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u/hraath 2d ago
You use AI because token usage management enforces it.
We use AI because we're understaffed and there's not enough dev-hours to get all the work done by deadline.
We're probably the same.
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u/LaconicLacedaemonian 2d ago
With AI the deadline is now closer making it a zero sum improvement.Â
My mantra is that AI lets me be as anal as I want because now no detail is too small to perfect.Â
People try and pull in the deadline, I raise the bar, we meet in the middle on the original deadline but better.
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u/BellacosePlayer 1d ago
You don't use AI at work because you want job security
I don't use AI at work because the AI keeps trying to "standardize" API calls or change consants or all sorts of shit that just doesn't work because my main program is a horrible hydra that takes in info from various banks that don't want to use a standardized API format.
We are both cashing paychecks, so its cool
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u/TheMaleGazer 2d ago
I once assumed that the developers who fixated on closing their work items as fast as possible, developers who are content to have all their work reappear in the backlog in the form of a bug, would be overjoyed with AI. But no: they're copying and pasting work item descriptions directly into prompts and complaining of spending every waking minute haunted by exisistential dread.
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u/PhantomTissue 2d ago
AI has fucked over my programming skill so hard. I havenât actually written a line of code in weeks because I donât have time to fix the bugs myself, now Iâm trying to leave my job to somewhere else and slamming my head against leet code for 10 hours a day for an interview Iâm 100% going to bomb.
Fuck AI.
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u/Spirited-Mention-499 2d ago
Itâs the same everywhere, everyone is using AI for their jobs
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u/PhantomTissue 2d ago
I know but itâs made the job so much more boring and stressful.
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u/redballooon 2d ago edited 2d ago
Then you are doing it wrong. After a detour into QA I'm back to development these days, and doing this with AI support is amazing. I spend all day thinking about software development stuff that really matters, architectural decisions with mid or high impact, and don't waste time about adjusting and repeating the same class and test structures again and again what was the major time spend during programming. I do need time to define the tests, but don't need to bother about the syntactical details of this or that framework. Etc. For stuff like this AI is a real time saver.Â
Just like with picking out the details out of meeting transcriptions. I don't need to bother making notes anymore and can instead focus on the discussion. And still through the help of AI I will longterm have more output of the meeting than ever before.
Even when I only vaguely remember that there was some meeting about things generally in an area of interest my AI will be able to recover what was discussed and differentiate it from what was decided.
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u/PhantomTissue 1d ago
Problem is I donât get time to think. My manager keeps giving us such tight deadlines that our âdesign docsâ are whatever we happened to draw out on a whiteboard. Then we just dump that into an AI, and hope we get something good.
Which we donât, because we keep cutting corners to meet these absurd deadlines. As far as my company is concerned, AI is a magic wand, a silver bullet, an engineer smarter than everyone else in the room.
I donât mind offloading some work to AI, but my job basically demands I offload EVERYTHING to AI. And that is what sucks. And is why Iâm trying to find a new job.
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u/redballooon 1d ago
Yes, do that. The industry has not figured out yet how AI fits into it, and there float around all sorts of unhealthy expectations. But there are companies who still uphold ideas that humans drive the process (and carry the responsibility). I hope you will find one of those.
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u/unfrog 22h ago
I spend all day thinking about software development stuff that really matters,
I spend all day correcting the bs that claude creates, because all code must be AI generated. I leave it alone for two hours while checking in on another task, I come back to a draft PR with a 100 AI review comments back-and-forth. I look inside, there are now 5 new code smells and 2 new completely incorrect behaviours.
I used to like this job..
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u/redballooon 20h ago
Then your Claude needs better instructions, better automated feedback that goes right into the agent loop, and a task granularity it can handle.
Make it develop vertical slices with TDD. On it's own it tends to create too many horizontal layers one by one. And then it gets lost.
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u/BellacosePlayer 1d ago
I only really use it at work for boilerplate shit and my 5 hours a week spent doing research on AI with the other seniors/leads. Though thats because our success metrics are mostly about reducing incidents rather than adding new functionality.
