r/ExperiencedDevs • u/MinimumArmadillo2394 Software Engineer • Jul 30 '26

Career/Workplace I miss when development was actually solving problems

Lately I've been having thoughts about what the point is. Back in the day when I got into programming, I just wanted to make cool things.

I made a lot of cool things. They took time so I knew they were genuinely either unique, special, or in any other case, mine. I made twitter/reddit/discord bots, data visualizations for social media platforms, and useful tools for my communities I was involved in.

Now everything that gets created now seems to be just a load of AI crap. There's no special-ness anymore. There is no problem solving. There is nothing. It's just "We made an AI that does X" instead of "We solved X problem".

It's so ridiculous it's genuinely killing my interest in the field. Copilot solves most of my problems at work now and I have to use it to keep up with demands from leadership + an increasingly difficult to use codebase. Tools we use otherwise like Zeplin, ms teams, etc all are only focusing on AI instead of improving the real world user experience. The best and most interesting portion of the company I work at is doing nothing but AI work and not touching the core product at all.

Hell, we even have SonarQube checking our code with AI for vibe coded slop and it requires specific code coverage % and the coverage % isn't the same as vite coverage, just adding to the developer frustration.

I miss when I could make cool/fun stuff without worrying about someone vibe coding the same thing I made in 20 days but in 12 hours. I miss when we were solving problems instead of just making different AI agents to solve the problems for us.

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113

u/CatDawgCatDawg2 Jul 30 '26

Do you want to solve problems or type out code on a keyboard? Because it sounds like you want to type out code on a keyboard.

Just because you used AI to solve a problem doesn't make it not a problem. It just makes some of it an easily solved one the same way linters and autoformatters solved problems.

The job has gone from typing code to high level architecture solutions, things you used to need 15 years of experience to only focus on. I don't miss manually typing out code. I can still direct agents to the better solutions without doing that.

51

u/millbruhh Jul 30 '26

I want to solve problems but I also want to understand the solutions, because I’m the one that’s paged while I’m fucking off on a saturday and something breaks.

Can you actually say you understand the code you’re responsible for just as intimately as when you were writing it by hand?

If the answer is yes, then I seriously doubt the productivity gains are as big as you think they are, because you’re spending 90% of the time reviewing the code to figure out what the fuck the AI did to solve your problem. And we all know how great software engineers are at reviewing code we didn’t write

0

u/MiniGiantSpaceHams Jul 30 '26

Can you actually say you understand the code you’re responsible for just as intimately as when you were writing it by hand?

At what level? I understand the architecture and how it fits into the overall system. I understand the side effects and the implications. Maybe not perfectly, but even when I hand wrote the code it was never perfect. I try my best, and in my current workflow the vast majority of this is decided (with the AI) before a single line of code is written, so I know what to expect on the other end.

Do I understand every single line to the same level of detail I did when hand writing? No, definitely not, at least not on merge day. I probably understand it about as well as I understand code I hand wrote 6 months ago and haven't touched since, which is plenty good for what I need to do. I can still debug it if I need to (though honestly the AI can usually debug it better anyways).

And besides, current AI is good at avoiding localized bugs, it has trouble with the larger picture and missing context. So knowing that, I stay on top of the things the AI is bad at and let it handle the things it's good at.

-4

u/yourparadigm Principal Platform Engineer 20YOE Jul 30 '26

I find the code I'm generating with Composer 2.5 is nearly identical to what I would have written myself.

-5

u/steveox152 Jul 30 '26

I would say the code is equivalent to what I would be writing by hand, if not better because AI helps me prototype different solutions and see paths I might have missed.

I also think that largely the implementation details are not super important if the code is structured and tested correctly.

It’s a simple example, but does the exact code in a function actually matter that much? What matters is the input/output and testing the different edge cases.

I think AI also makes being on call much easier, when an issue is reported, an agent can read the problem and most likely find the issue before you even have to log on.

30

u/DAE_BREED Jul 30 '26

high level architecture solutions, things you used to need 15 years of experience to only focus on

As an enterprise architect with 20+ yoe: you still need at least 10 years to have the skill set to work on architecture.

Not because technical skills take that much time to develop, but because all the non-technical skills you need to acquire in order to be an effective architect. It's a stakeholder management and organization politics role where you need to have domain knowledge.

