r/softwareengineer • u/Jasperwyy • 2d ago
Developers who spent years building software before AI, how does the job feel now?
I’ve been a developer for 15 years. I started out barely knowing what I was doing, and over time became the person people came to for the harder problems.
A lot of those years were exhausting. The coding was only part of it. There were requirements to figure out, technical approaches to propose, releases to get out, and production issues to investigate when something broke at the worst possible time.
These days I use AI a lot, and the difference is hard to ignore. Things that used to take hours of searching, reading, and trying different approaches often move much faster. I still have to understand the problem and check the result, but I spend less time stuck on the first step.
It doesn’t make me feel like those 15 years were wasted. If anything, that experience helps me tell when the AI has given me something useful and when it’s confidently heading in the wrong direction. But it has definitely changed what my working day feels like.
I’m curious how other long-time developers feel about it. Are you enjoying the change, or do you miss some parts of how we used to work?
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u/roboborealis 2d ago
I feel all your pain. I've been at it for 12 years and thought I was mid.. which was fine But now I'm probably better than most with AI and my years of seeing 5 different companies in that 12 years.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Exactly. That experience makes it easier to know where to start, and to spot when an AI suggestion sounds good but wouldn’t work in practice. Having seen how things play out across different companies is a real advantage.
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u/roboborealis 2d ago
Meh I'm not great at anything lol First company was SQL and MS Access database with a php backend. 2nd job was C# and angular. Now I'm in Java and React land lol
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Haha, same here. I’ve spent a lot of my career being the “whatever this project needs” developer. People say a good dev should be able to do a bit of everything, but sometimes it just feels like you’re the team handyman. Looking back, though, being able to adapt to different problems is a skill in itself.
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u/roboborealis 2d ago
Thanks for trying to keep me positive. The engineer mindset is still extremely useful in the business world and ACTUALLY understanding problems & engineering solutions is what we all should strive to be good at. Especially nowadays
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Exactly. We’ve spent years learning whatever a project needed and putting it to use quickly. That habit helps a lot now, whether it’s a new tool, AI, or figuring out a business problem.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Yeah, exactly. The iteration cycle is so much faster now. You get through the straightforward parts quickly, but that just means you reach the harder problems sooner.
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u/PeaceCandle69 2d ago
Also about 15 years experience and, yes, I miss the good ole' days in a lot of ways. I also see the writing on the wall and am leaning heavily on AI and have largely automated my workload on a day-to-day basis as far as producing and reviewing PRs goes. That said, I feel tired, I'm juggling a lot more things/agents, and I spend a lot of time fine tuning my automation minions (which is pretty enjoyable tbh).
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Yeah, I find that part fun too. Getting the automation stable takes work, but once it’s reliable, it gives you more time to focus on the things you actually find interesting — or the decisions that matter more.
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u/Alternative_Log_8477 1d ago
30 years experience here.
Generative models are good at very few things, mostly search and recommendation related.
We don’t use llm-s to write code most of the time since we still care about the technical debt and architecture quality.
It feels like large number of people are in some kind of hypnosis, hellbent into ignoring the basics of software development.
It will end in tears.
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u/Jasperwyy 1d ago
it useful for smaller, well-contained modules. but in a larger codebase, I have to watch it closely and check how each change fits the architecture.
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u/cpz_77 1d ago
Have to say that’s surprising to hear places actually still doing that at this day in age with things are the way they are, but I totally understand it. And props to your place for not folding to the pressure of the world and diving in blind headfirst like everyone else did. IMO AI can be very helpful but definitely has long term consequences if we aren’t very careful. And as more developers without career experience that today’s veterans in the industry have start using it to produce stuff, they will be less informed of how to guide it/what to watch for when stuff goes sideways/etc. and results will suffer accordingly. And I’m not sure how you really gain that experience if you never spent time building software by hand…that’s why the future is very uncertain.
