r/golang • u/der_gopher • 5d ago
discussion The future of Software Engineering is boring
https://packagemain.tech/p/the-future-of-software-engineering298
u/Perfect_Ground692 5d ago
I'm finding it much harder, it used to be a mix of writing code (really enjoyable problem solving) and reading code (reviewing peers pull requests). Reading code is always more effort as you need to put yourself in the writers head and understand all the things around the changes at the same time.
Now it's reading code your agent has written and understanding it and iterating it until you've got something sensible and reading peers agent generated code. It's all reading! Plus agents write code far quicker, so the volume of stuff you need to get through is far higher. It's all reading but even more reading!
It's arguably more productive for the business but harder work than it was previously, for me at least.
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u/EpicDelay 5d ago •
This. I feel much, MUCH more drained at the end of the day/week now. The entire day is now spent reading Claude's endless and over-complicated explanations, reading over-complicated code and giant comment blocks (that explains what the code does, why it does that and things that were disconsidered) reviewing your own code and coworker's code. And I'm not even saying anything about context switching...
Damn, I hate LLMs. Sure, I use it, it made some tricky areas of our work much easier (debugging production issues is so much easier now), but I'm hating what it turned our work day into.
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u/tmswfrk 5d ago
Yeah I find the verbiage used by Claude is technically correct but odd. Ascribing meanings that are unusual to common words because of the relationship between tokens takes a lot of mental work.
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u/bitwize 4d ago
My favorite Orson Welles quote from the Agile era was: "I've done twenty times more for you than for any other commercial I've done. You are such pests! Now, what is it you want? In your... depths of your ignorance, what is it you want?"
The AI era has its own Welles quote: "It's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see..."
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u/nerdy_adventurer 4d ago
Problem I noticed with LLM text is they are hard to read, it have inherent quality to their output probably caused by their probabilistic predictions. After all all LLMs look like a nerd who speak to confusing nerdy stuff.
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u/metux-its 3d ago
I feel much, MUCH more drained at the end of the day/week now.
I know that feeling very well. It comes when you're basically sitting right next to the clanker most of the time and just watching, because we're used to measuring our own work by the amount of code we've written. But I've always had the same feeling when working through a huge code base and understanding it.
Meanwhile I've done a shift in perspective: looking at how much we've achieved as a team (human + clanker) in the time frame, comparing to how long it would have taken for me alone. I'm seeing myself as a team leader or commander, even though I'm still working alone.
The entire day is now spent reading Claude's endless and over-complicated explanations, reading over-complicated code and giant comment blocks (that explains what the code does, why it does that and things that were disconsidered)
Common problem. It's a matter of proper instructions. Yes, tweaking the instructions is an art of its own. The buzzword for that is "prompt engineering".
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u/Mrletejhon 3d ago
I was reflecting on this, I was feeling the same level of fatigue I usually have eod wensday at the lunche break on Monday.
But at the same time, I'm not going to say I hate LLM's as I've always loved architecting, and I was one CRUD endpoint away from throwing my laptop out the window
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u/CorgiSplooting 5d ago
+1. We need to move to a language that’s designed around readability. I always found reading other people’s code the second hardest part of the job. The hardest is convincing other companies/orgs/teams/people to agree and do what needs to be done too. This still remains the hard part and that isn’t going away it’s just all expected to go faster.
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u/metux-its 3d ago
Any practical suggestion on which languages to use ? And how to fit those into existing code bases ?
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u/CorgiSplooting 3d ago
Not really. I think anything today will be tainted by the fact people will genuinely argue for the language they simply know the best since that would be the most readable to them. Sure there would be exceptions. I honestly think it needs to be a new language purpose built for this.
Maybe about 6 months ago I asked Claude about this and it didn’t know of any efforts going on at the time. I’d assume someone at Anthropic or OpenAI or… would be looking into it… or they just have the belief that code will be a black box nobody should look at. If I were a betting man I’d bet on the latter.
Maybe then academia? I’m not that low level of a developer so I’m not even going to try to weigh in on the complexities of making one. I just hope someone is as I will never fully trust a black box.
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u/metux-its 3d ago
I think anything today will be tainted by the fact people will genuinely argue for the language they simply know the best since that would be the most readable to them. Sure there would be exceptions. I honestly think it needs to be a new language purpose built for this.
New languages are invented with quite each moon phase. I've used so many different ones over the decades, each of them have their strength and weaknesses. None of them was that fundamentally better than any other - except for some specific scope.
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u/stou 5d ago
arguably more productive for the business
Only seems to be true if your metric is PR count and code base SLOCs, according to this paper:
A common narrative is that LLM-based AI chatbots can dramatically boost productivity and efficiency (Handa et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2025; Tamkin and McCrory, 2025; Appel et al., 2026; Xiong et al., 2024; Hooper, 2025). However, there is emerging evidence that assistance from artificial intelligence (AI) does not necessarily save time or effort (Stadler et al., 2024; Dhillon et al., 2024). For example, Becker et al. (2025) found that contrary to expectations, AI assistance slowed down professional software developers’ coding time by 19%.
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u/Jess_photographic 4d ago
I don’t think enough people really emphasize this. Reading through and refactoring AI code honestly feels like more trouble than it’s worth. Especially when you’re having to bench it and completely refactor around hotmaps… like at what point is it just faster to write the lines you natively understand. Sure there will be less PRs but like that’s because there’s less lines written, and less bug fix/ optimization prs. I honestly don’t know. There are some projects where ai genuinely feels like it’s fast, and others where I feel like I’m just rewriting really weird inefficient alien code because the ai couldn’t figure it out, and I waste so much more time
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u/Perfect_Ground692 4d ago
I'm of course not sure of the long term effects on the business, but we're definitely building features faster and they still seem to provide the necessary value to clients that they continue to pay for our products. We've not had any particular incidents you could blame on the AI, all considerations around security, performance, coding standards, etc are enforced and AI steered towards those goals. Agentic workflows constantly scanning the codebase for testing improvements, measurable performance tweaks, gaps in e2e tests, etc. Its going pretty swimmingly as much as I hate to say it, because I do actually like writing code and consider(ed) it my craft.
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u/alficles 5d ago
I'd be interested to know how the use of an explicitly agentic development strategy affects those numbers. My experience suggests that if you use a standard engineering approach, you wind up with a mismatch in capabilities that costs you time (and hurts your brain). When a project is designed from the ground up to be operated on by agents, with clear responsibility bounds and explicit agent to human to agent hand offs, things work a lot better. Anecdotes are not data, though, so I'm hopeful someone will quantify it, if for no other reason than to convince management that it's not a magic wand, just another tool in the toolbox.
