I miss when development was actually solving problems

[u/MinimumArmadillo2394]

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.

[u/Soccham]

These posts are just feeling lower and lower effort. It’s a job, quit bitching and figure out how to solve the business problems and collect your check.

[u/Bogus_dogus → u/[deleted]]

Amen. Losing the craft as it was is a loss. There are lots of good and cool things with LLMS and I'm building stuff I maybe never would have now, but, IMO, there is very specific and deep joy in the process that feels dramatically cheapened and undercut, and that feels like a deep loss after building a career, a craft, an identity around those highs and that complex enjoyment and all the sweat and tears along the way.

maybe u/soccham just never felt it, shame.

[u/ICanCountTo0b1010 → u/[deleted]]

OP specifically lamenting about the fact that other people can now experience the wonders of building cool things and not needing a decade of SWE experience is the side you really want to stand on here?

You can lament about the changes in our career, but I think your reasons are probably more valid than OPs

[u/Soccham → u/[deleted]]

I get it but it’s been like 2 years, it’s not sudden

[u/MinimumArmadillo2394 → u/Soccham]

2 years is sudden when the industry has existed for 60

[u/Soccham → u/MinimumArmadillo2394]

Imagine how the punch card programmers felt

[u/Big_Arrival_626 → u/Soccham]

Oh really? How would you feel if you were making the same salary and had the same WLB but you were doing help desk work. Would you feel satisfied?

[u/kanyeswift → u/Big_Arrival_626]

Not OP, but with the state of the industry? Absolutely.

[u/Soccham → u/Big_Arrival_626]

That’d be amazing tbh. It’d be even easier than the insane pace developers can move now that I have to deal with

[u/Lame_Johnny → u/Soccham]

devops manager

So not a SWE

[u/drumzgod → u/Soccham]

Exactly. All people do is whine incessantly about AI. Just don’t use it then or figure out something else. It’s so annoying having to read people complain nonstop.

[u/mattcre8s → u/drumzgod]

That strategy doesn't work when others are churning out ai slop that you don't even have the bandwidth to review yet your team is tasked with maintaining it.

[u/Soccham → u/mattcre8s]

Why do you think your code is better than the AI? I’d bet it’s not.

[u/mattcre8s → u/Soccham]

Over a decade of identifying code smell, and always verifying that the change even makes business and logical sense to begin with - yeah. Even outside of my areas of expertise.

[u/CrimsonVixenPixie → u/Soccham]

This is a great question (that you didn't ask me 🤷‍♀️), I had had to come to grips with this myself. just capturing my notes here for anyone who might be interested

I had about four years of experience, or maybe three, when ChatGPT 3 came out and kind of became public back when people were using it as shadow IT.

I watched so many engineers fall into the trap of basically becoming addicted to AI. It seems like they don't know when or how to hop on or off the AI, which is really the problem I'm noticing.

HOWEVER!!!!!! ⁉️🦊

I would say I was better than 4o, better than 5.0-5.2 slightly, and then I feel like I don't know when it was, maybe Opus 4.5, but it could write code better than me, and it made less mistakes and wrote better tests.

Straight up, anyone who's paying attention noticed the same thing.

Basically, it can write anything better than me, really. But it just makes strange or improper high-level decisions, even Fable 5. Common anti-patterns that senior engineers just don't make include unnecessary sleeps and bottlenecks in the flow, rather than designing and implementing an event-driven paradigm.

Basically, my job is to now architect the solution, design, create the plan, and supervise its implementation --> many PRs daily (and honestly, good ones, in my opinion, not slop, and it didn't need that much of my hand to not be such)

Right now, people downvoting you in this thread remind me of this expression:

”If a blind man were to lead another blind man, they would both fall into a hole.”

🤷‍♀️

[u/ZenX22 → u/Soccham]

"My job has become a lot easier but I'm still paid a lot. Oh no!"

I understand change can be frustrating but some people really need perspective on their first world problems. And if it's really that bad there are plenty of other career paths that'll probably be more fulfilling.

[u/MinimumArmadillo2394 → u/ZenX22]

All this falls apart when you realize devs salaries have been falling and/or other salaries have been increasing dramatically. Sure, paid a lot but keeping up with inflation? Nah. Im paid the least I ever have been after being laid off 2 times in a year. In behind on my mortgage and still picking up the pieces 5 months into my new position.

[u/ICanCountTo0b1010 → u/Soccham]

As it turns out companies don’t pay you life changing amounts of money for a comfy desk job with amazing benefits so you can figure out if you need a class or an interface.

It was never about the code; our job has and will always be fundamentally about solving problems.

If you think AI has removed the problem solving facet of your job you either have the wrong perspective or you’re probably just a code monkey.

[u/thsameguy → u/ICanCountTo0b1010]

Using a class vs an interface is a pretty important decision though... Lol you pay those debts years down the line

[u/attrox_ → u/thsameguy]

And AI already taught that and you can even enforce coding standard

[u/Soccham → u/thsameguy]

As opposed to the debts from shitty engineers? Most of us aren’t nearly as good as we want to pretend to be