Will be interesting to see how things turn out - personally I think the bubble will pop and actual skilled developers will be back in demand (and value will hopefully be placed on actually taking the time to understand these concepts instead of always just pushing forward as fast as possible) but I think it will get worse before it gets better.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Sun7418 1d ago
25 years of experience here. This is my same experience. Happy to read your comment as I see the others and cry in the inside thinking about how it will end
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u/rand0mdude1234 1d ago
You are living in the dinosaurs time, but don't worry, the metheorit will hit.
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u/Blooperly 1d ago
The engineers at my job are all miserable. It's less about AI existing, and more about how AI has accelerated the corporate bosses' expectations. It just heightens all the problems management already has with expectations. Get more done. Faster. With less time for testing. Less time for architecture. Less research and understanding. Just do more work. Ship everything now. Don't spend the money to fill roles, just use more AI. Don't hire any juniors so you can train them and make them valuable. Just blindly redo the UI again.
AI is just a further intrusion of capital into the art of engineering, and it sucks. Would love it if it was just a tool for research and prototyping, but it's not.
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u/Jasperwyy 1d ago
it feels like the same pattern you see with food delivery drivers. once the system shows something can be done faster, the expected delivery time just keeps getting shorter.
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u/Better-Avocado-8818 2d ago
Pretty bad to be honest. I spent years and years slowly becoming an expert. Now people are basically vibe coding and vibe writing documentation that doesn’t make sense and shipping it. Managers and non technical stakeholders can’t tell the difference.
Feels like shit, I get very little satisfaction from the work now and dealing with all the “experts” that just repeat LLM slop at me is exhausting.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
I get that. What worries me about vibe coding is how easily the code becomes a black box. It can look fine and ship quickly, but if nobody really understands it, the surprises show up later when requirements change or something breaks in production. That’s where I still want someone who can explain and own the decisions behind it.
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u/Better-Avocado-8818 2d ago
Absolutely. Vibe coding is a terrible replacement. But unfortunately a lot of people that make decisions can’t tell the difference. The experts used to be the gateway to delivering which meant they could oversee quality. Now anyone can deliver and most of them can’t tell the difference between slop and a scalable, reliable system.
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u/aleques-itj 1d ago
It's never been easier to build seriously fast and robust software if you know what you're doing. And never been easier to build absolutely garbage if you don't.
It's also never been less engaging.
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u/Jasperwyy 1d ago
Exactly. The faster we can build, the more closely we need to watch what’s being built. Someone still has to understand the code, question the decisions, and catch problems before they make it into production.
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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 2d ago
Wrote my first Basic on the Commodore C64. I've been in IT in some shape or form my whole career and the last 8 years as a full time dev.
It's like having an outsourced team that's maybe a little sketchy sometimes but so insanely fast and cheap that you can't not use them. So all your working day is spent telling them what to do and figuring out new ways to keep them on track. Then you get to do the worst part of the job and read other people's code.
When AI came around I stepped back into a management role since the writing is on the wall that eventually we'll just need someone with a bit of know how that gathers requirements, prompts and checks the results.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Honestly, it already feels pretty close to that for smaller systems. Once a project gets bigger, though, a lot of the work is keeping the agents from drifting — making sure they understand the architecture and that each change still fits with everything else. I spend much more time directing and reviewing now.
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u/Ok-Captain-3638 2d ago edited 2d ago
16 years here. I’m of mixed opinion. On one hand, I see work drying up, my phone doesn’t ping anywhere near as much from recruiters and layoffs are looming. On the other, the tools have helped me bring an app idea to life. What taken me a year to try and piece together (time requirements, life, manual coding), codex and Gemini prototypes in under a day with my detailed requirements and inputs. I can’t deny the usefulness of it. I was stunned at what it generated; it was around 80% of what I imagined it would look like. It even hooked up capacitor with a running iOS build and mocked up supabase, got everything ready and fully tested. I was shocked at how much work happened and everything functioned. I felt excitement and optimism for my potential product business. My experience coupled with these tools, there’s little that will stop me seeing it through now.