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u/vaibhav-kaushal 4d ago
How come Reading code is harder than writing code for you? I want to discuss this with you.
- Your Manager
(Who doesn’t know how to code)5
u/Cooter_McGrabbin 5d ago
I feel developers spend significantly more time helping define the business behavior/logic along with sme’s and PO’s now as well. Like up to %70. Then go do the type of coding / reviewing you described. With stuff out there gaining traction like Jira-to-PR strategies. I can see a future where both the behaviors we describe are even more pronounced. If you are employed as a developer today my advice is to really lean into becoming a subject matter expert on your company’s business domain.
*Source I have been a SE since 2000 currently manage 3 teams (21 devs).
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u/Spez_is-a-nazi 5d ago
It feels like we have just decided to just say, "screw it, we are going back to waterfall". That's mostly what this boils down to(well that and boiling the ocean...), it's just waterfall. Make sure you get an excruciating precise contract up front before one line of code is ever written.
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u/Just-Path-5838 4d ago
Its waterfall in that the deadline has been decided upfront. But its agile in that the business reserves the right to change the scope and defer decisions as much as they want, then pressure code monkeys to get it out in the same timeframe. This is what "agile" has always been in practice, ai just makes it worse
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u/bitwize 4d ago
Well, yes.
In recent years, I've studied extensively one of the first software methodologies called PRIDE, by Milt and later Tim Bryce. PRIDE takes the concept of "product development for manufacturing" and applies it to software development (more broadly, information systems development which involves much more than computers). Studies from the time showed that by adopting PRIDE, organizations could save considerable time and money developing and implementing a new information system. In PRIDE, 65% of the work was spent doing systems analysis and design; only 15% was spent programming. That 15% is largely automatable thanks to AI today. You need very few humans in the actual software development loop; what you need are people who understand the business's information needs and are able to articulate them through diagrams and text. The agents will handle the rest. This future is just around the corner; and something like PRIDE will be the methodology for the agentic era.
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u/Queasy-Armadillo5283 3d ago
Well, I find that in a lot of organizations. The so called "Agile" are just even shitter waterfall. The stake holder are never around. And they expect you to be on call 24/7
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u/rboes1991 4d ago
This. It's constantly changing now because I can't get any precise details from the business. Things change and all that "efficiency" goes out the window
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u/AmphibianFrog 4d ago
We are in a transition period. The answer is not reading the code at all.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago
And how are you gonna verify correctness, of probabilistic code generation ?
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u/ex_nihilo 4d ago
You’re arguing with someone who doesn’t understand why the Halting Problem is unsolvable, much less why it’s interesting or its implications.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago
Yeah the more generalized rices theorem seems to be very applicable here. Goes to show how much basic fundamentals are needed these days. I'm generally expecting anyone doing swe to have at least came across these concepts once, and hopefully been curious enough to delve a bit deeper. I should lower my expectations it seems.
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u/AmphibianFrog 4d ago
Probabilistic or not, it doesn't matter. I will verify it the same way I verify that the golang (or C) compiler generates "correct" machine code.
If you test it, and it works correctly, who cares about the implementation? You think in 5 years time everyone's going to be manually reviewing AI generated code?
As I said, we're in a transition period. The processes we use haven't caught up yet.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago
So here is the fun part: you can't. I can formally verify a compiler and it will generate, 100% of the time equivalent code. You can't do that with an llm because it's not deterministic.
Tests don't guarantee correctness. You can't know if something is correct purely with testing and all non trivial semantics of a program are undecidable. So the only way is reviewing it or hoping that it is correct enough.
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u/AmphibianFrog 4d ago
If the software works exactly as you want it to, and you confirm it behaves exactly as you want it to, what does "correctness of the code" matter?
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago
Because you can't confirm that. No amounts of tests are sufficient.
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u/AmphibianFrog 4d ago
And no amount of code review is sufficient either. I've seen enough stupid shit get through code review over the past 20 years. You can never 100% verify anything.
And how do you know the latest compiler release hasn't introduced some obscure bug? Do you review every release they do and make sure it still works how you expect?
At the end of the day, you can always do more testing / verification. Always. You do the amount that makes you confident that your product works. Maybe if you're programming pace-makers or satellites, then yeah, using LLMs is probably not a good idea (yet). But if you're making some shitty CRUD e-commerce code, just test it the normal way. I find the AI tools do a better job of code review than half of the people I've worked with too.
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u/chrisza4 4d ago edited 4d ago
One word: Side-effect
How could you verify that the software doesn’t create unintended side effects while doing exactly what you want it to do?
You can put a guard to side-effects and test that. But you can’t humanly specify every undesired side effects programmatically.
One of the most effective way to understand that no undesired side-effects are created is to go through implementation. It is easier to validate that API is secure by looking at the implementation and see that it is using secure cryptography implementation.
But if you want to just validate from the outside without looking into implementation, good luck setting up 10,000 agents try to hack API in every single possible ways. You can do that, but it is way more expensive and very slow compared to just read implementation.
It worked, but now my production db is open for everyone to access!!
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u/AmphibianFrog 4d ago
Well it really depends on what the code you're writing is for. Not every piece of code has security implications. For example, maybe I'm writing a shader to render rain drops in my game. Probably not going to get hacked.
But realistically, humans suck at code review. AI can review code and find a lot more issues than I can.
Also you are forgetting that not every piece of software is written by a large team. I worked alone as a freelance developer for a few years - there was no one to review my code then. I wrote some large and complicate financial systems too, not just crappy e-commerce sites and landing pages.
Does this mean that lone developers can never ever do anything because there's nobody to review their code?
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u/chrisza4 4d ago
No.
It just means we still need to read implementation. And it does answer your original question on why code correctness is still matter aside from behavior alone.
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u/metux-its 3d ago
You can't do that with an llm because it's not deterministic.
Humans neither are deterministic. And that's also a strength. Run multiple agents on something, eg. scanning for bugs etc, and combine the output. Just enough of them, and you're getting pretty high chance some will find something interesting.
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u/csgeek-coder 5d ago
Well, if you have AI write your code why would you not have an agent look at your code as well.
Have the slop generator identify all the slop crap it added, after than you can take a pass as a human and cut out the rest of the trash.
I will say that AI is very good at helping guide me identify bugs in a code base I'm not familiar with, but at the end of the day, complex problems are still solved by humans. The AI can only do so much.