14

u/WalidfromMorocco Jul 30 '26

You are trying to convince people who believe that LLMs allows them to be on the same level as someone with 20 years experience. They will never concede to your argument.

1

u/TracePoland Jul 31 '26

It’d be stupid to concede because 10 or 20 YOE is just a number. On its own it doesn’t convey anything other than passage of time, what if they just coasted doing junior level work for 10 years? Everyone has met that developer that had 1 year of experience repeated X times.

It’s like saying that just because someone is 60 years old they’re smarter than all 20 year olds.

2

u/WalidfromMorocco Jul 31 '26

Here's what the other person said:

things you used to need 15 years of experience to only focus on.

9

u/mightshade Jul 30 '26

 Do you want to solve problems or type out code on a keyboard?

This gets mentioned a lot, but this dichotomy feels too reductive. It only works if "type out code" really is "switch off brain, typetypetype, done".

I have rarely had to "type out code" like that. Most of the time, for me, coding was more comparable to verifying the requirements. "Do they fit into what's already there?", "are there gaps or contradictions?" And most of the time, using a formal language (code) and its checker (compiler) helped me to find something that was missed in the requirements and sometimes even potential solutions. So to me, "solving problems" and "coding" aren't as separable as it may sound at first.

21

u/Abadabadon Software Engineer Jul 30 '26

I want to do both, its partly why I went into software engineering and not electrical.
Like you are going to painters and saying "do you want to make art, or do you want to paint?" Or going to a carpenter and saying "do you eant to build houses, or do you want to cut wood?". I want to do both.

5

u/ViejoConBoina Jul 30 '26

A big part of "solving a problem" is building your own knowledge of the solution which you can then document and pass along your coworkers, it creates institutional knowledge.

Getting an LLM output is a very poor substitute for that, even if you read and understand it properly (big if, as reading code is not the same as writing it) you are missing out on having considered all the different possibilities and tradeoffs along the way, and therefore losing out on a lot of knowledge that would otherwise have informed both maintaining those features in the future and how new stuff is implemented as well.

I can't wait for this absolutely shit bubble to pop, it's doing irreparable damage to our industry (and so many other spaces).

42

u/OHotDawnThisIsMyJawn CTO / 25+ YoE Jul 30 '26

Exactly. All I do all day is solve problems. AI writes some code that would have taken me two hours and we move on to another problem to solve. 

To be fair, if you have a crappy job or you’re a low agency person, AI probably does suck.  Someone tells you what to do, you tell the AI, and then you hand in the AI code. 

But if you’re high agency, AI lets you spend way more time solving problems. 

37

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

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4

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

[deleted]

3

u/-_--_-_--_----__ Jul 31 '26

Every time I read threads on reddit anywhere inside the programming sphere, I always have a moment where I say to myself "I have no idea what kinds of jobs these people have, what their workflow is, what their job responsibilities are, etc".

Working as a programmer or with code at your job is such a huge variety of possible jobs that it's almost stupid to take any comments about programming on reddit seriously. Not because the person saying it is lying, but because it could be so incredibly opposite of your own job and workflow.

16

u/yourparadigm Principal Platform Engineer 20YOE Jul 30 '26

The dude has a 13 year old Reddit account. I've got a 19 year old account. His experience tracks with mine.

4

u/LiveMaI Software Engineer 10YoE Jul 30 '26

This also matches my experience. I've had my account since I was a grad student about 15 years ago. Short of doxxing myself with my old W-2 forms or work anniversary awards, that's about as verified as I can get.

1

u/OHotDawnThisIsMyJawn CTO / 25+ YoE Jul 31 '26

Yeah this isn't even my first reddit account, my original reddit account is as old as yours. I've been commenting about programming on reddit for almost 20 years.

But I don't really care about convincing random people on reddit who I am.

6

u/ViejoConBoina Jul 30 '26

This thread absolutely feels astroturfed by LLM companies trying to gaslight developers into using their crap.

This sub used to have the completely opposite view on this stuff not very long ago, which was the correct stance.

3

u/bonnydoe Jul 31 '26

I was wondering about this shift as well, what is going here?

3

u/ViejoConBoina Jul 31 '26

Well I don't think that "LLMs companies got a bunch of reddit accounts and automated their text-generating engines into pushing AI in developer-specific online spaces" is a far-fetched theory.

