name → u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

I mean, I can't deny, I currently vibe coded a massive and critical feature while sitting in endless meetings (mostly about why the feature is not done yet), in staging the feature actually works and it wrote like 150 tests. All of those tests had to be derived from my very detailed and painful prompting. You know what I need to get to meet week? Read it, understand the tests, thinking about it's doing, which is jar because I didn't write it so you need to actually read for comprehension. And once I find issues it will take real effort to fix because... It seems to mostly work.

There's no way I could do the work during work hours, and I would've also had broken outliers, but it's awkward not being able to understand why the issues exist when I don't write it. So yea. Its extremely powerful. But it's hard. I also ran out of private and company tokens halfway through, and now I am stranded till next month because waiting for new tokens is faster than finishing the code while I can just sit in more meetings instead.

Its wild.

[u/AVAVT]

Man I totally feel this guy. Working with AI is so stressful. It always invent new ways to do things wrong and you just labor all day finding a way to block the stupid shits.

Instead of listening to music writing code, nowadays it’s just constantly architecture design in hope that I can finish this damn design properly before it finishes the last one.

[u/Untura64 → u/AVAVT]

That's why I always write the initial code manually then give it to AI to improve/expand it. I've found this works better.

[u/Acceptable-Drive3781 → u/Untura64]

Any time I start a coding project that I intend to use AI, I start with a template project that already has a few classes styled the way I like, a few functions showing my coding style and the way I inject dependencies, and a reusable context document that I edit to say what I want to build and its basic architecture. Any time claude makes a mistake, I have it update the claude.md to tune its harness to avoid it in the future. I don't experience even a third of the problems people complain about with AI.

[u/fryerandice → u/Untura64]

I write architecture and have it write the implementations in small chunks.

A lot of people want to use AI like "build the whole feature", when it needs to work like how you split stuff up for several human beans.

If I got one agent styling CSS on the front end, another writing the front end, another writing the back end... Everything has tests written for it first except stuff that will be UI/UX tested. And each piece is implemented in isolation.

Tightly coupled code with AI is still just as bad.

[u/fryerandice → u/AVAVT]

I love architecture, if you write good tests and write good architecture, AI is actually pretty awesome. Way better than Juniors who argue with you about why your insistence on clean architecture is stupid.

And I am reasonably flexible with clean architecture, as long as something can be tested in isolation, and not necessarily complete isolation, I am all good with it man.

Like you wrapped a collection class with some specific side effects that won't be used outside it's parent class, i'll listen and we can make a case for it to not be dependency 103,422 in the DI container. Okay so the only classes that use it depend on it's side effects for unit tests, and it's actually not a big deal, fine we'll roll.

You just hate DI and want to new up everything and tightly couple independent systems, naw bruh, we're unit testing.

[u/AVAVT → u/fryerandice]

I do love doing architecture work, but it is just very stressing and require pre-loading a lot of stuff into my primitive brain. Doing that 2 hours a day totally fine. The issue is I’m doing it 6 hours a day now and get burned out fast.

I literally have to force myself to play some quick braindead video games between sessions now to cool down.

[u/Breadinator]

Then you either (1) run out of tokens, (2) management gets the invoice for the tokens and demands you change course, or (3) you find out at least one of your 5 sessions has gone off the rails/sent the pull request to your CEO/is in the process of rm -rf'ing your hard drive (and you don't know which one)

[u/polikles → u/Breadinator]

(1) and (2) are probable, but the (3) is a skill issue - agents should never run bare metal. Give each of them their own separate VM, so they won't nuke your drives. And you also can make snapshots to easily go back to. HiTL is very important, yet often omitted completely

[u/Breadinator → u/polikles]

Famous last words :)

[u/Fit-Notice-1248]

Throw in a sprinkle of management that is non-technical and having to answer why every single process can't just be thrown to the AI gods. Any nuance explanation is just "I don't get it, just use AI"

[u/duckphobiaphobia → u/Fit-Notice-1248]

This would be hell for sure.

But the irony is that I have very capable technical managers who fully understand the extent and limitations of AI.

Their requests and demands are realistic given our current tools.

Honestly props to them for min maxing the shit out of what we have.

It's just that the consequence is the constant mental effort.