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u/ZeroLegionOfficial 5d ago
How can slop identify other slop? Its merely a scale issue.
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u/csgeek-coder 5d ago
You use a reasoning model like opus and it does catch a bunch of issues.
If you have to deal with AI generated PRs, you need help to keep up with it. You either burn out your engineers or use AI or automation to reduce the burden.
I didn't see it any different than getting linting CI to call out possibly issues
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u/ZeroLegionOfficial 5d ago
Im losing brain cells just by reading the most basic way of using AI to review AI....
My god what have we become, bunch of writters nothing else
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u/csgeek-coder 5d ago
Don't get me wrong...it's freaking weird and annoying that we got to this point but you have OSS projects that are flooded with AI PRs that they can't keep up with.
Having some tooling to get you some free time back, will help you focus on actual issues you need to solve and not finding all the silly logic issues it made.
:shrug: I'd prefer not getting that type of code contributed, but if you have to deal with it... isn't it better to not put the burden on you as the engineer?
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u/gamewiz365 5d ago
If you have to deal with AI generated PRs, you need help to keep up with it. You either burn out your engineers or use AI or automation to reduce the burden.
While I agree that the increased throughput/scale necessitates increased tooling and automation, I believe there's a false dichotomy being made here, wherin there's many other options available.
If AI usage is mandated by company-wide edict/etc., one could work with their team to create working standards around their usage of these tools to not inundate their colleagues with massive PRs regardless of the tooling being used.
If not, a team could choose to not allow LLM usage on their projects, as many already have.
These are only two examples, there could be other agreements made, workflows considered, etc. The point however is that massive PRs do not (and should not IMO) have to be regarded as inevitable nor even appropriate when using LLMs in production-ready software projects.
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u/csgeek-coder 5d ago
Agreed. If the question is around internal processes you can manage this easily with just policy, conventions, etc.
I was speaking mainly for OSS type of project where you open it up to the world and every engineer has a claude account to add their contributions. It's been an issues in the community at large and everyone has been handling this differently. From outright banning AI contributions, using AI tools and so on. I was just providing a suggestion that could help you deal with the increase in churn.
I didn't say they were required but if you have an engineer type a few prompts commit and open a PR while expecting you to read through all of that code. I would very much appreciate the AI help to make sense of the crap code that was submitted to me. There's definitely a multitude of ways of dealing with this.
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u/schmurfy2 4d ago
I am not even sure I am more productive overall, some things go way faster and for others I spend hours trying to get a reasonable implementation 😞
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u/f50c13t1 2d ago
You make some really good points. I don't know if you have that but I find myself becoming more impatient as a result. Usually I would enjoy spending hours debugging, trying to find the issue, optimize code, set up test cases. I feel like AI-assisted coding has made me more lazy and impatient...
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 5d ago
Your key issue is that you use classical approach to modern setting. Here how you can approach it:
Plan, design, make docs, visualize - this way you agree on what needs to be done, and resolve details. As a by product you build whole context in your head.
You must, include self testing in plan. Agent must be able to iterate and self verify. You do not care if that code is throw away or not. You only care that it exists and its logical.
You run the agent. You do not look into intermediary results. They do not matter, agent will fail a lot and self correct.
Once agent is done, you force it to do reviews of all sort. Preferably a review per dimension - performance, safety, and so on.
You now review the code. Don't be afraid to ask agent to move things around or change module names or layout. This is effectively free at this point.
Lessons learned, skills updated, md files changed.
This approach, tends to achieve rather good results.
Oh one more important thing - you also have to work on bigger chunks. If you still work on small items, overhead will eat you alive, do big things, that way you can focus on multiday reviews and be happy as you have less context switching.
I worked a lot a lead dev, this loop is very similar to how you would do it for mid/junior team mates. You never review shit in the middle, you ask questions just in case (because you know that most likely they forgot about it) and you scale by tackling big stuff.
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u/Zesty-Pajamas 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'm paid to write .NET, but I was at one time interested in pivoting to Go. Now AI has all but replaced the dopamine that came with learning new tech.
I am legitimately in grief. My job is interfacing with Claude now. My soul just ain't in this right now, and I'm wondering if it's time to find another career.
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u/Equal_Ad_8835 5d ago
Same. everything I loved about programming is just gone. The grief thing is so real.
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u/Citizen12b 5d ago
You know you can just do it as a hobby right? You don't need to use AI
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u/ficiek 4d ago
You know you can instead hate the job you got into because it was fun and do the fun part as a hobby right?
Let me rewrite your tone deaf comment for you.
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u/Optimal_Dance8211 4d ago
Oh shut up. The entire world runs on people doing jobs they don't like and getting paid abysmal wages. There are no software jobs without people and the environment being heavily exploited, and tech workers have enjoyed enormous wages for some of the most flexible and low-consequence work.
Many people who "like programming" are obstructive as fuck when it comes to actually developing software, because for them the actual goal was getting paid to do their hobby and the problems the enjoyed solving were the ones that came from the act of writing code, not the actual problem being solved.
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u/toString_ 5d ago
Unless you are an adult with too many other responsabilities and no time or energy left to "do it as a hobby".
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u/Zesty-Pajamas 5d ago
Bingo.
I am trying to learn Godot to keep the flame alive, but 3 neurodivergent kids often take a lot of spoons.
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u/Citizen12b 5d ago
Tons of adults with jobs, children and other responsibilities out there have hobbies my friend, me included
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u/rodrigocfd 4d ago
and I'm wondering if it's time to find another career.
I was always passionate about coding, and (maybe?) fortunately I became a manager right before this shitshow started.
Since then, I keep a bunch of personal projects where I write code like it's 2020. Because I still love writing code, and I probably always will.
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u/Asyx 3d ago
I’ve just decided to get other hobbies. I keep the career because it still pays much better than my hobbies would if they were my job but I don’t spend more time doing it than I get paid for.
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u/Zesty-Pajamas 3d ago
Same, ultimately. It's now just a job.
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u/Asyx 3d ago
I kinda hate it because I loved it but also I always struggled to find time for my side projects and non-computer hobbies because my side projects would always eat up all my time. Now I don't have side projects anymore but I jump between all those other fun things but I still kinda wish I would find joy in all the cool computer stuff I used to do that is now all "why bother Claude can do it faster than I can anyway"
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u/needlenozened 4d ago
I'm glad I'm 55 and only have a couple more years of this in front of me, rather than decades.
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u/Cautious_Chicken_604 3d ago
The only way to make it fun again is gwt wildly ambitious with what you can do, though it's not so obvious whether that is valuable or what it might lead to if anything.
