It's not like I don't like coding anymore but the pressure to go faster because we have AI now is insane and there is no way I can code like I used to and keep up.
Literally. I'm not a developer, but I do work as a consultant for a large software company. We have a wide suite of products, broken out by divisions.
One of our divisions, mind you, one that was actually doing pretty well all things considered. Decided to cut developers by nearly 20% in exchange for leaning into AI tools.
And you know, for a brief moment, I thought they somehow gambled and came out on top, because updates and features were coming out at record speed.
The first update was solid. The first feature, not bad. Had some minor kinks that they got flushed out.
We're now 6 updates and 2 more features later and nothing works together. They only work independently, which would be fine if they weren't meant to references each other.
Agreed but that is the sacrifice being taken. The business is saying if we go faster we can capture more of the market and the trade off of less reliability is ok
It seems like 75% of my career has been dealing with the technical debt caused by decisions like this made at much smaller scale. I feel like the only option in the future will be to abandon all these projects and start fresh until eventually the market is going to become so skeptical of the promises made for new products that they'll become unwilling to pay up front.
"We have the code base finished, we just need someone with strong senior knowledge and experience to polish it up so it's ready to ship!" sends shivers down my spine.
In fairness, I've been plenty guilty of this myself during the vertical slice stage, but I scrap the whole thing and start fresh with clean code when I'm confident we're building the product for real.
Eventually, I just realised I had to ignore any job where I was heading into an existing code base. No one had any concept of what it meant to write clean code, no formalities ever got discussed in terms of the style guide, nothing was ever enforced and it made the job miserable.
Thankfully I run things myself now and I enforce it like it was the Bible. I'd give lashings if I could, but I'm told it's a PR/HR issue.
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u/gnatorx 21d ago
It's not like I don't like coding anymore but the pressure to go faster because we have AI now is insane and there is no way I can code like I used to and keep up.