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’m sorry that you’re in this spot, it’s not easy. I see a lot of what I love as a software engineer as “solving problems” and a big part of that was solving problems by writing code, but that part is changing.
But it sounds like you’ve identified a bunch of problems. I’m seeing how it feels to see these new frictions as a problem to be solved and finding fun in it so far.
Reviewing code wasn’t ever real fun for me but it was managable at the pace we used to write code. So thats a new problem to solve: how can we confidently ship this new pace of code and feel confident about it? Some of that has been trying to design the process around it, some has been writing agents to help me stay sane while juggling the new amount of PRs I have to face.
It feels, so far, like trying to see all these new situations as problems to be solved, and experimenting with ways to solve them, has been fun for now, hopefully well find ways to keep it fulfilling.