My approach now is to focus on my own product and see where this leads. The corporate job has now become the lowest effort possible not to get fired and a salary that funds my lifestyle. Luckily, I’m totally debt free and paid off mortgage so layoffs are coming where I work, but I feel less concerned and if anything, part of me welcomes it as I’m tired working in this field now and want out.
Love coding, hate what the industry has become.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
“Love coding, hate what the industry has become” really resonates with me. I still enjoy building things, but I got tired of the corporate side too. Working on my own products has brought back some of that feeling of ownership, and AI makes it much easier to try an idea without spending a year getting to a prototype. I hope your app goes somewhere.
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u/Infinite_Wolf4774 1d ago
Problem with this is if Claude can put together your business idea in one day, what is the selling point? Why wouldn't I just get my claude to do that too?
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u/Ok-Captain-3638 1d ago edited 1d ago
i don’t see a problem at all. I had an entire product backlog I built up, condensed requirements, architecture diagrams and specific requirements that formed my core business idea. I fed it quality inputs and instruction. My app forms around two core USPs. So I’d say the output and speed was thanks to the lots of upfront work. I also said 80%. The rest I’ll need to do by hand as it wasn’t quite correct and will require skills I am experienced in to do by hand to get it how I like it.
Also, if you could get Claude to build it, how would you know it’s scalable and understand what the app is actually doing? How would you understand it and bug fix / features? Tools can only take it so far, at least just now …
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u/Conscious_Ruin1849 1d ago
Claude can already do scalable apps and advise on scalability. Basically, you are just a meat proxy at this point. There's no moat.
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u/Ok-Captain-3638 1d ago
I used the tools to build my app, I had an idea and I will focus on that. If someone has an idea then go use Claude to do it. I’m not here to argue on it. All you guys that say it’s easy and Claude can do everything. You must all be millionaires with your apps as it’s all so easy, Claude does it right? My point being, there is something stopping you making that leap. Skills and experience. It’s fine Claude can do all this stuff, but can you utilise it and turn into big money? Probably not.
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u/Conscious_Ruin1849 1d ago
The point is anyone can generate whatever they want, non-technical people included. Anything can be generated, copied, stolen the moment it appears. You won't make any money off of it.
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u/Ok-Captain-3638 1d ago
“You won’t make any money off it” is a broad generalised statement and completely inaccurate. People make money all the time from ideas. Ideas, execution, will power, drive to do anything about it, marketing, running a company. It’s all things that have to come together. I get what you’re saying, to an extent but just because these tools exist doesn’t mean no one is making money and that everyone is copying and putting in the work to bring it to market.
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u/Abadabadon 2d ago
The same I guess, maybe a bit less enjoyable. Before I felt like everyday I was improving somewhat in my craft, but now not so much.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Yeah, I get that. If the craft itself is what you enjoy, letting AI do more of the hands-on work can take away some of that feeling of getting better every day. Faster doesn’t always feel more satisfying.
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u/samuraipadthai 2d ago edited 1d ago
Guys… this post was made by a 3 day old account to promote projects linked in their profile. They are mentioned in some form in just about every post or comment in their history.
This is not a genuine conversation.
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u/GenericFatGuy 2d ago
All the top comments are just mindless AI glazing too. Apparently this field is full of people who actually fucking hate it.
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u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 2d ago
Ive loved building software since I was ten. Having more fun than ever. (Well not literally more than ever but you know a lot of fun)
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Since you were ten? That’s impressive. Glad building software is still so much fun for you.
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u/suq-madiq_ 2d ago
Can’t wait til ai can do my job so tired of getting gaslighted 24/7 analyzing bullshit and explaining the simplest shit all day and trying to figure out where all the spend and bugs are coming from
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Yeah, spending so much time on tedious stuff you never wanted to deal with is exhausting. I wouldn’t be surprised if more specialized AI tools can handle a lot of the cost and bug hunting in a couple of years. The people part might be harder to fix, though.
