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.
Are there complicated problems to solve that the AI can’t handle? Or areas that are too important to risk the slop? You could focus on those. Nothing like a big dumpster fire that only you know how to put out to make people back off with the AI first bullshit.
For example?
One thing that I can think of are people management problems (eg talking with clients etc).
I’m kinda worried because AI will get better down the line and even if the bubble pops, AI will be here to stay.
Performance work, lower level issues that interact with external software, hardware spec implementation, large testing efforts, long-standing customer-side issues. Anything that throwing AI at won’t immediately solve.
Long before AI I’ve built a career around going after the tasks people deemed too difficult or too lenghty. This strategy creates a lot of room to negotiate. Now with AI, I’m seeing people walking in circles feeding one AI text into another and not being able to interpret the AI output. That’s when they stop caring whether I’m using AI or not, as long as the problem gets solved.
You’ll probably write way less code than before still, but at least you get to keep more general problem solving and code analysis skills.