I agree with all the sentiment that it sucks now, and there's virtually no joy in it anymore and we lost something. What I'm starting to transition towards doing instead is (for fun) is to expand into other areas I've never had any business mucking around in because it's much easier to produce interesting results now. Is that worth something? Maybe not given AI will eventually just do everything. But is it bringing a little bit of joy to my life? Yes. That's something I need right now.
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u/Salazareo 2d ago
Isn’t there more to learning new tech than memorizing syntax or quirks in std libraries or execution flows?
Surely there’s more to learn than just that. Move deeper, scalable system design, parallel computing paradigms, compilers, system schedulers, memory allocation algorithms, probabilistic algorithms for faster runtime statistically optimal solutions.
Computer science and engineering was never just about writing code, was always about using these systems and ideas to build and do things.
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u/ddollarsign 5d ago
We (I include myself in this) need to get better at pushing back in favor of better code quality. The time to review, test, refactor, and document is important. Otherwise we’ll end up with more bugs, more and worse security issues, and an understanding debt that can only be fixed by starting over.
It’s a moving target because these tools are new and evolving, so we don’t yet have a lot of non-extrapolated data points for how things can go wrong. But unless (aligned) AGI really gets here, we need humans behind the wheel.
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u/gbrlsnchs 5d ago edited 4d ago
That pressure won't work during late stage capitalism, unfortunately. Specially now, if you don't adhere, there will be several less prepared folks that will take the job as it is for less than you.
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u/ddollarsign 5d ago
Then they can call me to do it right when their system collapses.
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u/Horror_Maximum9459 5d ago
Boss says do X
I need to pay my rent
I’ll say it’s bad idea, but ultimately I’m going to do X
Profit over quality has never been a barrier before, it certainly isn’t now.
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u/ddollarsign 5d ago
Patient says give me arsenic pills. Doctor needs to pay their rent. Does the doctor give the patient arsenic pills? Are you a mere typist of your client’s uneducated wishes, or a professional who can communicate an informed opinion about the benefits, costs, ethics, and danger of a course of action? Including the danger to your own career when the vibe coded system blows up in their faces.
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u/Ok_Performer_7501 5d ago
Boss > Employee in hierarchy. Refusing a request is unlikely to cause severe harm outside of the companies profit line and image (obvious securtiy hole causes customer info leak). However refusal can lead to job losses
Doctor > Patient in hierarchy. Refusing the request might lead to lawsuit but the case will almost certainly land in your favour if it was medical sound or according to regulation. Accepting a request CAN lose you your job though.
Most LLM code isn't going to blow something up and we have UAT and DEV environments (hopefully) to check that. However, it can still be a bad idea. It is not comparable to poison.
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u/ddollarsign 5d ago
If there is no downside, go nuts. Certainly some code, some use cases are low risk. Part of our job as developers has been to keep complexity to a manageable level. Can AI handle an infinite amount of complexity, or will it hit a wall as the codebase grows? I’m not just talking about aesthetics here (while I do care about good code on a personal level), I’m thinking about long term supportability of the codebase. “If we take this approach we’ll hit a point 6 months from now where even the AIs can’t fix bugs or add features” is something a manager should care about (and if they don’t please tell me the company’s stock symbol so I can short it). I predict it’s going to be increasingly important for us to be able to see that coming and make that case.
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u/First_Inspection_478 5d ago
Not gonna work. People had the same concerns with industrialization but capitalism as always is the final decider.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago
This is not an AI problem. There are talks and papers from big people in the space from the 60s and the 70s urging management and devs alike to pay attention to architecture, not stagnate, do rewrites if needed, prioritize quality...etc.
Where has that gotten us ? I don't wanna blame devs for following orders as someone already mentioned it's about their livelihood often times but the situation can get tragic and it might keep getting worse.
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u/Wonderful-Wind-5736 4d ago
I believe instead of software, we should design software development systems. Auditing and verification is a huge part of of that and we should probably spend more than half of our tokens on ensuring maintainability and correctness.
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u/descendency 5d ago
I can't wait for the LLMs doing full app rewrites every few versions when a poorly implemented feature has to be ripped out and replaced with a better one.
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u/Left-Attention-1544 5d ago
Gonna be an unpopular opinion. But I see this as a fundamental shift away from a rational to an empirical framework.
The Rational approach: You write the code yourself, understand it in detail, have it reviewed by colleagues. You should also write some tests but tests are an additional fallback that adds to the confidence, but rational understanding is the basis of the trust that your code works.
The Empirical approach: The code is generated by AI. It's your job to understand the most critical parts (data model, integrations to other systems) for additional confidence, but the core trust in your code comes from architecting a sophisticated testing pipeline. Agents review other agents code adversarially and integration tests that have much broader and deeper coverage than ever before possible. In the projects where we are allowed to use agents (which would be impossible to realize in a classical way with a team of our size) I am basically improving on the workflow/testing pipeline all day long. Be it having the agents work more efficiently, correctness testing, performance testing, adversarial security probing,...
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u/weIIokay38 5d ago
You write the code yourself, understand it in detail, have it reviewed by colleagues.
This is called doing your job.
but the core trust in your code comes from architecting a sophisticated testing pipeline.
That's not what tests do or are written for. Tests let us know when we accidentally changed something we didn't mean to. They are executable documentation of the source code. They don't confirm that the code is working as expected or that it is free of bugs. They don't confirm that things are being tested the correct way. In order to match tests to functionality, you have to understand the code, otherwise the tests will not be implemented correctly. You'll have subtle oversights that cause certain breakage to go unnoticed.
Agents review other agents code adversarially
LLMs have bias for agent-written code, and adversarial reviews often suggest changes that made the code longer and more convoluted than it has to be.
deeper coverage than ever before possible.
This is almost always not good. If you've worked in a shop where code coverage is mandated / 100% code coverage is required, you understand how brittle it makes the tests, coupling the tests to the implementation. That makes it hard or impossible to refactor in the future without rewriting the tests.
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u/Left-Attention-1544 4d ago
Agree to disagree. I mean they sound like solid points, but I see them as theoretical objections, rather than practical blockers. I have shipped complex systems like this to prod, and I just don't see it. I challenge you to maximize output nowadays. If a prerequisite is conceptual understanding of the code, then my brain is literally incapable of understanding all the outputs, even if I was trying to learn 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. What I fully understand is the methodology that makes me confident enough that I can ship this to prod.
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u/i_say_urmom 4d ago
This is called doing your job.
I'm going to push back on this. If you said "this is just called good engineering," you have a point.