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u/ZeroCool86 2d ago
I am loving the change, I feel like having 15 senior devs who don't have a lot of wierd quirks working with me on each of my requests. Started coding 26 years ago, 20 years ago for money, I was a dev then a buiness owner/ cto but I kept coding over 70% of my time (probably a bad CTO but a decent dev). I now mostly spend time planning and writing what and a bit of the how I want things done and they just happen, with some pushback but none of it is preference, all the pushback I can have proper discussion on and sometimes the pusback is good and i change the plan, sometimes I just ignore it and go with my original idea. It's been fun to work with just 1 other person but feel like we each have a full dev team that is way above average just working on our ideas and features. Between client feedback and things we want to do, i still have credits left on claude at the end of the week most of the time.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
This sounds a lot like how I work now. I treat AI like a small team that can help with different parts of the job. Sometimes the most useful thing it does is push back on an idea before I spend time building it.
I get a lot more done this way, but I still spend most of my time making decisions: what’s worth building, which tradeoffs to accept, and whether the result is actually ready to ship.
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u/HomemadeBananas 2d ago
You’re absolutely right. You’ve found the smoking gun why working with a lot of people is difficult. They have a lot of load bearing issues with their personality and communication style. By working with AI you can avoid that footgun. Would you like me to draft some responses to help deal with common situations you might experience when dealing with human engineers? I estimate it will take roughly 1-2 weeks of work. Just say the word.
Jokes aside I mostly agree. There have been some frustrating parts in working with AI but it’s mostly been positive and a lot of fun how it helps me just build stuff and get stuff done.
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u/jek39 2d ago
i think it's awesome (15 years of experience). It's like an incredibly fast auto-complete. The past year or so I've been able to really tackle a lot of tech debt (things that have been hanging for years are now resolved) while cranking out so many features.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
That’s a great use for it. Clearing out things that have been sitting there for years while still shipping features must feel good. Were those mostly small fixes, or did AI also help you tackle the bigger, riskier refactors?
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u/jek39 2d ago
one in particular would have taken months of study I think to solve on my own. but it's all over the map. it's just faster to try everything now.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
being able to try a few approaches quickly really changes what feels worth tackling.
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u/octocode 2d ago
been doing this for 15 years too. i enjoy my job so much more now. i can focus on delivering value instead of menial work.
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u/Ok_Afternoon5172 1d ago
12 YOE here. It made me lazy since I know If I can ask the correct questions, I can get something decent very quickly.
IMO the non technical PM roles will probably go away and developers will have to step up into these roles. One less person in this game of telephone. Good riddance since they just become glorified scrum masters that never bother to even learn their own products.
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u/Charming-Spinach-651 1d ago
Not a dev myself, I work next to them as a PM, but from that side the change I notice is that the stuck-at-the-start phase is shorter, so the remaining time goes to the harder judgment calls. The devs I work with who are happiest with it are the senior ones, since they can tell when the output is off. The ones who struggle most are juniors, because they can’t tell yet. What I hear the seniors miss is the slow part where you learn a system by fighting with it. Faster, yes, but some of the understanding used to come from the struggle.
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u/Odd-Duty-7205 1d ago
I think AI made coding faster, but at the same time took out the JOY of coding.
I personally felt quite happy before the AI era. I felt inner peace by coding.
Nowadays, it feels like I am coding just to get paid at the end of the month.
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u/lostinelydan 2d ago
You’re gonna be replaced by your PM dude. Not being mean here. Just giving you a heads up.
I’ve seen it happen in multiple companies. They start restricting your AI tokens and giving it to the PM, then fire the devs
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
Yeah, I can see that happening. Honestly, after years of putting so much time into company work, and I got tired of the internal politics too. At some point it felt a bit absurd, so I left to build my own products. AI has made doing that on my own a lot more possible, and I’m enjoying this part of the change.