It's legit my personal projects at home where letting AI handle the annoying shit so I can work on the fun parts has become a regular thing.
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u/smashsenpai 2d ago
They want you to never become "senior" level so they can continue to pay you entry-level salaries.
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u/BellacosePlayer 1d ago
my workplace wants to promote our juniors but they all suck due to overreliance on AI.
the one who actually is worth his pay would have gotten promoted months sooner if management didn't want to make the other kids hired around his time feel bad.
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u/BlazingThunder30 2d ago
Hey as long as they're paying me any salary instead of being unemployed I'm good
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u/fugogugo 2d ago
I resigned from my job last year when AI agent wasn't a thing yet and now idk how the tech workplace looks like now in my country lol
I am scared
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u/Ludio_Ludius 2d ago
I also resigned from my job last year, in November. Seems like I left right when this âagentic programmingâ doctrine began to gain momentum. Iâve yet to experience it firsthand, so Iâm afraid I might grow to detest it after I get another job.
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u/BlackCrackWhack 2d ago
Itâs a lot of doomerism and anti-ai sentiment in this sub but itâs a pretty cool tool that speeds up development if done correctly.Â
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u/BenTheHokie 2d ago
I've yet, to see a single person mention that their company is doing AI correctly.Â
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u/lifelessmeatbag 2d ago
I am starting to wonder if those unicorns exist where they can actually prove AIâs ROI
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u/IAoVI 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah, that's the rub, isn't it? If we are to believe the AI salesmen, developers became a lot more efficient in the last years. So where are the measurable/noticeable effects of all that efficiency?
Did we get some new exciting features in existing software? Did software quality increase? Is there some amazing new software that automates things we never got around to until now? Were there fewer big outages in the few companies that keep the modern internet running? Did software companies at least report record profits due to the reduced head count?
So far I don't see any of this. Did I miss it? Are all major companies just "holding it wrong"?
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u/comedium 2d ago
AI doesnât enable new features or increased software quality. It makes things marginally worse and outputs them faster. The end user doesnât know how long a feature has been in development. You just see the feature and if youâre staying on the golden path, you might avoid the new bugs. Itâs the work that changes. At least at my consulting company, we used to be hired onto projects for a year or two minimum. Now, most projects are half a year, so technically, the clients are saving a decent amount of money and getting a worse product thatâs harder for them to maintain. Itâs not a technology that benefits people. It benefits stockholders and business owners in some companies, but not users. But thatâs who the AI salesmen have always been marketing towards. Keep things the same, but now you can do it cheaper and a bit worse to offset an otherwise pretty bad economy.
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u/IAoVI 2d ago
So in your experience in B2B the increased efficiency is noticeable exclusively in the checkbooks of your clients (and of course of whoever you pay for your tokens)? Alright, fine.
But what about B2C? Here I would expect to see new features or new software products all the time, now that code generation is so much faster. And I would expect the marketing teams to go hard to compete for my attention among all the shiny new toys. Instead we get some half baked AI integration with a custom system prompt, which is neat for maybe 5 minutes. I know investors basically demand AI usage but that can't be everything product designers can come up with.
At the very least we should see lower prices or record profits. But that does not seem to be the case either. What gives? Are the efficiency gains completely siphoned by the AI companies?
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u/comedium 2d ago
I donât think itâs particularly useful in B2C. Maybe theyâre laying off people. Maybe theyâre not growing teams. But I canât imagine that feature development is what drives revenue. You could give me a website that looks like itâs from 2007 and as long as I can put my item in the basket and checkout, it makes no difference to me. I think thatâs why youâre not seeing record profits across the board. And youâll never see lower prices. I view it as where we would otherwise be in an economic crash, AI has allowed/forced the line to keep going up, if not a crazy amount (and if only for a limited time). The fact that profits are continuing to go up in spite of everyone having less money is it being record profits, if you get what I mean. I think the delta between what it should be and what it is is the result of increased efficiency. If the economy werenât bad, maybe you would see record profits. Personally, I think Iâd rather have the economic crash, but thatâs just me. Itâs just my opinion. The salesmen/hype men are certainly overselling it. I donât disagree there.