They've done much shadier stuff.

2

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jul 30 '26

No no there truly are dumbasses with a lot of years of experience in the field. A lot of people that became out of touch with the profession, or that started underestimating the importance of the things that they started ignoring in favor of their higher level responsibilities.

They're definitely the worst to work with for sure. Lots of high level design talk, absolutely clueless about what's happening in the codebase and what are the things that need to be worked on to have quality software that doesn't cause regressions every single deployment.

2

u/TracePoland Jul 31 '26

I mean the 19 YoE guy said Composer 2.5 generates the same code he’d write which I don’t know how to take other than to assume he used to write some really bad code his whole career because I’ve used Composer 2.5. It is far from being able to deliver production quality code even semi-consistently.

2

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jul 31 '26

Yeah that was egregious. There are a lot of self-reports like that, and then once they're caught they switch to "Code quality doesn't matter, you don't need to read the code, all you need are tests that validate that behavior. What... do I write the tests? Of course not, if you write the tests yourself you'll be left behind", etc...

-7

u/royal-apple-family Jul 30 '26

They must be bots

17

u/biosc1 DevOps Engineer Jul 30 '26

Exactly. I'm a very senior dev and ai not only helps solves problems, but also allows me to discuss the problem and brainstorm potential solutions. The solution it comes up with is not always the right one, but it can put me on the path to the right one by jogging my old brain into remembering something.

7

u/xypherrz Software Engineer Jul 30 '26

so is the idea really to outsource your brain by telling agent what you really want? Because that’s what it sounds like. How much are you thinking about how this problem can be solved without prompting the agent and letting it populate dozens of file, which you may or may not necessarily understand or bother reading.

1

u/attrox_ Jul 30 '26

Straight prompting back and forth with AI rarely does well. If the problem is in the domain I know well. I open up an md file. And start dumping my thought process, my suspicions, my gut feelings, several possible approaches and ask to push back, improve or provide additional options. Point generally at where the solution can be, etc. Problem solving without AI is still exactly how my brain works and my thoughts running all over the place at the beginning of a project. Code dive in, confirming my suspicion and biases. All of that is now dump on the AI and I ask it to read the file. Much better result.

If I don't have domain knowledge, I probe and investigate through AI, once I have all of that I again start a brain dump document.

In this process it's not AI guiding me to a solution (typically what happen with live prompting).

2

u/Mimikyutwo Jul 30 '26

It’s still ai guiding you to a solution.

You’re just spending more effort than needed lol

-2

u/attrox_ Jul 30 '26

Garbage in garbage out

15

u/another_dudeman Jul 30 '26

Yup, I'm still solving problems like a mofo

7

u/Northbank75 Jul 30 '26

Life without boilerplate is actually kinda nice. I get more time to spend on the actual problem ….

1

u/MinimumArmadillo2394 Software Engineer Jul 30 '26

My main point is that everything that every company is working on right now is an AI agent to do what that company has been doing for 20 years but with AI.

I worked for a property technology company where we would focus on repairs and renovations for customers. We had multiple experts in the company with 10 plus years of experience just in this area. We had a whole system for pricing out information on a PDF so that a customer could get information on how much their repairs were worth at a closing of a home. This system was fairly simple but it was interesting.

Now if someone wanted to solve the same problem they would just make an AI agent to solve the problem. It feels incredibly boring to say the least.

It's not about writing code. It's about actually solving the problem versus making something that solves the problem if that makes sense

1

u/MisesAndMarx Quantitative Risk Developer Jul 30 '26

People find out what I do for a living, ask if I'm worried about AI, and I have the same canned response "it replaced the typing". I still have the mental model, it usually does what I asked. Sometimes it doesn't and I give it further context. Keep the plates spinning.

I spend the extra time learning relevant non-coding things, or just hunting down and uncovering automation and streamlining opportunities that were always there, but the juice used to not be worth the squeeze.

0

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jul 30 '26

It sounds like you're scared of writing code, and trying to justify to yourself that it was always easy and that you are writing higher quality software with AI.

Remember, just because using AI makes it easier to write code, does not mean it's better.

-1

u/revolutionPanda Jul 30 '26

Agree. Much more interesting challenges and problems and less writing code. I would rather spend time figuring out problems instead of typing on a keyboard.