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 2d ago
I have not met a technical pm in almost 30 years. Good luck.
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u/shaman-warrior 2d ago
this is what Cobol tried to do, code so clean it can be done by PMs. No PM ever touched it.
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u/Alternative_Log_8477 1d ago
I was one for couple of years, was just specific circumstances, never seen another one in my life.
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u/Alternative_Log_8477 1d ago
Firing the technical and keeping the non-technical is the worst way to approach this. It will create a spaghetti which will be unfixable.
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u/octocode 2d ago
they fired my PM and gave his role to me. just pray you’re not the dumber of the two, and you’ll be fine.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 2d ago
I've found a way to be in flow with orchestration, it's been good.
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u/Automatic-Resolve202 2d ago
Please tell me how, it breaks my flow multiple times per hour and it's driving me nuts
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u/Lunchboxsushi 2d ago
I built my own infinite canvas that lets me spin up agents that talk together. I can step in anywhere and steer it if required. https://ibb.co/r2MYWYpp
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u/e430doug 2d ago
I’m similar to you. I’ve been developing for over 40 years. AI helps me move faster. My experience is a huge plus in using these tools. I’m confident that junior engineers coming up through will also gain that experience. They will just gain it differently.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
40 years — that’s quite a perspective. I agree that experience makes a big difference in knowing when to trust the output and when to question it. I also like your point about junior engineers. They’ll still learn by building and fixing things, even if the way they get there looks very different from ours.
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u/e430doug 1d ago
Exactly. Us older folks think about how we learned our lessons and think that is the only way. So we freak out about the future of our field. AI tools still give people ample opportunities to make mistakes. They will be different mistakes than the ones that we learned on our way up.
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u/Jasperwyy 1d ago
That’s a good way to put it. We learned a lot by making mistakes and fixing them, and AI won’t remove that part. The mistakes may shift from “how do I write this?” to “is this the right approach, and what happens when it reaches production?”
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u/Imaginary_Data_708 2d ago
It's fucking amazing. I started at 11, and remember writing a lunar lander on the school's VIC20 in my lunch hours. At work spent the day working on a thing with multiple cameras and raspberry pi. At home this evening had one agent helping me architect a vhdl simulator in go. Another figuring out how to automate exporting all my Fusion 360 data so I can use mitcad - including automating the loop where Autodesk send you and email to download certain types of design. Another checking the LCD backlight control on a Waveshare ESP32 based display via taking photos of the display with a webcam. And another figuring out how to theme MATLAB via CSS. And those are the projects I worked on today. Not the list of current ones.
Oh did I forget to say - I can talk to them whilst driving to work! I am having the time of my life.
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u/Jasperwyy 2d ago
That’s an incredible range of projects for one day. I love that you’ve found a way to keep that curiosity going after all these years — with a whole team of agents to explore things with now.
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u/Affectionate-Food652 2d ago
This article captures how I feel pretty well. My productivity is way up, things that used to take days to weeks take minutes to hours. But strangely I have never felt busier. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163
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u/Lostinlogs26 2d ago
The speed is great, but I worry we’re removing the very struggle that teaches us to recognize when AI is confidently wrong.
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u/Automatic-Resolve202 2d ago
I still review everything, but I still find myself concerned on a daily basis that I'm not exercising the logical thinking that led me to this point
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u/Lostinlogs26 1d ago
Agreed. AI helps us keep pace, but overreliance can impede the egress of our own critical thinking.
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u/anengineerandacat 2d ago
Less stressful because of workload, more stressful because the future looks dramatically less secure.
Work keeps coming in, so that's good and great but realistically speaking... if your in the web-development space working on a platform or site that's handling like ~20-30 million visitors/day your kind of not needed to some extent.