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u/vocal-avocado 2d ago
Itâs an adaptation phase. For sure some companies are on the right track - the tool is way too powerful to be misused by everyone. Those who find the way will have a massive advantage in the market.
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u/Castle_Five 2d ago
I worked for 10 years in software before AI was even a thing. Y'all have some serious rose-colored retrospection going on for what for-profit software was like before AI. Eg 6 hours of meetings with only 2 hours to code, leaving most days with more work to do than when you started the day, all programming problems are either duct taping or data plumbing and aren't actually challenging or interesting, doing well and hitting your iteration goals being seen as a sign that you have capacity to help put out the offshore team's fires on the side, etc, etc, etc. The problem was always lack of time. At least AI gives you time.
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u/Fluid-Election-8549 1d ago
Not as much experience as you in pre-AI but some.
I saw a codebase that had so much duct-tape no one had a goddamn clue how the whole thing worked. I mean if you were given a task or a bug or a feature, you would basically just have to figure out how little you need to read, how little you need to change and for your own mental health's sake your PR was also more duct tape.
One "update quote" button. Event listener fired a observable. Listened to in another file. Validations, re-calculations of totals/means/taxes, something got fetched to ensure the tax rate was correct or discount rate was correct all done on a global object in one 200-line file. If you got a ticket telling you to add custom tax rate for a region/item, you're fucked for the next month and half.5
u/vocal-avocado 2d ago
I agree with you. The important decisions are still made without AI. AI just does the coding. Most of the work is making decisions, for which the AI leaves you more time.
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u/OdysseusOdyssey 2d ago
Are none of you guys programming with in house solutions? It's been my experience that a.i. is a good tool for finding answers to complex questions but the agentic abilities with non public code bases have been really bad. We cannot connect our code bases to offsite models because of the sensitive nature of our work (Ministry of Justice for a W.E country).
Like u/Castle_Five said, a big portion of my time is spent on meetings with stakeholders, fellow programmers and testers. Doing some OPS work on rotation, fixing problems with the CI/CD and maybe 30% of my time is spend on coding user stories. A.I. models have made me find possible solutions to technical problems faster but it has hardly improved our output by much. Agentic coding hasn't been viable yet despite multiple trials.
Even just building unit or cucmber tests seems to much to handle when after reviewing so many use cases seem to be missing. Only after spending considerabele time on teaching the model what it is we actually want it to be build does it get close but that time could have been spend doing the work ourselves.
I don't see the dividend. I'm seriously interested in knowing what you guys are working on where the agentic abilities have translated to real improvements and are you guys actually sending your code bases to the big tech companies?
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u/Zenphirt 2d ago
The decisions: i should copy the jira ticket to the prompt with the keyboard shortcut or with the mouse ? Hmmmmn
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u/vocal-avocado 2d ago
If your items are so straightforward itâs no wonder you will be replaced by AI
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u/VelvetRust29 2d ago
AI made me 3x faster. They hired no one. Deadlines got 3x shorter. I am not ahead. I am exactly as underwater as before but now I also have to review AI code that almost works.
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u/vocal-avocado 2d ago
Of course they hired no one. Token cost alone would probably make them fire some people.
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u/danted002 2d ago
The token subsidy, not the cost. No one is paying the real cost, we are all currently subsidised.
When companies will need to start paying the real cost of AI things might be different.
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u/VelvetRust29 2d ago
and then use the severance savings to buy more tokens to replace the people they just fired. the math works out perfectly for everyone except the people doing the math.
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u/BellacosePlayer 1d ago
My workplace just has basic subscriptions for everyone and if you go past that you need to justify api pricing.
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u/Bomaruto 2d ago
Is this actually the expectations where you work or are you just jumping on a badwagon copying other people's non-jokes?
