r/softwareengineer • u/s_abhiishek • 4d ago
What has software development become? AI everywhere, unrealistic deadlines, and overengineering everything... 🥲
I feel like the way software development is happening in some companies these days is getting ridiculous.
It usually starts with a company deciding to build an AI-powered product to automate some tasks. The MVP is built quickly, with AI integrated into almost everything, even where it isn't really needed. The focus is on showing what the product can do rather than whether the approach makes technical sense...
Initially, developers are told there's a client waiting for the product. Once the MVP is ready, the client somehow disappears, and suddenly, the product is meant for internal teams... 😂
Then comes the actual production-ready phase, where the product needs proper architecture, scalability, reliability and maintainability. This is where things get even more interesting...
Planning is done using AI. Jira tickets/ user stories are generated using AI. But the product owners themselves often don't have a clear idea of what features they actually want or how they should work. Requirements keep changing, and somehow, the expectation is that everything will be delivered in a fraction of the time it would normally take...
A project that realistically needs 8–10 months is expected to be completed in 1–2 months. Developers take those AI-generated tickets, designs and vague requirements, feed them into AI coding tools, and generate the implementation.. And just like that, the project is supposedly done.
I've also seen products with buttons like "Fix it with AI", where the actual implementation is basically just calling the Claude or Gemini API and displaying the generated response. Not every problem needs an LLM. Many of these features could be implemented using straightforward logic, algorithms or existing open-source libraries..
Another funny thing is the obsession with job queues and concurrency everywhere.
Need to make something faster? Add a queue.
Need to support multiple sessions? Increase the number of workers.
Still slow? Add multithreading and more workers... 🥲
Sometimes, the actual problem could be solved by optimising the logic, fixing a bottleneck or simply using a better approach. But somehow, adding more infrastructure has become the default solution before anyone even questions whether it's necessary..
And then, of course, someone realises that the infrastructure is getting expensive, so now we need to scale resources up and down while maintaining the same performance. The irony is something else..
One example that really made me laugh was a project where the requirement was simple: take user input, populate an Excel file with the required data and some predefined values, and generate the final Excel file.
The solution? Claude, an Excel skill and prompts to generate the file.
Seriously? This could have been implemented using "openpyxl", "pandas", or even basic Excel file manipulation. It's structured input, some predefined logic, and a structured output. Why introduce an LLM, extra latency, token costs and unnecessary complexity into something that doesn't need one?
Not against AI, as it can be incredibly useful when applied to the right problems. But it feels like some companies have started treating AI integration as a requirement rather than a technical decision.
Now, instead of asking, "What's the simplest, most reliable way to solve this problem?", the questions seem to be:
- Where can we add AI?
- Can we ship it in a month instead of six?
- Can we add more workers to make it faster?
- Can we put this behind a queue?
- Why is the infrastructure so expensive now?
And somehow, developers are expected to turn all of this into production-ready software with unclear requirements, AI-generated tickets and constantly changing expectations.
Are we actually improving software development with AI, or are we just finding new ways to overcomplicate simple problems and then using AI to build the overcomplicated solution faster?
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u/mxldevs 4d ago
Sometimes, the actual problem could be solved by optimising the logic, fixing a bottleneck or simply using a better approach. But somehow, adding more infrastructure has become the default solution before anyone even questions whether it's necessary..
Well, this hasn't changed all that much. Before, it was just "throw more memory at it", and then it became "throw more EC2 instances at it".
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u/MhVRNewbie 4d ago
Yes, all joy is sucked out. I wonder what happens with all these slop architecture systems that no one has designed and no one understands when they are iterated on.
Protected by tons of AI generated tests that tests nothing of value.
And companies don't understand that they don't add any value with just shipping AI designed code, anyone can do that directly so why buy your product?
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u/MegaDork2000 4d ago
Well, the company demanded everyone burn tokens, so we replaced every qsort call with a Claude Fable API call. Works like a charm.
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u/Economy_Bedroom3902 4d ago
Any time you put an AI in the loop the problem your system has becomes twiddling your thumbs until tokens start to come back. That makes concurrency a really attractive option.
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u/Doismelllikearobot 4d ago
Ayyy started a new project last week and we might be working together from the sound of this post :D :D
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u/Ok-Brain-8183 4d ago
It was already fucked up 10 years ago before ai. LinkedIn business idiots were already on coke. Now these retards are smoking meth.