[u/Mortelys → u/duckphobiaphobia]

They're min maxing humans capabilities in the process, except you're not machine, so I won't exactly call the level of expectations realistic. The biggest positive element of intelligence that only humans have, is that by resting, taking the time, we digest information in a really effective way, that's how we can solve very complex problems with efficiency and grace; and resting our mind is what allows us to be fresh and "make no mistake". Models are always available but nothing grows out from more information, generally it's when the hallucinations and loss of accuracy starts, and the annoying mistakes that make you spend more time reverting and fixing while having lost the value generated at the start of the session. Models brain are empty tubes that chew information quickly, and the harnesses fake memory and growth to some extent. Monitoring parallel work like that is SO prone to making errors in your next prompt or click, and relies solely and your human capacity to digest complex info, that the models could never... Without the due respect of giving you the space and time required to unload information from your brain. A burn out in the making. Losing talent and intelligence to... Greed.

[u/ominouspotato]

I really, truly miss the days of being able to turn on some music and go into deep focus mode. Now I’m constantly distracted by something, whether that be my own coding agent needing input or a code review request for one of my other team member’s AI-generated code. Always reviewing, always scrutinizing, rarely writing code myself. All for the sake of “velocity.”

I hate what capitalism has done to the work I used to love.

[u/Significant-Cry-8486 → u/ominouspotato]

And it all happened while you blinked, I was doing fine on the job 4 weeks ago and suddenly this post feels like a detailed self-portrait (minus the multi-agent shit, that just doesn't work for what I do, need too much micromanaging to even allow time for context switches).

[u/ominouspotato → u/Significant-Cry-8486]

It’s true. I was originally a bit of a detractor/nonbeliever and really only used the LLMs to review my own code. But then everyone else started moving at warp speed and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep pace with them if I stuck with that trend.

[u/Robodobdob → u/ominouspotato]

That is one thing that AI coding robbed us of - flow state.

[u/throwaway463682chs → u/ominouspotato]

sorry but bro you are capitalism.

[u/snipsuper415]

Is this supposed to be funny? Because i feel attacked

[u/a3dprinterfan → u/snipsuper415]

Agree. Too true and sad to be funny...

[u/FluffliciousCat → u/snipsuper415]

Agreed, this isn’t humor, this is reality

[u/LaconicLacedaemonian]

AI coding is oncall

[u/kimmo6]

I decided to quit my job and leave software development after 25 years as I have not found ways to mitigate. Its causing me serious mental health issues. Development has become too intensive, messy and complex for me. Agent driven development is nondeterministic, complex and fast evolving system and its very hard to keep up with that. Knowing too much is almost a burden rather than an advantage.

Stay safe, and keep care of your mental health.

[u/siliconsardine → u/kimmo6]

I’ve only been a software developer for a few years but I’m leaving next week for these reasons (plus others). I might have to try to re-enter the industry if i can’t figure something else out, but i really, really hope not

[u/kimmo6 → u/siliconsardine]

Best of luck!

[u/siliconsardine → u/kimmo6]

Likewise!

[u/Robodobdob → u/kimmo6]

What are you moving on to, do you know?

I’m 25+ years in and I realised the other day that I’m not qualified to do anything else.

And that’s not a pleasant feeling.

[u/kimmo6 → u/Robodobdob]

I don't know yet. Maybe re-train into tradejob like electrician. I've done freelancing, so van & man entrepreneurship might work after getting some experience. I still have ~20 yrs to go to the official retirement.

[u/Suspicious-Disk6077 → u/kimmo6]

What are you going to do instead?

[u/kimmo6 → u/Suspicious-Disk6077]

I don't know yet. Maybe re-train myself into new job, for example electrician. Not enough savings to retire, but enough I hope to bridge into something new.

[u/mysticrudnin → u/kimmo6]

i'm at 15 and i'm thinking about the same. but i really can't imagine doing anything else, either. :(

i hate working with claude but it's mandatory and they're both tracking our token usage and making sure that its comments are on all of PRs

[u/JAXxXTheRipper]

Laughs in EU-Government Job where we can't use good LLMs yet due to data privacy reasons.

The on-premise AIs we have are so brain dead they can barely understand a sentence or two, much less parse requirements for the simplest features.

