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.
I made a horizontal career move and accepted as a trade-off that at this time I won’t write code.
Old company: mildly toxic environment, out of touch CEO, poor leadership. Increasing AI push and wild gaps between different people’s competence. Constant arguing. The dreaded 5k loc generated PRs started appearing. My role: ~5% web programming tasks (that I actually signed up for originally) rest was design, review, and people-related work. I was not a manager. Hated it.
The project: 1 year of goal-oriented homelabbing, from a 50€ raspberry pi to hybrid cloud, gitops, kubernetes, and all the good bleeding edge stuff you need to run your own cloud. Did this completely without AI, built the resume, applied to a few places. Happens that one of the companies was looking for the exact stack I built my homelab around.
New company: Platform team, 90% hands on, competent manager, capped AI budgets, people treat each other respectfully. I quite like it. When I do coding it’s simple enough that it stays manageable even though I ask some bot to write it 90% of the time. It gets the job done, I wasn’t hired to write code anyway.
It’s probably a patch, but I’m hoping to run the wave long enough by this move. For the first time in a couple years I feel clarity. I trust that I’ll be able to pick up programming by hand if needed. Most people are in the same boat anyway, so the expectation won’t be there to perform on a similar level instantly. I trust that my ability to learn new things keeps being valuable.
On my free time I don’t currently write code, non-technical hobbies and maintaining the homelab I conjured eat it up. I don’t mind too much. I have enough interesting stuff to do. I think most of all it’s important that I get to create something. If I’m not exactly paid to do that it’s not the end of the world. Much worse situations exist, I’m still paid similar €€ than in my software position.
I should get more non-technical hobbies, especially physical ones… But I’ll be literally sat at my wfh desk typing for work, looking forward to after 17h when I can switch the kvm to writing code for pleasure lol. I do really like programming though. Somehow still not sick of it after all these years.