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.
Easy!
Get fired from A CTO position because everyone gets replaced by AI, like me, and then be unable to get any IT job for 6 months straight until you’re so desperate and that you’ll take a call center job.
Oh wait, that isn’t honing IT skills, that is honing depression skills. Sorry bout that.
Same boat. I’m not even really reviewing the diarrhea code. I just tell the bot to review it. I don’t care. Let it explode. It’s the only way they’ll learn.
I’m also not even paying attention to the implementation tickets. Just tell bot to do it. Whatever.
I’m super checked out at work now. They want me to use AI. Fine. I’m not babysitting it though. If it blows up, it blows up.
If job wants slop, I just queue up work back to back in the slop generator. While the slop generator is running, I’m reading a book or building something by hand to make sure I stay sharp. If my engineering leadership doesn’t care about quality, then why should I? Give em what they want and take care of your own needs
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!
I have also been doing this since the 90s. All of this rings true.
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’m a CS instructor now (after two decades of industry), but it’s unclear how long this job will exist despite my modernization efforts. When I think about what I’d do instead, one of the top things is working for a non-profit or public-sector gig doing Good and heavily leveraging AI to get the work done (using my SE skills to keep quality up). I figure it won’t pay much, but I’m old enough now that the nature of the work has more value than the money.
And after the workday, I’ll hopefully have something that I’ve never had in any other coding job: enough energy after work to code my own projects.
Hopefully.
If I had a manager who was telling me to review huge, unreviewable PRs every day, I’d just punt that to an AI with piles of tests. Under that management direction, there’s nothing you can do to save the product; you can only postpone its inevitable demise.
Personally I don’t even work in anything that could be done with AI. All my tech stuff I do is hobbies. AI hasn’t yet penetrated the in person manual labor sector much.
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
which other fields have you found not related to CS
Maybe electrician? I don’t know if that field is even safe though excluding the hands on parts. I have been finding I’m leaning more into server hardware and networking lately though just for my hobby setup. There’s no AI involved when swapping server components or running SFP+ cables to replace ethernet and it makes me happy
Can relate
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.
Loads? No, but the ones who do good work are well compensated. Just need rich clients.
Not a reasonable analogy. Coding isn’t like making the furniture, it’s like making the assembly line that makes the furniture (or an assembly line that makes assembly lines that make furniture, etc.).
It’s true that a factory doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) care about deeply understanding each individual screw in each individual item. But it does (and should) care about how its assembly line is laid out — or at least the process of how that layout was determined, or the process of how that process was determined, etc.
But they will organize school trips to see us in museums, right?
(in case it’s not obvious enough, I was joking)
I’m not really worried about skill atrophy. I don’t really buy that using AI to write all my code for a month will do any long-lasting harm to my ability to write code more than not writing any code for a month would, and I’ve gone much much longer than that without writing code before, with no long-term consequences.
I think it’s more about motivation, which again is something that you can regain pretty quickly if circumstances change.
If you have strong soft skills this isn’t so much of an issue, and I highly recommend that. AI can do such a good job in so many avenues, but being able to show up with confidence and understand and present materials to leadership is a very important skillset to possess. In addition, having the ability to solve problems on the fly is also a large asset from my perspective.
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.
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.
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.
Instead of sizes, I recommend:
- high quality for <25 LOC
- quality for 25-75
- decent for 75-150
- questionable for 150-250
- shit for 250-500
- dogshit for 500+
Public histograms per engineer. 😄
Not necessarily. Sometimes you keep features on separate branches and merge them at appropriate times, and those branches can grow BIG. But even if all individual PRs of the feature branch were reviewed, you still need to review the big blob.
Similarly, some things just take a lot of LoC without compromising quality.
e.g. in a project I work on, most API clients are generated (no, not genAI, but OpenAPI descriptors and Gradle tasks). When you add a new version, that can end up a big, chonky boi PR, but it’s all auto mergeable because 1, it’s generated via a known good template 2, CI already checked it.
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.
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.