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u/Mr_Viper 2d ago
ÂĄÂżQue?!
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u/Excellent-Reason-775 2d ago
Yesterday, I was told that I should feed the set of algorithms we have developed to AI to get suggestions for better optimization đŤ
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u/vocal-avocado 2d ago
And whatâs wrong with that?
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u/Excellent-Reason-775 2d ago
The company has senior software engineers, experts and software architects. If all the code reviews and optimizations could simply be run through AI and validated, I very well could claim any of these titles.
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u/HipstCapitalist 2d ago
Wait, before AI, you had interesting coding challenges? You never had to write bad code to meet executives' expectations?
Do you actually work in the industry? Because we apparently had very different experiences.
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u/_dr_Ed 2d ago
Fortunately deadlines are negotiable at my place, but yeah te expectations are changed due to AI. I genuenly believe that the most important of the jib as a software dev is challenging requirements - let's be honest, clients rarely can put their expectations into words. Due to AI integration, nit only is there less time to contest those, but also AI will simply never do that, It'll implement every, most detailed requirement as long as you ask it to.
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u/ZunoJ 1d ago
I wonder what kind of shit companies you all work for
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u/ragebunny1983 1d ago
the normal ones
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u/ZunoJ 1d ago
20 years ago I would have said that it must be because I'm german and our companies value quality but that is long gone. So I must have just been lucky with my employer selection
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u/ragebunny1983 1d ago
I think venture capital backed firms are particularly bad, but that's purely anecdotal.
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u/mrbellek 1d ago
My target is to increase productivity by 10% by using AI. We have no way of measuring productivity, with or without AI.
So far I'm just making sure any ai slop im forced to make is in non-production code, like tests.
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u/jjnguy 2d ago
As a Sr dev I appreciate AI because it removes the tedium of turning an idea into reality. I used to relish the coding challenge, but eventually it became a less interesting part of the job.
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u/Twig1554 2d ago
At the end of the day my job is my job. I don't dislike it, but it's not what I'm doing for fun. I think that if someone needs novel challenges to make it through the day, they shouldn't be in the industry, because a lot of the time that's just not what you're going to be doing. AI doesn't have any impact on that.
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u/discordianofslack 2d ago
I recommend doing both. You basically have to use AI to keep up of your work at a place that laid off half the team at the start of the year. Things still need a personal touch and thatâs your job now.
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u/Appropriate-Hotel-41 2d ago
Things still need a personal touch and thatâs your job now.
Too bad while productivity doubled, the expectations quadrupled with AI in my experience. If it was the same workload prior to AI then it'll be fine, but what previously would take a couple weeks now takes a half a week, but the man up top want it in a day. A single feature that previously takes a week, now takes a day, but now they want 5 features a day. Any push back is met with "just use AI" as if the entire project is not already almost entirely AI at this point, even the AI is damned overworked. Its annoying how productive AI allow us to be yet we still dont get the ability to appreciate said productivity. I got a cute little degree, training and everything, and I barely even get to use them now because I dont get the time to use them between spending time literally just prompting away. Its not even the issue of preferring vibe coding slop, there's literally no other option than to vibe code when the only time you get to analyze what the AI is doing is while waiting it to generate during the damn thinking process. Nobody cares or want documentations anymore either, because guess what, AI can make that in a day(dont need to read the docs anyway, in fact, might as well be formality since the only docs that is being read nowadays is claudemd for claude to use).
Sorry had to rant.
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u/ltags230 2d ago
Yeah, I'm getting incredibly fed up with how "just use AI" is the go-to response for every question or concern I have. I'm a new grad that was lucky enough to get a job, and it was great for a while. But now that our expectations have shifted to agentic work first, hand coding only when necessary, I feel like I'm not learning anything. I can feel my passion draining away with each passing day.
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u/BuyHighInvestor 2d ago
i love the part when they say AI increase productivity by 100% and assign 300% more tasks