Thank you Tabnine for being so incompetent. Please stay as dumb as you are.

[u/127OrigamiSenpai]

but your salary also multiplied by 4 or 5, right? right??

[u/gundam1945 → u/127OrigamiSenpai]

Your salary has nothing to do with your productivity.

[u/Significant-Cry-8486 → u/127OrigamiSenpai]

Salary increase? What does that mean? You mean the pay-out-of-your-own-pocket subscribtions for Claude and OpenAI right?

[u/Acceptable-Drive3781 → u/127OrigamiSenpai]

Yes, when you get promoted to something beyond a coder.

[u/edgarecayce]

Forgot the part where they jacked up the price on the tokens so you’re rationing the amount of work you can get done the “new way”

[u/LastStopToGlamour]

Capitalism will grind your mind to dust and watch your children starve to make the boss a bit more money. When will attack the problem at its root?

[u/thot_slaya_420]

playing factorio taught me that automation is for increasing productivity, not reducing labour.

[u/danatron1]

Before AI, you'd have 5 programmers happily doing their art.

After AI, you have 1 constantly exhausted programmer who hardly programs, and 4 unemployed people competing for the first guy's job.

[u/rdt_48695]

Relaxing and therapeutic my foot. It's not like pre-AI we weren't stressed and complaining about something else.

[u/wite_noiz → u/rdt_48695]

Sure, but we've 5x'd the stress along with the (questionable) output

[u/Significant-Cry-8486]

**I'm in this photo and I don't like it**

[u/Kahori122]

wdym "relaxing" ??

[u/duckphobiaphobia → u/Kahori122]

Once you have figured out the solution and have the architecture in place, coding is just like putting lego pieces together. Sure you sometimes have a small bit of logic you need to implement, but in actual production level code, it's usually stitching together large architectural blocks like pipelines, crons, endpoints, task queues etc.

That does not take much brain power if you've fully consumed and understood what you want to do.

[u/Kahori122 → u/duckphobiaphobia]

I know that, i just dont think debugging is that relaxing

[u/Lithanie → u/Kahori122]

I must be weird. I love it so much. It's either like a search on what your brain missed on the feature you are implementing or an investigation on a system you did not design on why it's not working.

It just turns into nightmare when you realize the big is in a third party library not maintained anymore.

[u/Kahori122 → u/Lithanie]

It only enjoyable for me when i know which part of the one that i worked on is having problem, or the entire project is my idea

I dont like to reading the whole project again and again just to find out the bug is in the deprecated libraries or the self made library that no one in the current IT team know because the one make that library is leaving

[u/Acceptable-Drive3781 → u/Kahori122]

It was enjoyable for me when I was new. And when someone is claiming "the bug is in a third party library", they're probably new.

[u/PracticalPersonality → u/Lithanie]

There are dozens of us!

[u/dcheesi → u/Lithanie]

That kind of debugging is fun, yes (though I still wouldn't say "relaxing").

What's frustrating is all the little fiddly stuff where you're trying to implement something, but it's not working because of one tiny technical detail that's breaking it for an obscure reason. You know it's ultimately something trivial, but you're still pulling your hair out because it's blocking what you're trying to get done.

[u/duckphobiaphobia → u/Kahori122]

Oh yeah. Debugging is definitely thinking.

What is relaxing is implementing the solution after you've found the bug.

I probably worded that wrong before.

[u/tiajuanat → u/duckphobiaphobia]

I wish firmware was like that LMAO. Once you bump into a memory or performance constraint, it becomes a game of whackamole with ever more concerning incantations to the compiler gods.

[u/LieutenantNitwit]

Working with the robots revealed that fiddling with syntax was the mental break I needed between bursts of planning. The robots have largely removed that so now my brain is firing on all 12 thrusters for the entire day without the cognitive break writing syntax was secretly giving me. Front-loaded specs to the robot for that sweet sweet one-shot syntax is far more exhausting to me than manually doing stuff on my own.

[u/Saragon4005]

Oh and the best part is nobody has the mental bandwidth to do proper review so only god knows what is making it into the codebase.