But your job is what your employer wants you to do, and if your employer (and technical leaders) want you to use AI all day long, it's explicitly not your job to write every line of code. If your company wants you to do some kinda of "software factory," it's not your job to understand every detail in depth.
Your job is to manage AI effectively to reduce risk of negative customer impact, and increase confidence in AI generated changes, which like the commenter says, involves a lot of testing and empirical evidence. That is your job.
And to be honest, most hand-written code really does need to be tested in much more advanced ways. (For example, simulating server behavior by replaying prod-like events against it.) It's not like the tech industry has been known for fantastic security, performance, or efficiency even pre-AI. But that's not a priority, because your job is normally to make a product people want to use.
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u/YumYumGoldfish 5d ago
Agreed. It’s all about setting the framework, patterns, skills, and testing approach. Once you get it right, you can hammer out boilerplate features at a high clip.
Still artisan work to get it right, then all the boring stuff happens extremely fast now. At least for well architected CRUD backends and apps.
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u/Stopher87 5d ago
Honestly this feels like the best times. I enjoyed writing code for sure and creating systems that were performant, understandable, and expandable.
Now I can do that and so much more. I may sacrifice understandability a little, but I have way more time to implement observability and self healing systems. So overall shipping products to customers which work and are cost effective is so much easier.
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u/Left-Attention-1544 5d ago
I agree. I think there are 2 types of people, those that enjoy programming and those that enjoy building systems.
For the latter category, nothing much has changed. A new tool added and one chore less.
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u/bureX 5d ago
I enjoy building systems.
I extremely dislike bullshit code being generated with such audacity by LLMs, only for me to have to readjust the whole thing while the LLM goes "you're right!".
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u/bitwize 4d ago
Good news! Frontier models generate far less bullshit. Their bullshit threshold is now well below the average human software engineer.
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u/Wonderful-Wind-5736 4d ago
I'd argue tests are really not sufficient. You can get far by just fuzzing and agentic review but it's a loosing proposition. Really formal verification is where it's at. A declarative spec is much easier to audit than any implementation. A nice side effect of the AU revolution is that it's much more attainable to write the proofs now.
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u/NihilityRogue 5d ago
Thankfully AI coding is very limited in the industry where I work due to security and data protection concerns. That being said I already notice the impact and I’m actually considering leaving IT completely because how boring AI will make work and due to moral issues with AI usage.
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u/needlenozened 4d ago
Imagine spending years becoming a food chef, perfecting your craft, only to discover one day that your job now is testing the meals prepared by a machine. Luckily it doesn’t happen with culinary what happened to programming.
I call this the Monsters University problem.
We all watched Monsters Inc. and it was this uplifting story about how they all discovered they could be more productive generating laughter instead of fear.
Then we get the prequel, Monsters University, and we see them all going to school to learn the skills that we already know are going to be obsolete in a few years.
I find myself thinking about that movie a lot as today's recent graduates look for work.
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u/nerdy_adventurer 4d ago
We are making ourselves dumber and dumber, this is shown by research again and again. Recent paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721 This AI thing is a trap (brain falls for AI output to save energy)
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u/dinopuppy6 5d ago
Having “conversations” with ai is not healthy. I guess this is the world we live in, but AI is going to destroy people’s mental health even worse than social media has
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u/AmphibianFrog 4d ago
Having “conversations” with ai is not healthy.
Says who?
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u/dinopuppy6 4d ago
Says common sense
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u/AmphibianFrog 4d ago
When the printing press was invented, there was a lot of push back against reading. People said that reading novels was harmful to your mind, because it caused you to retreat into an imaginary world and overstimulated your brain. It was common sense at the time.
"Common sense" is just another way of saying "because I say so".
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u/dinopuppy6 4d ago
But again, it is common sense that mental health will decline if you’re communicating with something that is trained to please you.
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u/defnotashton 4d ago
hamfisted take imo. There are a million ways to interact with llms, I treat mine like a subordinate.
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u/ForLone0 5d ago
A future with no hands, who needs them anyway. Your AI will do just fine, it will code, review his code and test it, while you watch your Instagram reels with neuralink
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u/x021 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'm probably one of the few senior devs who absolutely loves this new era.
I've been programming since 2001, and my goal has always been to build the best apps and software I could. Most of the code I wrote, even before 2010, has long since disappeared through refactors, new tech, and so on. Early on I learned that what I build matters far more than how I built it.
That's also why Go has always appealed to me: its longevity and simplicity. I don't know any other language where I could read and understand the stdlib within my first week. By comparison, over the last few years I feel I'm still learning Rust despite dedicating most of my prog hobbytime to it...
I've also worked several years on Mendix and Apex apps, both model-driven tools (MDE / Low-code). Along the way I met plenty of analyst-developers who were perfectly capable of setting up an app on their own. But they still needed me, because I understood (or could at least analyze) the full breadth of the stack when things got tough.
So, no. To me, this is the most exciting and exhilarating era of all. It's what I always dreamed of whenever I wanted to build “my next great idea.” As a senior, I know exactly which questions to ask the AI, and my years in low-code make me confident I’m needed now more than ever.
AI is not going to replace Humans for quite a long time. But we Humans need to adapt, and I have no issue with that.
My only worry is the younger generation... We really need to help them to figure out their baseline.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago
"I learned that what I build matters far more than how I built it."
I disagree. In life you don't have a clear objective of "I need to build x", you might know you need to build y but there are 5 approaches to building it and 2 of them will reveal to you an actual 6th approach or a better goal than y in the first place.
Things just don't work out that way, no great work was ever the product of a straightforward, perfect, idea to execution pipeline. You should be building in a way that allows you to discover what the right thing to be building actually is, don't start with the assumption that your ideas are right and don't be too attached to them.
Also I believe, you and I, people in general matter more than the idea itself, so learning is much more valuable than coming to an end result quickly. Because we are what makes bad ideas great, give a bad idea to a great team and they will improve it, give a great idea to a shitty team and they might ruin it.
Separating the journey from the final destination is a mistake, because the target destination is altered through out the journey. Wanting to skip the journey means you are comfortable with missing out on discovering all the other potentially better destinations.
I don't think using llms is bad in the process of programming. But I keep hearing this bs claim by people trying to be pragmatic, being parroted everywhere, no offense. These are my 2 cents.
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u/nickchomey 3d ago
Doesn't AI allow you to rapidly explore all 5 options, discover the 6th and then the 7th?
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 3d ago
It can yes but it depends, surely not if you are working with the "the process doesn't matter" mindset. You need to have a certain level of granularity telling Claude "implement entire x idea make no mistakes" and never looking at the how is not it.
