I currently work at an “AI First” 🤢 fintech company, and we’re mandated to program agentically. I was fortunate enough to start working before the AI hype, but the environment right now is daunting.
There’s too much unmaintainable code slop and throw away scripts committed that I can’t keep track anymore. Each PR has so much diffs that it feels like someone had diarrhea and shat all over.
I try to manually review the code, but it feels like best effort at most. Like I may only understand 70% of the thing that I’m reviewing. What ends up happening usually is that I just ask the model and verify the output(which is horrifying I know)
I spend the whole day arguing with AI, reviewing, and pushing back against its output that sometimes I wonder if I am the one driving AI or is it driving me.
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Recently, I noticed that I’ve becoming more reliant on the model and that my skills have been atrophying. What would’ve taken me an afternoon if I program it by hand, would take me a week now if I do it now. I also find my head hurting and myself glossing over the code in code reviews and prompting claude to do even the basic of commands.
I get that there’s more to programming in software engineering (collaboration, dealing with people, etc etc), but I don’t feel like I am in control of the systems I am building anymore with the engineering aspect being replaced with babysitting and self lobotomy.
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Off work hours, I try to brush up by reading on system design and architecture books, typing by hand if I’m learning a new technology or stack, but I feel like it’s not enough to prevent from skill atrophy.
How are y’all coping and how do you recover from this? I am afraid on what skills that I’ll be able to bring at my next place of employment if I resign and that I’m becoming a jack of all trades master of none type of thing - having only shallow understanding.
In a similar boat. I’ve been programming since my family got a IBM 386 in the 90s and I started dabbling in the dark arts. I’ve been a career programmer for 20+ years now. I’ve loved it, all the way up until the past year or two.
Here are some of my rambling thoughts and perspectives, for whatever they are worth.
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“Don’t try to fix someone else’s mistake while they are still in the process of making it.”. AI is both a useful tool and a giant shit show, but if your company wants the shit show, then let them have the shit show, do not carry their burden.
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Lean into hobbies that aren’t on computers. I do woodwork, gardening, arts and crafts, sewing, home repairs, camping, etc. “Go touch grass” as it were.
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“Fight fire with fire”. (I don’t understand that saying) But the point of it is to say, don’t manually review AI slop, if they are gonna slop 800 file PRs at you, AI slop review them and move on. The Titanic is sinking, you aren’t going to save it by frantically bailing with a bucket.
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Programming is both an art form and a skill and it is also like riding a bike. You may not ride for years, but if you get on a bike it will come right back to you. Don’t stress or worry that your skillset is deteriorating, it will always be there. It may get rusty and need some lube, but it won’t go away.
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When the AI bubble finishes popping, AI will still be around, but it may not be shoved into literally everything as much, and there will still be a place for talented people to do quality work. Examples from 2 of my top hobbies is that we have both automated farming and assembly line furniture factories, but handmade solid wood furniture is still around and worth doing, and there are still gardens in a lot of back yards.
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Most of the people in the top positions in our governments and companies are completely and utterly unqualified to be there. You’ll be fine. Focus on being your best self, being happy with YOU. AI is here to stay, but talented people have not lost any value at all, know what you are worth, have some confidence, don’t let the slop get you down, there is literally slop in every aspect and career, try not to worry about it, ya know? Mass produced, low quality clothing and furniture exists, but people still sew and woodwork. It’s ok, be better than the baseline slop and you will have value to those who understand.
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Being a “Jack of all Trades / Master of None” isn’t a bad thing, neither is the inverse a “Master of one thing and nothing else”. All of that is also very black and white thinking, it’s not reality. People are more than just their skills.
Final thoughts and summary: The AI slop is here to stay. As I learned in therapy “Don’t fight the current/flood/rising tide, learn to swim and float above it.”. The river is going to go where it is going to go, you can either be swept away and dragged under or you can sail along the surface and enjoy the breeze. I, personally, recommend the latter.
Good luck out there! You got this!
Thanks. This is a bit reassuring.
Fight forward with fire- My only gripe is if a prod issue arises, the ball will bubble up to my court and I hate to be caught with my trousers down
That’s so inspiring. Thanks!
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I don’t know but I’m in the same boat except its just killing all of my motivation. I really love software but not like this and it’s making me want to switch fields
Can relate
In short - I’m not.
This is a “buggy whip manufacturer” moment. Software development as we currently understand the practice is no longer needed in volume. Just like buggy whips no longer need as many craftsman making them since the advent of the internal combustion engine.
Yes, some people will still be “line editors” just like there are still some people preserving older skills and manufacturing niche items like buggy whips for the handful of horse-drawn buggies that still exist and are in-use.
But the vast majority of software going forward will be produced by LLMs. The skills required to “drive” the new LLM engine is an altogther different set of skills than what is required to whip and steer horses. Everyone fighting this tide is just fighting the inevitable.
Instead, I’m moving “up the stack” and focusing on answering the question, “What testing is difficult to game and shows me that the work has been done adequately to spec?”
The LLM-enabled future needs more mathematicians than it needs code-writers. The vast majority of anti-LLM Luddites I see online are all people who are “coders”; the “computer scientists” are busy adapting to a future that is already here.
Personal projects done without AI. It’s like artisanal coding. People will pay tons of money for it one day. We will be able to sit in museums implementing simple scripts without AI so kids on school trips can see how human brain works without assistance. Of course the AI will have to explain to them what’s happening.
People will pay tons of money for it one day.
I hate to say it, but this sounds like copium. Do you still see loads of well-paid furniture woodworkers? Nah, it’s all replaced with factory IKEA stuff. Sorry, but nobody will pay for “artisanal coding” when they can get whatever they need from the AI for free.
But they will organize school trips to see us in museums, right?