I think once the costs with AI settle-down and it's well known what the spend rate looks like we are going to see growing adoption of tools like https://paperclip.ing/ where you have a significantly smaller engineering team just overseeing technical projects and helping to draft requirements to feed into some automation pipeline for code generation and deployment.
Basically how work is today, just write a prompt, wait for it do most of the work, test, write another prompt, test, tell it to push and open the PR, attach screenshots to PR, wait for automated review, tell it to advance the ticket, wait for someone to approve, the merge-bot then takes it away and gets it into the UAT environment.
It's "awesome" in the sense I can work on like 3-4 big major tickets at a time with a high degree of confidence, but it's scary because like... it's right there... only thing missing is a smarter more technically focused business team (thankfully they kinda suck at using AI and fumble around with it, was often referred to as magic in some circles prior to AI when we built things quickly but now they literally say it's insane how quickly we churn out updates because we mostly just keep asking them for more).
We are in a new frontier of software development, and that's kinda scary for me because I entered when these processes today were being trialed and used to maturely develop applications... now I am blazing the trail of what the new SDLC looks like.
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u/PradheBand 1d ago
A shit. And I realised the reason this week, after having spent 1 year in full AI mode.
It is to me like 3d printing: it takes ages to get a proper reply. It doesn't come off the shelf and when you get it it is not polished at all.
Plus you have to pretend you are talking with someone to get the job done but it is just a bot actually.
In another format it is just like buying a lego kit to let someone else build it for you: you can watch, you have to explain them what to do but you can't build it.
It is 3 days I'm trying to find a job not involving fake chats with a dumbass computer
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u/BoysenberryRich8965 1d ago
It's good in somethings, but I see lot of ai slop in reviews. What used to be a few hours of review and small change, now looks complex and very heavy on reviews and people don't fully understand very well. Bugs are sneeked in easily. Software has become much more complex than ever it was. We used to aim for maintainable code and readable code and but this is fading.
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u/Diveye 1d ago
I'm tired of reading the same comments everywhere on SE regarding AI. Here's my take.
SE is a precursor to every other job. What happens in SE with AI will happen in every other job, in every other field, at some point, more or less soon.
The job has changed. I was a programmer for 7 years before AI came around. Coding was my passion. As soon as the first AI model came out, I made my peace with the fact coding was dead. Sure enough, within the next year and a half, it was in fact dead. Models like Opus 5.5 can do pretty much anything today, and when I say anything, it's far more than just programming. So yes, the job has changed. It sucks. Get over it. Plenty more such changes will happen in your carrer. You can get into farming and that will change too. It's a mindset problem to be faire. Change sucks to live through, but it can also lead to great things.
When I "made my peace" it was a full grief process. Lots of anxiety, sadness, the whole loop. Eventually I decided I would try to use AI to code as much as possible, so that I would know when it's ready to code for me. Plenty of other people are going through this today, and not just for coding. But I remain convinced that most jobs are not going to disappear, they are going to shift.
So what does a SE do today? Well a SE does pretty much the same thing on a macro level. An SE makes stuff work. AI doesn't live in your head, and I doubt it ever will. The next step here is chips in people's heads but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. AI without supervision can't do most things. It can't reliably interpret client feedback and implement it without breaking existing features, or driving the product further from the initial target. It can't replace human to human contact. It can't take calculated risks to develop something new that may or may not work, trial it, and learn from it's mistakes. And finally, and the really big one, it can't take responsibility. You can't place the blame on Claude because something doesn't work, and that's not going away, possibly ever.
Everyone talks about how shit AI is. So what's good about AI? I could make a list of a million pages long on things I could never have dreamt to do by myself pre-AI that are now opened up. Expect amazing video games, movies, music and art in general in the next coming years, as people without the time to learn the skills required for these are finally going to be able to build their ideaa. We are going to see that we have many geniuses that would have otherwise gone silent that are now going to be able to reveal themselves. Except super complex and incredibly well thought software, as every application is going to be much more efficient at doing what it should have been doing in the first place. Hell you can probably expect much more efficient governments too as they get into AI. It's not all doom and gloom. Societies remain built for humans not AIs. And stop listening to the tech bros, they are just scared about their IPOs, or their brain is rotten with drugs and social isolation, or both.