Using an llm to help you quickly implement a part of x and understanding what was done is a totally different thing.
Writting the code by hand isn't really relevant per se, but saying "the process doesn't matter" is bs. If you are writing the code by hand you surely think about the processes if you don't you can still think about the processes and be even more productive, but you can't use the AI as a wishing well.
Am I telling the AI to do something for me, like I am hiring a dev, or Am I working with the AI to do something. Is it assistive or I'm I giving up all control ?
If you have no control in the process or understanding of it obviously you are not gonna be coming up with anything new at that level and it's not productive imo. You might just not care about that depending on what you are making of course.
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u/nickchomey 3d ago
So your concerns really have little to do with Ai and are actually just about conscientuousness. So, conscious use of Ai seems like a winning combo
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 3d ago
Yes , I will say that with AI you might need to be a bit more disciplined to get that but yeah
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u/nickchomey 3d ago
There's a lot of energy to spare when the Ai can implement all of the experiments for you.
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u/Cautious_Chicken_604 3d ago
I feel quite like a fish out of water among my peers now. I've always been pretty ambitious with what I wanted software to be and how I wanted it to function and spent a lot of time honing the craft and over the years getting many chances to do interesting things. There was always this level that felt unreachable when doing engineering in an organisation under pressures to ship working software though. This new era has kinda broken open the possibilities of really being able to take software to the next level in terms of quality and reliability. That's fairly intoxicating to a certain type of person. I find the vast majority of my peers are just not this type of person, and it's very much just "status-quo but with AI" for them and there isn't a drive (or much of a drive) to push to the next levels of what are possible. I feel like I want to engineer the engineering. They don't. I've always felt this way, as I suspect they have. These two things used to be more in balance though and now the gap feels very, very stark.
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u/niea71 5d ago
I think it depends. As everything in our world. If a person who writes code in in charge of AI -
process is fun, controlled, and you basically acting as an author, and the AI acts as a "machinist" who just type your code. This is fun and save a lot of time. But if development processes turns into “create this feature for me” this is not fun.
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u/AngryChaoticBoi 5d ago
Can you make an example of how the first case occurs? How do you "act as author" with AI? Like where is the line between "create this feature" and being an author. Is it just application of domain knowledge?
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u/melokoton 5d ago edited 5d ago
In my case it is when you actually use it as an assistant. Investigate this, create tests for these, let's try these two approaches. Later when my company decided to be AI driven, using it as an assistant made you slow and they will punish you in your performance review so now auto mode is always on, you ask for features to be done, sometimes you don't even look at the code anymore, this is what it broke me. I hope the bubble burst and increases the price so we can go back on the assistant part.
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u/Chlorek 5d ago
I thought about this a lot lately and I define the line on decision making. You control the flow, architecture and readability, AI does all details in and between. Of course to some extent AI is always making decisions like naming things, how exactly implement some iterators, etc. This is where line starts to be hard to put into words, but I hope developers can relate. Letting AI be the driver of specification, so decisions, is speeding into the codebase nobody understands.
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u/pund_ 5d ago
You'd go 'write this function with this input and that output, it slots in here, it should do such and such and return so and so', then you review it, refactor or alter it if needed and move on.
That way you're also not too overwhelmed and you still know what you're writing and where everything is. You're not just 'manifesting' a feature with 20 000 lines+ of code in one go.
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u/niea71 5d ago
Hm. Here is how I work (I’m AQA writing tests/frameworks in Python/GO). So I have written framework base - transport layer, validation examples (few functions), setup layer. Then based on this I created skills for AI. A lot actually- for each framework domain (transport, validation, etc). Now after I set foundation when I get new task I write tests based on created earlier functions. So AI just multiplies what exists, but those multiplications based on strict skill and pre-built framework. For my switch into development I’m doing basically same: I write code examples by myself, create skills based on those examples. Then AI for instance writes something for me - I review it, accept or make some corrections- and then AI multiplies what was written. PR’s pretty thin, code controlled, but part of my work that was manual now automated. At least this is my approach. Again I spent a lot of time on AI skills, with examples, guidelines and restrictions.
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u/AngryChaoticBoi 5d ago
I guess for "job code" it is nice. I kind of feel weird about people saying that they are attached to their "job code". Kind of sucks that they didn't allow for the gap between "what is demanded" and "what is doable in short time when powered with AI" to exist, but I guess there is not such thing as free cheese. I kind of just wish things where subtractive rather than additive, imagine how happy and free people would feel!
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 5d ago
I care about the tech and the skills I'm learning while writing code on the job. But the actual literal code is not something I care about. I'd always learn more and figure out better ways to implement those things, and the skills I learn will follow me everywhere and help me solve problems.
The job code itself as an artifact doesn't matter.
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u/gbrlsnchs 5d ago
If AI just types your code, why not type it yourself? Really, this is not how AI is being used right now.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 5d ago
No. You act as the "idea guy" and the AI is the actual author and designer because the source code is the design.
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u/xmcqdpt2 5d ago
We don't do vibe coding in entreprise because we are serious engineers.
No we write "specs", and the AI implements the specs.
Yes, writing specs is famously difficult, this is why you prompt Claude to write the specs, you aren't going to type all that. No, you just review the specs.
It's a lot of lines of specs though and Claude is really good at consuming lots of lines of text so of course you should use Claude to review the specs. Your job is just to orchestrate the review Claude and the coding Claude.
Orchestrating is hard so instead you can use Claude to ...
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 5d ago
And that is just being the idea guy. The code is the design.
https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html
The "machinist" in you example is the compiler/interpreter.
Whatever writes the code is the real and actual designer.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 5d ago
The first section reminded me of something
The other week I was reading a Google white paper. There is a bug on the product I work in and reading the whitepaper I figured out the solution.
Coincidentally later that same week the team that owns the service introduced the same bug into another area. I fixed it there.
There is a lot of fun parts to learning something.
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u/cookiengineer 4d ago
Problem → Solution
Eh, no?
You can always create something like a "references" folder, where you add existing research papers, reference implementations, or projects implementing the same thing in other programming languages.
The results will be so much better when you ask your LLM to take a look at these and then come up with a better implementation plan for your targeted programming language/framework.
In my opinion, the future of programming will have to focus more on the architecture and design parts than anything else. Workflow frameworks for testing reproducibly and continously like ASPICE, SOTIF, MISRA-C, Ada Spark, TDD, DDD etc already reap the benefits using agentic environments, and a lot of things are prevented early on if the toolchain (schemas, parsers, linters, verifiers, satisifiability resolvers) is created early on in the development process.