(in case it’s not obvious enough, I was joking)
At work? Do what they want you to do I guess. If they are mandating you mass produce slop, do exactly that. I’ve tried fighting against it. There’s nothing you can do when your coworker opens a 785 file PR (not an exaggeration) and it needs to be reviewed today. Your carefully crafted code can never keep up with the constant waterfall of whatever the fuck Claude/ChatGPT/whatever calls acceptable these days.
Your best bet at work is to direct the agents others will use. Use a strict linter. Mandate a strict formatter. Add to the instructions that tests must be written and must pass. Do what you can to force it to emit semi-acceptable code (or fail if it can’t).
Outside of work? What’s a coding agent?
Oh my god, the slop PRs with dozens of files abd tens of thousands of loc are insane.
I don’t even know how to review it.
My answer is usually telling them to go back and rethink the design, LLMs hate well encapsulated modules and they’re very good at spaghettifying your dependencies.
They can do a decent job understand the spaghetti, but they have no concept of what exists that didn’t turn up in the last 5 commits or a list of file names. So they reinvent the wheel every time.
I work at a very large company that has pushed Ai. I also have 27 years of professional experience, so I lead position hasn’t changed too much, except reviewing Ai work as well. All your problems sounds like a team issue. People shouldn’t commit things they don’t know how and your commits should be small enough that they are easy to review. I had this issue before Ai. I would tell my team to please make small co.mits because either have to review them. We still do the stuff we enjoy ourselves but use Ai for the coding equivalent of “please read this 200 page document and remove all i stances of dog”. Basically something that requires no skill but an insane amount of time.
That being said, I do worry about the new grads.
People shouldn’t commit things they don’t know how
I don’t use AI, but I read people saying you lose interest when an AI writes it. You check out. So you have less understanding, and it’s not reasonable to expect people to have the same investment. So I don’t believe it is just a team issue.
your commits should be small enough that they are easy to review
Depends on what’s being asked by higher-ups. If there’s management pressure to commit fast, then, again, it’s not a team issue, unless you’re including management in the team.
People shouldn’t commit things without understanding them, but there’s a lot of pressure on people in some of these shops to push out updates at irresponsible speeds. Management is being flooded with messages about 3x, 5x, and 10x production, and you don’t get that with bottlenecks like “understsanding what you’re releasing”.
In a lot of companies, senior management has lost their minds, and have ben fully committed to the slopocalypse.
nothing new here
ai is just a different flvor to the same shit sammich
It’s the pressure to ship things that gets you.
I took over another guy’s work last week and have spent a whole week fixing issues, but his core work needed to get shipped for a major sales deadline. So I got it out the door.
But now I have to bug fix it back to a real solution that aligns with our long term goals which sucks.
Play Stationeers. It’s got a neat little assembly language called IC10 inside that directly controls and networks the game’s physical world and it’s fun and challenging to master. Build contraptions, have deadly but hilarious accidents, repeat.
Simple. My job currently being full-time unemployment.
Enforce commit size and quality.
Label PRs:
- xsmall for <25 LOC
- small for 25-75
- medium for 75-150
- large for 150-250
- xlarge for 250-500
Anything above and instantly reject. Do standard exclusions: docs, code comments, tooling (though I’d categorise this separately), etc.
Have very strict rules on creation of new scripts, new tooling, and so on.
I don’t know, but I can only say that I share the situation.
I’m currently on a self-enforced break of at least a week from using LLMs for code generation. I’m using that time to pay off technical debt and make sure I have a full understanding of codebases that have grown too fast…
LLMs have let me get stuff done that’s tedious or outside my skillset. I consider the former purely positive, but the latter is dangerous and requires being selective. I don’t care to level up my Google Glass API expertise just so I can have heads-up biking navigation, but I do want to be good at maintaining the self-hosted compiler for the programming language I’m developing.
My company isn’t mandating AI but he’s only encouraging it. I’ve been able to just not participate luckily
Nice.
Greetings, stopping by as an engineer, but I hear yah. The engineering firm I work at went full AI first with Ai being mandated at every step. Nobody thinks anymore and just types questions into a prompt at every chance. It’s just nauseating to witness at the senior level.
What has helped me is my hobbies, and trying to find ways to learn new skill sets by looking at fun ways to expand into spaces adjacent to my hobbies and interests. I can’t recommend anything specific but the best advice I can offer is to try exploring new hobbies or things that interest you for fun. You will likely stumble onto something by accident this way. Best of luck and you’re not alone in this struggle.
Are there complicated problems to solve that the AI can’t handle? Or areas that are too important to risk the slop? You could focus on those. Nothing like a big dumpster fire that only you know how to put out to make people back off with the AI first bullshit.
For example?
One thing that I can think of are people management problems (eg talking with clients etc).
I’m kinda worried because AI will get better down the line and even if the bubble pops, AI will be here to stay.
Performance work, lower level issues that interact with external software, hardware spec implementation, large testing efforts, long-standing customer-side issues. Anything that throwing AI at won’t immediately solve.
Long before AI I’ve built a career around going after the tasks people deemed too difficult or too lenghty. This strategy creates a lot of room to negotiate. Now with AI, I’m seeing people walking in circles feeding one AI text into another and not being able to interpret the AI output. That’s when they stop caring whether I’m using AI or not, as long as the problem gets solved.
You’ll probably write way less code than before still, but at least you get to keep more general problem solving and code analysis skills.
I’ve been working on my own templates and libraries for personal projects, and trying to do it all by hand to really learn the frameworks I’m using. It’s been pretty rewarding and it feels like I’m tapping into those skills that I haven’t used in a while. Focusing on templates/libraries also makes it not feel like throw-away work, as I will likely use it for something at some point.