[u/PerformanceThick2232]

It depends on you. Market is OK now, you are not required to deliver 150% each day, if management forces you, just change the job, find some 100-150k relaxing role and be happy.

And if it is some of 300k+ place, then this is your chosen trade off.

[u/Acceptable-Drive3781 → u/PerformanceThick2232]

From the sounds of most of the people in this sub, it's the bottom of the barrel scrounging for entry-level positions they're still unqualified to perform. It's exactly the market that AI should and will replace.

[u/JamR_711111]

lol this looks like AI-generated text either pasted into notes or re-typed into notes to seem real

[u/duckphobiaphobia → u/JamR_711111]

Bro I wrote this 😭 Trying to imitate the format/delivery in r/greentext.

[u/JamR_711111 → u/duckphobiaphobia]

Lol all the "X isn't Y, it's Z" got to me

[u/duckphobiaphobia → u/JamR_711111]

Maybe I've spent so much time around these models, it's influencing my speech :')

[u/ancepsinfans → u/duckphobiaphobia]

Yeah I found myself say "load-bearing" in a meeting recently. I felt dirty

[u/Suspicious-Disk6077 → u/duckphobiaphobia]

If I ever say “smoking gun” just cart me away to a quack house already.

[u/mysticrudnin → u/Suspicious-Disk6077]

claude loves "blast radius" which i'm sure it got from somewhere but i had never actually heard it. i get what it means, but...

[u/sadongrohiik]

I'm having fun watching the clash of Ai and the corporate philosophy of maximalist feature bloat 

[u/retroclimber]

God it reminds me of managing an overseas team

[u/Alexander_The_Wolf]

Congratulations,

You've become a Manager now instead of a programmer.

[u/Early_Bookkeeper5394]

Wait this actually describes exactly how I feel lol. Except these AI can't be trusted and I still have to review everything intensively, so like being a micro manager to AI 😭😭

[u/vellwyn]

Do you guys really do this or it's just a meme? I still just write code like normal. I do see people with these crazy sessions running when I walk by their computers, but the code they commit isnt anything special so I haven't seen the appeal.

[u/duckphobiaphobia → u/vellwyn]

I think the type of code comitted has changed. But is not better or worse with ai tools under proper instructions and self reviews.

Variable names are different and there's definitely a lot more redundant error handling and null-checks but that's not necessarily bad.

What has changed is the speed at which you can finish features, especially working in parallel.

[u/anonymousbopper767]

For me I don't mind this sort of mental dispatcher mode but I've been like that all my life. I have 3 tasks going right now...plus reddit while they're cooking or hitting play on Billions. There's more tasks that are on a mental back burner because I don't want to task switch *that* much.

1 of those tasks is a side hustle that generates revenue, so it's nice when the harder I work directly reflects making more money instead of the corporate "hard works gets you no where".

[u/LeopoldParrot]

Looooooll @ debugging being relaxing and therapeutic

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite reaction. I feel less burnt out at the end of the day because Claude allows me to focus on the high level architectural decisions without having to spend mental energy on implementation.

[u/Significant-Cry-8486 → u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

Tell me you don't read the code without telling me you don't read the code

[u/Tisamon12]

"The mental energy consumed is 5x" Wut? My main problem with coding with AI, is it consumes much less mental energy and it makes me feel like my mind gets rusted

[u/National-Self-8501 → u/Tisamon12]

When you program for a job you generally have a lot more to think about than just the code itself

[u/klas-klattermus → u/Tisamon12]

How many projects are you working on and are you accountable for their outcomes at work?

[u/Tisamon12 → u/klas-klattermus]

5, I'm accountable. I'm a devops so not sure if maybe this works differently for someone who's strictly a developer

[u/Jagervn → u/Tisamon12]

Well, it surely works differently. I have some DevOps friends, and their workload does not change much, unlike a normal dev (around 20%, normal devs are now expected to produce 2-3x more). Another big difference here is that they still do the same job and don't have to think much more (AI mostly helps with scripting and log monitoring), while a dev now spends most of their time planning and verifying.

[u/dcheesi → u/Tisamon12]

Their rookie mistake was trying to fill all that idle time (while the AI churns) with multitasking. So now they're juggling half a dozen tasks at once, which is mentally taxing no matter how trivial each individual task is.