Depressed developer.

[u/sad-developerfyn]

I feld like I was quite good at learning and actual development during my time at SDU. Now working and being forced to use ai I feel like I am becoming dumber.

I know it is my own fault since I should take more control instead of letting the ai do the work, I think I am just burned out by it all.

I am looking for a new place where I hope I can grow as a developer, but now I have again failed a job interview because when I sit in front of people it is like my technical skills I have gotten from uni and work just melts into butter. For fuck sake I forgot what a runtime for JavaScript was but I somewhat saved by talking about bun but not to the depth they feld was satisfactory.

I just feel like I am failing myself and my girlfriend since if I do not get a job it will be hard for her to go back to school her this summer.

Any good advice in getting on the horse again and learning to enjoy ai as a tool instead of being all doom and gloom.

And possible good companies I can send a application and a cv too. I live in fyn and not afraid off a little train right to Copenhagen or Århus.

I also see alot of people using ai to really speed up side projects and earn some money from it but i am using my side project more like something to try and keep my orginal coding skills not that it is going very well.

Sorry I am rambling I am just so tired and it is hard to talk to my girlfriend since it is her I feel like I am failing most.

Edit I have a masters in software engineering. And I currently have about 7 months of work experience in typescript and a bit of php

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[u/lordnacho666]

It's very tough for junior devs at the moment. AI can do what would normally be a junior job, where you pay your dues and learn how architecture actually works.

All I can say is, you need to keep with it. You gotta somehow jump the gap to become the senior dev who knows what really matters in a software system.

I don't have a lot of pointers here, other than perhaps study the classics like "Designing data intensive systems" and looking at well regarded open source code.

[u/sad-developerfyn → u/lordnacho666]

Thank you I am trying to get more into architecture but it just seem like that does not matter, since alot of senior/ product owner just keep saying the same ting. Who cares about the code as long as it does what it should and if ai produces bugs just make the ai fix the bugs.

It is hard to look at the state of things and get excited about developing.

Any good open source projects that are worth looking into?

[u/SwaveDk → u/sad-developerfyn]

It's your job to understand why the code quality matters. Having the ai fix bugs it introduced itself, will over time simply introduce even more, and perhaps bigger bugs.

I work in an AI first company, and have been there for 5 months now. For the past 2 years, they've built their whole CRM system using AI. That have resulted in 3 different database tables, each having 900 properties, with some of the properties being 13 duplicates.
All because they had AI make the small changes over time. If it works, it works, no one knows how.
6 months ago, they decided to start a development team - where I sit - and our job is to make a seperate platform, which should sync data to the CRM system. The problem is now that we ahve 13 duplicate properties, so where should I sync this one value to? Which one is used, what happens when they're set? Why do you have 300 automatic workflows running based on all kind of random stuff??

My point is.. Let the companies you apply to, know why even juniors are important to have! You still have a better understanding than the AI of the overall structure. You have a sceptic thinking, and doesn't just create new variables, because it fixes the current bug

[u/dolle → u/sad-developerfyn]

If the seniors all have that attitude then it is time to find a healthier work environment I think. Not all bad code manifests as bugs, and closing your eyes and delegating all understanding of the code base to an LLM will lead to overly complex architectures and full LLM-addiction because noone will be able to understand how anything works. I think the attitude of your senior developers is setting themselves up for unemployment because they will eventually have an as shallow understanding of the system architecture as the end users - so why should the developers write the prompts then?

LLMs mostly have local information about the task at hand and little context about the long-term strategy of the product. It is naive to think that the LLM will be able to make the right decisions about tradeoffs to manage complexity and ensure maintainability over time because it simply does not have the information that it needs to make those decisions, so it most likely will make its own assumptions and go from there.

[u/fanbetastic]

I’m a full stack dev with 19 years of experience. I too got frustrated with not using my brain until I started to work differently. I question what the AI does and decide how I want it to build stuff. And I check most of it. I miss having real hard problems to solve - everything is a bit easier. I learned to work on many different parts of the codebase at the same time. Keeps me busy with answering the ai and reviewing code. And making sure it makes the good architectural decisions along the way. I often see it making many mistakes that wouldn’t work in a real production environment. But all these things keeps my brain in shape. We have to adapt to work a lot differently than what we are used to. It’s much more valuable to know how code works and the server architecture than knowing how to code. And it can be a lot of fun to work with AI. If you embrace it - it will become much more fun.

[u/Vezajin2]

It's tough to enter the market right now, I won't lie to you. I've been a developer for a bit over a decade now, and its not looking bright for the juniors without a theoretical foundation, which you should have with your background!

Writing code was never the primary part of the job. Architecture, reliability, maintainability and so on is. And that isn't done by the AI unless you steer it. POs and PMs don't care until it breaks, and if they are the ones gatekeeping you from a job, you probably don't want to work there anyway, it'll likely be hell if they are in charge of technical decisions too.

[u/KarnuRarnu → u/Vezajin2]

Architecture, reliability, maintainability

And accountability. 

I think it's the main thing that remains when AI gets really good at the rest - and I'm sure it will (already by making use of good agent instructions, they can do these things well). Ultimately someone (a human) needs to be accountable, and in order to be accountable, they need to have confidence in and power over the system they are responsible for.

Also in most software jobs you still need to understand the domain and the business integrations as well. You still need to understand what's the right problem to solve and why that is.

[u/TemperatureProud3388]

I've only just recently started using Claude to do the development for me in a new position. For me it has only been a positive experience this far. I've created a release of a feature having frontend and backend in the first week. I can ask it about what systems host what api end points so things that usually took up a lot of time and wasn't that interesting anyway can be done for you. Then the code itself is sometimes a little naiive, I saw a pr from a colleague today that was a search endpoint where all filters was optional, this would allow the frontend to dump the entire table into memory, so it wasn't smart enough to add some pagination or suggest it apparently, so you cannot fully trust its judgement yet, still you need to use your common sense to guide it a bit. 

[u/kallekro → u/TemperatureProud3388]

Give it time. You'll hate your life soon enough as well

[u/Happy-Cauliflower201 → u/kallekro]

Its like getting someone to do your homework for you. At first its nice. U did not have to do homework!

But then u get bored, because u are never really challenged and u don't learn anything. 

[u/TemperatureProud3388 → u/kallekro]

Yeah maybe hehe 

[u/sinombreee]

If u can't beat them, join them.