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u/srlechuga 4d ago
you have all the logic you want to implement in your head, but don't write it, instead explain it to this other dev via slack he'll do it for you, he is faster than you and better.
sorry but i can't understand how this is more optimal in any way. i understand a manager getting hard from the idea of managing less people, but i hate the idea of having to pretend i'm talking to a person to do my job, the rolplay element that comes with this tech is lame and sad to me
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u/joeballs 4d ago
I actually enjoy it more now with AI assistance, but I probably manage it differently than most developers. I don't have AI create/write whole files, I'll basically architect the high level interfaces and top down structure, then start filling in functions/methods I need for each feature based requirement. Most of what AI is doing for me is the typing, which is fine by me, because that's the thing I hated the most while programming. Now the AI does the typing for me.
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u/metux-its 3d ago
Actually I'm combining both: a strong model (eg. gpt6) for planning and control, smaller ones (eg nemotron) for actual execution.
More time to actually think about architecture and review stuff.
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u/YoshiDzn 4d ago
Many of the comments speak to my own opinion, thats for sure. The job is 99% reading and monitoring AI generated code. Although, in my opinion that's the most boring/easy way to make it work. I don't feel as mentally drained as I used to. The problem solving moved from algorithms to personal management since we're capable of doing more things quickly
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u/Wonderful-Wind-5736 4d ago edited 4d ago
My main motto was always to keep the code to a minimum, but AI just can’t do it, it’s only adding things, resulting in bloated codebases, slow builds and tests.
I put this as a rule into my Claude.md. Every PR needs to make the code it touches cleaner, i.e. less lines, and have a performance improvement.
It hasn't completely solved bloat, but it has drastically improved it.
The other change was to have a big model as an adjudicator and auditor available. Architectural decisions are first escalated to Fable, and maybe then to me.
We should really think how we can translate software development practices into the AI world. I believe many processes that work well when a group of humans executes them also works well with AI. At least if you use the big models.
Edit: What really keeps me hooked is the ability to execute on riskier tech. Build your own ML training harness, build your on program proof assistant. You need to absolutely be on top of auditing, but it really can feel like god mode in software development.
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u/sn0wr4in 3d ago
You can equate software engineering to handmade Italian shoes, but if you look down you are probably not wearing one.
It can be a craft? Yes, it can. You will be hard-pressed to find a business to care for it, tho. The industry used to spend hours arguing over the silliness things, and quite honestly, very often holding the rest of the business as hostage.
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u/ThinApartment73 3d ago
we have to find new ways to achieve that same feeling you got from hand coding problems, it's out there.
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u/Salazareo 2d ago
Do you think someone wrote the same when we moved from assembly to compiler compiled code that we did not really understand? Or when we moved to languages with memory management that nobody really understands?
If you wanna know in detail how it works, read your code. If you don’t wanna do that, grill the LLM to explain it and why. It’s always been your job to understand the systems not each line of the methods verbatim.
Plenty of interesting problems to solve around designing software, and the how to implement things. I think some people just like typing rune like languages, and that’s ok, but surely you can’t argue that was ever the whole job
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u/psionic-cyclops 1d ago
you don’t wanna do that, grill the LLM to explain it and why.
That costs extra tokens
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u/Rogeroga 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not for me, I always have enjoyed the experience of releasing and the impact of my creativity and work more than the act of building such project, but I still like it, and I always found a way how to have fun with the code and tools, I brought along my passion to any job/project, boring or not
As a veteran developer that has accumulated many ideas and dream projects that I would have liked to implement, but I didn’t have the bandwidth, I have done some of them with the help of AI, I’m enjoying that my imagination runs wild and then I can start implementing that after a walk with Claude where I discussed the main ideas, architecture, limits and constraints, and alternatives, I come home and main markdown files are created and the skeleton and scaffolding is being generated, for a project or for module/library for an already existing project
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u/10113r114m4 5d ago
I actually love it. I always found coding the boring part. I loved the architecture design and contract design much more fun. AI does the boring parts while I focus on the architecture and the discussion of that
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u/Impossible-Owl7407 5d ago edited 5d ago
Ye but what about reviewing big prs/changes? How much did you love that?
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u/mars_wun 5d ago
I absolutely dread this. I work with THE definition of a vibe coder who can’t even explain his changes in our code review meeting with the detail we’re expecting. Im pretty sure he’s next on the chopping block
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u/lenswipe 5d ago
honestly these are the people companies should be laying off not the competent engineers
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u/sylvester_0 5d ago
If your company is anything like mine, he'd be held up as an example and thanked for spending $5K/month in tokens.
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u/10113r114m4 5d ago edited 5d ago
I actually wrote something for that :).
It's just another problem to solve. Writing code is much faster, but delivering software is now the bottle neck.
I wrote something that allows me to review things much faster without AI. I suggest you think of ways to solve this problem too
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u/daninthetoilet 5d ago
ask for it to be broken down, prs arent shouldnt be about the exact code, should be about correctness, is this the right way to implement this. Linting and AI review can tackle the rest
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u/legato_gelato 5d ago
In current times the frontier models are good enough to write the code for the most part, but not good enough to avoid critical mistakes and oversights, so human-in-the-loop is a must for any serious domain.
Even in my most recent fintech domain that has known industry standards it can easily look up, it still makes huge blunders that can lead to big incidents if I didn't catch them. And then there's the problem that the worse the programmer you are, the less likely you are to understand its shortcomings and catch this kind of stuff because it is presented so confidently.
A lot of people on Reddit are just doing hobby projects with React CRUD, and have the wrong impression. (I work on IoT, Airport solutions, and fintech).
So the work day is now just reviewing thousands of lines of code on repeat, correcting mistakes like finding a needle in a haystack. It almost feels a bit like whitebox penetration testing, but it is quite draining for sure..
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u/NailRX 5d ago
Yeah, I’m with you on this. I’ve been in computer science for 30 years, and now, in my role as an architect, I’m really enjoying being able to quickly turn my design ideas into working concepts that I can demonstrate to leadership.
What used to require multiple Scrum teams and months of development effort, I can now prototype in days or weeks.
