I am a senior Software Engineer working in the IT field for close to 16 years.
Before AI coding tools became prevalent, I enjoyed writing code, architecting software systems, and speaking to the stakeholders. These past 2 - 3 years, since companies have been using AI tools heavily, I noticed most of the work has been delegated to AI. It's just prompting it to do work while I monitor its inputs and outputs, then redefining the prompts.
This work flow really took away my passion and joy of writing and building software systems. I don't know where I am heading next... most of my friends either move on to work on their solopreneur journey or switch careers completely. I can say my passion for building software is definitely diminished due to heavy AI usage
Has anyone experienced this? How do you cope with it? Did you end up switching careers?
thanks for your comments :)
onion2k has a point. You can still write a lot of code by hand, or at least write the interesting code by hand, but your output may fall behind your peers.
After 27 years in the industry, I've cut down to part-time software dev work, and I've enjoyed learning and doing more hands-on work, including bicycle and motorcycle repair. It's actually really nice to get away from the screen and the constant reading of internet garbage during those down times when I'm waiting for tests to run or an AI bot to come back with a response. My mind feels less polluted. But I'm not making money at my new hobbies.
My answer to your question is I don't know. But often, if you can free up some time and mental space, you'll find you start to drift toward other things that interest you.
Doing physical work is important; the more we spend time in the digital world.. there is a weird feeling of detachment from reality. I don't feel like a WHOLE self, if you know what I meant.
Am thinking of switching to switch the part time basis, and working as a Snowboarding instructor(I have a license)
1. mainly for discovery and research. I clone all the repos I need and then I talk with the agent: "I need to work on service A which has dependencies on service B, C, D and E. How can I accomplish X? Oh ok it seems, B can offer that but only when Z happens, after that I should rely on C. Cool. And now we probably need to extend E. Umm, ok, but I think E's team won't like that. Hold on, I'll reach out to them. Give me a succinct paragraph explaining what we need from them. Alright I'm back, so we have green light but only if we implement it like H. So, give me a plan"
2. Implement the plan. So the agent spits out code that I need to babysit (e.g., perhaps the class is not in the best package, or perhaps we are adding too many e2e tests when unit tests could be enough, etc.)
3. Answer product questions like: "Why is button K disabled in this screenshot? What are the potential causes? Afaik, I have the permissions A, B and C, and I have enough Z, so why is still disabled?", "How does the flow for endpoint 'api/a/b/c/ work? Where are the entry points? Dependant services? Tables touched?"
I could live without the agent generating the code, but not anymore without their help for discovery and research. I dislike using agents for coding (I feel the same as you), but not for research (I actually use them as a sort of improved "google for everything")
I pushed back really hard on this and gave them the arguments that
1. To Meet their expectation, we had to let AI compose code in a complex system (Tokenmaxing) 2. They don't have the engineering background to propose policy like that because in their mind, AI is supposed to supercharge developers
Basically delegating thinking to the AI (Which is a super dangerous ACT...)
I consider myself a fast coder, but there is no way I can code faster than AI. But my rule is that even if AI wrote the code I still review and own 100% the code.
With agentic development and senior experience you are now able to write and build systems that are 100x more complex and powerful. You’re no longer thinking about how to some mundane data massaging or crud - rather you can spend time thinking about how to solve actual problems that matter and have an impact - as a solo engineer!
Got a problem with climate change? Start brainstorming.
Want to model how a chemical factory works to simulate its IoT topology? It’s at your fingertips.
Think bigger. A lot bigger. Forget about the trees. Look for the forest.
Your decade plus of engineering experience combined with AI is a super power many other new comers to game would benefit from. Capitalize on it and do something cool.
"Forget about trees. Look for the Forest" - linesofcode
I should frame this on my wall
Then because the whole industry was into Web 2.0, with strong hardware, no one cared about optimisation or writing clean, beautiful code. This situation only got worse with AI.
Signn, I should look for a job in a field similar to yours.., but my past 12 years have all been working with Web and Crypto related projects.. with only 4 years with embeded system.. gonna need to build a porfolio for that
Could be producing a bunch of slop but that’s where the decades of engineering experience comes in to still find a way to ship reliably.
Try to ride the wave rather than being swept under.
there are a lot of software engineers working on boring ass-tier software like some shitty accounting systems or banking software.
this is the best time to go build something cool that YOU care about. i'm sure you have hobbies which could benefit from good software, or maybe you wished there was some cool protocol that existed that would make other devs lives easier.