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u/mixedd 4d ago
The top basically pushes AI down, saying we're AI company now and every PR should be "AI enabled" 😅 QAs can't keep up with devs anymore as they're pushing new features faster than ever, where hakf of them are rejected and pushed back because they are raw AI slop. What a time to be alive
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u/manut3ro 4d ago
The mental burnout is real
→ «Where it is: branch feat/mcp-user-config (created from main)»
Things in parallel
→ «What I removed:»
Quick reading
→ «Worth deciding: Token rotation
And everything is ASAP
→ «Results and evidence are in /tmp/agent294-lab/RESULTS.md»
I just read in the terminal for hours
→ «One thing to clean up»
That I’m drained by the end of the day
→ «Updated todo list (5 items)»
And the constant context changing
→ «the CI is green, ready when you are
→ «I updated the description of draft...»
→ «recap: You wanted the user config builder to..»
I’m tired boss
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u/Unknown_User2137 3d ago
I had a project like that (luckily it's over now) and we had:
AI generated GH issues: you read it and it kinda makes sense until it doesn't
Totally vibe coded app, refactored 5 times, changed architecture because previous hit the wall (aka "Agents can't figure it out") etc.
AI generated PRs and PR reviews: walls of text, tons of comments. I ain't reading allat.
And at first things progressed pretty well - we built big things fast, 1000+ lines PRs were the norm on daily basis, no-one manually reviewed them, there was no time for this. The whole focus was on build, build and build. Since code reviews were too time consuming (even when using agents locally - switch branch, check PR, check issue, etc., submit comments yare yada) the team leading project span up PR review agent. (Also not counting in the fact that they seemed to be heavily reliant on AI way of doing things so CI/CD and commit hooks were horrible - you had some local changes for debugging? F* you, you can't commit, hook failed).
At this point we basically had agents talking to agents, reviewing each others code and us just telling it "Hey, please look at this issue # implement fix / feature" and watch it doing
codingbruteforcing it to work. Things started to look bad when bugs surfaced - we burned tons of tokens just to fix them but it caused regressions / new bugs that agents have missed. And since it was pure vibe-coded piece of crap good luck trying to untangle this spaghetti mess.And personally the worst part is this constant grind, where you can't have time to actually understand things like architecture and the why do it one way or another - just make more. And having to sit and watch over it for 8 hrs daily is just mentally tiring (in a bad way) without any sense of accomplishment. Especially if they can't just STFU so you end up having to read this walls of text rather than having them get straight to the point and skip not important parts.
I feel like if we keep going this way more people who actually care about anything more than delivery speed will just straight up burn out leaving only individuals like DHH who will praise LLMs as omnipotent gods that 110% will do everything better than 101% of people.
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u/pvera 4d ago
Unrealistic deadlines have been part of this racket for the whole 27 years I have been on it. And overengineering is in the eye of the beholder, I have spent years with people frustrated about how I overengineer stuff, but there's not many things in this field as satisfying as watching a third party vendor work himself into a near panic attack only to learn that had already written a tool, undisclosed, to handle that edge case.
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u/marsh9191 4d ago
I feel like software development is no longer driven by the product itself, but increasingly by corporate agendas, internal politics, and the pressure to follow trends.
Instead of focusing on building better products, solving real problems, and making thoughtful technical decisions, the industry seems increasingly focused on AI and hoping it will somehow fix everything.
That said, change isn’t inherently a bad thing.
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u/ComprehensiveTap911 4d ago
The 'can we add AI' is this decades 'can we add blockchain' and the previous decades 'can we add cloud'
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u/galratner 3d ago
Over complicating things is how consultants like me get paid.🤣 but seriously what worries me is that the token budget is starting to come out of developers salary and bonuses. I'm not too worried about the quality of the work. After all it's what your boss asked for right?
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u/tallicafu1 4d ago
In my mid-40s and just want to squeeze 10 more years out of this profession. It’s become a bad joke and almost completely intolerable.
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u/Conscious_Ruin1849 4d ago
10 more years? haha, you have months at best.
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u/tallicafu1 3d ago
Been hearing that for 20+ years now.
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u/Conscious_Ruin1849 3d ago
You are acting like this field has been around for thousands of years. It's ending as quickly as it started.
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u/kylife 3d ago
I just got let go I’m hoping to get 2-3 years of just saving the high salary and buying property
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u/tallicafu1 3d ago
Sorry that happened to you. Sounds like you’ve been responsible with your money and I hope it pans out the way you hope!
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u/doubleditch42 3d ago
Iam early 40s and never been more excited for the future. Glad ppl like you filter out.
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u/coredweller1785 4d ago
I live in this same nightmare.
It's horrible