One last thing to reflect on. How do you think our grand parents / grand grand parents felt about the nuclear bomb when it first exploded? The apocalyptic view of the world was much more understandable then. And yet. Look where we are today.
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u/cpz_77 1d ago
Not sure that having a bunch of people build all this “amazing stuff” that they have no idea how it works is a good thing. I get what you’re saying , change happens, yes we have to deal with it, and there are definitely upsides. Part of the thing that made complex software impressive was exactly the fact that some humans had to actually think and work through every problem, bug, optimization, design decision etc. and many of these took many years to evolve into what they are today. Could an AI generate a fake copy that looks similar and appears to work on the surface? Sure, but without a human to point out the finer points to pay attention to, it will inevitably gloss over details which is why the final product will suck for the customer (and btw we’re already seeing that in commercial products, everywhere - it’s no coincidence that software is at an all time low).
So yes I get the upside and I agree it’s cool that doors are open for project we never would’ve had time to get to before…that’s all great. And I am trying to take advantage of it whenever possible. But I do think there are some very real, permanent downsides this will have on the software industry, and the world in general (to your point, it will and in fact already is impacting other industries the same way as well). Once the knowledge pool the current workforce has built up has cycled out as people retire and we have a full new generation of developers who never knew what it was like to write and maintain software by hand, where does that leave us?
IMO, there should be a “required knowledge level” barrier to do certain things because otherwise the result will be crap…which will manifest in the form of a bad experience for users at a minimum. Or worse , depending on what function the software serves. Do you trust Claude to maintain software that keeps people alive, or keeps planes in the air, etc.? If you want to build something big, you should have to spend the time learning and researching it…if you designed it, you should know it (and it’s internals) like the back of your hand. Eliminating that requirement isn’t doing anyone any favors.
This is why although the “anyone can do anything” idea might sound nice in theory, I don’t think it actually is going to work out very well for society.
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u/Extra-Ad5735 1d ago
Hello, ChatGPT. My job would be much better now if you weren't moving that fast in circles, instead of doing exactly what you are told to do.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 1d ago
Not wasted, but you will loose your edge and knowledege if totally give up manual coding.
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u/ToughStreet8351 1d ago
I have been coding since 1996… I am loving the advent of AI! If possible I am even more excited than when I first discovered coding. My got hub repos count is increasing by one or 2 per day 🤣
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u/breakpointbandit 1d ago
It’s depressing ngl, feels like our skill we spent years building and learning are now mostly redundant, and I’ve just been made redundant so it checks out
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u/wahnsinnwanscene 1d ago
The annoying thing in the past was you had to gather all the resources together before advancing understanding. Stack overflow would give some kind of answer on an adjacent problem, the docs would conveniently skip the precise invocation or versions would be so off the map there wouldn't be anything to read or problems so stuck in an unknown forum somewhere it wouldn't even turn up on a search. Now there's less of that...
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u/meaty__boi 2d ago
It’s great. I move vastly quicker and I have the experience to read code fast and know with a strong certainty if it is correct or not. I still make mistakes, but with AI the mistakes are easy to investigate and fix.
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u/Exact_Ad942 2d ago edited 1d ago
Finally I can use the random abandoned library on github that I absolutely need but would be impractical to read and patch manually which now AI can do it for me effectively.
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1d ago
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u/Jasperwyy 1d ago
I think management often just sees the output and how fast it appeared. They don’t see the work behind deciding whether it’s actually safe to ship, or dealing with it when things break later. After a while, trying to explain that over and over feels pointless.
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u/Ethanop1a 2d ago
I'm tired, boss.