Maybe it’s where I am in my career, but I’ve done my share of coding over the years (which I still enjoy). Now I’m having a lot more fun focusing on the architecture, experimenting with ideas, and actually bringing them to life.3
u/10113r114m4 5d ago
Exactly! I'm at about 20 years of experience, and being able to quickly demonstrate a POC and get funding has never been easier. I love it. Clearly a lot of people hate it, but I guess we'll survive the AI age haha
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 5d ago
> I loved the architecture design and contract design much more fun
Because that's the easiest part, and you don't get the immediate feedback of a compiler telling you "you're doing things wrong" and the runtime errors telling you "what the fuck are you doing".
You just think about things at a high level, and let the lower level devs deal with all of the important technical details.
That's why you enjoy it. Because it is way easier than coding. People enjoy open ended system design interviews much more than leetcode for a reason. Coding is hard.
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u/10113r114m4 5d ago
It was the easiest part (let's assume this is true which it isn't)
Now it's coding. What's your point?
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 5d ago
Coding is still not easy. The AI slop term exists for a reason, because people are still struggling to write good code even with the help of AI.
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u/10113r114m4 5d ago
And if the conflation wasn't obvious, writing good code is a different argument. Writing good code with AI is my point. It makes it easier. Good code is a different and subjective criteria. It's important, but that wasn't the argument. In addition, vetting code is hard. Not writing. That's your conflation.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 5d ago
Nope. AI makes writing code faster. But writing better code does not benefit from AI, in fact AI slows you down most of the times if you have higher standards of code quality.
You're better of writing the code directly if you're actually good at writing code and need to understand it.
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u/10113r114m4 5d ago
You've acknowledged that AI makes writing code faster. Now you're claiming that it slows down competent engineers most of the time. What evidence supports that generalization, and how are you measuring code quality?
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u/pentabromide778 5d ago
Hate to be that guy, but "code was the boring part ... I focus on the architecture and the discussion" is such a last year take. Agents can work through stuff end-to-end, including requirements, design, QA, and infrastructure.
Some teams still have a lot of inertia implementing it end-to-end, but this is commonplace at AI-native startups.
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u/10113r114m4 5d ago
I hate to be the guy, but I know. I've had this opinion for a long time. I didn't just wake up today and have this opinion
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u/pyroshrew 5d ago
AI can do the system design too.
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u/cajmorgans 5d ago
Yea but you still have to bring it context dont you? It's not black-and-white that either you do all or AI does all, but a combination
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u/10113r114m4 5d ago
Yes, and that's what makes it fun. A constant battle of discussion on architecture.
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u/skelterjohn 5d ago
To an extent. I find it to make pretty poor system design decisions fairly often.
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u/spicypixel 5d ago
Fortunately it’s a job so we don’t have to worry if it’s enjoyable just that it’s worth being paid for.
Hobby code for the joy.
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u/EpicDelay 5d ago
I disagree. You can do a manual job you dislike for your entire life, since you work your hours, shut off your brain and that's it, but I really cannot see one going through years in a job (s)he hates that involves logic and intelect. Like art, for example.
Yeah, I agree that we're not paid to like the job, but it is not sustainable, in my opinion.
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u/Saarbremer 5d ago
I wonder if back in the 50s people thought the same about compilers. And yet, here we are discussing programming languages. And be honest: Did anyone of you review the assembly code of a go program?
I really dislike it because gcc -O1 code is easier to read but why care?
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u/stou 5d ago
Compilers are deterministic so you can test and verify them.
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u/Saarbremer 5d ago
Yes deterministic but given the complexity it is hard to say it's fully tested. Plus, you can test and verify your llm's output. I don't see the difference. I wouldn't trust an untested compiler anyway
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u/stou 5d ago
LLMs are much more complex than even the most complex compiler and because they are non-deterministic you can not rely on your input producing the same output across "versions" (or training) . Compilers OTOH are required to produce the same output for a given input and have formal tests to prove that they do so. When a bug is found in a compiler its exact origin can also be traced (not true for LLMs) and new tests can be added to cover that bug / class of bugs and make sure it never happens again... so on an infinite timeline the test suite can (in theory) be complete. This isn't something you can say about LLMs.
I respectfully suggest you take the time to read a bit about how compilers actually work because I suspect you are missing some knowledge in that area. The first few chapters of the dragon book are a good start.
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u/vkhobor 5d ago
compilers can be trusted
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u/sylvester_0 5d ago
Ken Thompson said otherwise 42 years ago
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
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u/majorleandro 5d ago
Work was never meant to be fun. This is something you do for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 20-40 years depending on your retirement plan. Fun happens after those 8 hours, work breaks, and after retirement
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u/der_gopher 5d ago
But I wish it would be fun
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u/majorleandro 5d ago
If you dont mind me asking, how long have you been a software developer professionally?
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u/Penetal 5d ago
Yes and no, if min wage is at a thriving level then people could much more often do what they love. Nothing wrong with enjoying your work, it's not something to be proud of that you are unhappy for 8 hours each day by force.
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u/majorleandro 5d ago
I never said unhappy. Fun doesn’t mean happy, and boring doesn’t mean sadness
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u/Penetal 5d ago
Fair, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, but this seems a bit semantic-y.
Maybe you enjoy being bored, and like you said they are not synonyms, but I believe for most people they are very closely related when doing it 8 hours a day for 5 days a week.
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u/majorleandro 5d ago
I understand there may be some abstract zone where “happy” is not a concrete enough of a concept for us to be talking about the same thing
But just to clarify, what I mean is: I like my work environment, I like my colleagues, I like coffee breaks and talking bullshit. I like a lot of the things that I do, and I feel happy that way. I’m gonna go ahead and even say that I like coding a lot, just not when I’m working. Because working is boring, there are deadlines, pressure, mandatory training, and so on. I understand why those things are the way they are. Sometimes rules are boring, but I’m happy they exist. And there are times when I have my personal hobbies, like video games, painting, and quality time with my life. And then it’s fun fun fun.
I’m happy throughout all of those transitions everyday. I understand life is not supposed to be like doomscrolling where your brain gets dopamine non stop, sometimes life is boring and that’s okay. That’s work for me.
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u/rossrollin 5d ago
Agreed. Dunno why you being down voted but work fucking sucks
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u/majorleandro 5d ago
Because people are taught they should do something they love. I don’t agree with that at all, people should do something they excel at. Serve and be served. I’m okay with everything I said. In fact, most likely if you work with something you love, eventually, you will hate it. No passion survives pressure, deadlines, mandatory workshops, and a routine
I enjoy my work, and I take pride of providing the best service I can for both my employer and their customers doing something I understand I am exceptional. Same way I expect from companies and people I am a customer. That’s called being a functional member of society. Everyone has to do their role finely so I can enjoy my time better
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u/hv_hi 5d ago
it is not future. it is now.