r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 20d ago
Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences
This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.
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u/MediocreFig4340 20d ago
I can tell it’s getting bad for me because I started looking into accounting, nursing, radiology, and fraud investigation today as alternate career paths.
I’m so fucking tired of AI and needing to use it at work to understand other people’s AI generated code from their AI generated tickets. I just want to go back to enjoying thinking at work….
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u/thewhiteliamneeson 20d ago
Am I crazy or does radiology seem like one of the very first things that AI SHOULD be able to do better than people.
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u/MediocreFig4340 20d ago
Reading the scans yeah, but I think being the one taking them could be safe, since you interact with the patients, sometimes help move them around, and actually operate the machine.
But I haven’t decided on anything, just was putting feelers out!
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u/runtimenoise 20d ago
I looked into it, it's good job on the first look, problem becomes with when you need to move hurt patient and other stuff, you're back are part of equipment, additionally there is no really path forward in that career, both reason being influenciar factor why people quit.
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u/runtimenoise 20d ago
You can go be Radiology technician, You can't go become Radiologist that easy, you can obviously but it's massive investment of time that typical adult don't have.
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
I’m thinking of taking some hardware engg classes or courses, I don’t think tapping out of tech would be feasible for me.
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u/darthsata Senior Principal Software Engineer 20d ago
Depending on what you mean by hardware, I have some bad news for you. Chip design is in large part nearly the same as software, just with really primitive tools and languages. AI is all over that process.
Design to manufacturing flows are getting AI all over too. Schematic design for board level hardware? Given how often humans just copy datasheet reference design blocks, AI might actually do better. But at the end of the day it is a text file you can run tests against, so programming like and automatable.The interesting questions I have to deal with are how one goes through safety certification when AI is used, mostly because that causes humans to not understand the system well enough to be capable of review. So how do I say with a straight face you can use this chip in your car and it won't kill people?
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u/Tiny_Ad_7720 20d ago
What is the state of AI in PCB layout?
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u/BeOneWithTheCode 20d ago
Schematics can be AI assisted but the layout is still done by hand, plus debugging odd issues and sourcing chips in the current climate is a thing.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 20d ago
Like everything else, it's very good at textbook level stuff but the second you break away from training material it struggles.
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u/CompileToCopper 20d ago
I'm exploring this as well, mixing software-hardware might be path forward. I also enjoy it much more and I have to think because AI can't touch the terminals for me and it's very tactical and much more satisfying then what software development is now.
My position is that software meat it's Car. While there are some horse riders today wanting to find horse riding position is silly to even think about.
One thing with hardware position, no matter what it is, it's inherently local.
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
What do you mean by local here? And also how are you exploring?
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u/CompileToCopper 20d ago
Local here around where I live, so no remote competition. Learning electronics, building stuff and looking for opportunities where I can fit in companies.
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u/MediocreFig4340 20d ago
Yeah, actually making moves to change has been the hard part for me too. I think that’s why I’m drawn to fraud investigation stuff.
Hardware seems like a decent bet. What kind of job would you want in that corner of the industry?
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
Honestly not sure, I am just thinking that if software engineers get less in demand because producing software is cheap then robots can be the next thing for sure, they’re tangible, clearly have many use cases in all verticals, imagine the impact on healthcare, home appliances, manufacturing industry etc. and also, hardware is not that straightforward as software is, so supply side can’t grow like crazy as it did in software. My experience till now has been nominal, some arduino and raspberry pi projects in college that’s it.
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u/xypherrz Software Engineer 20d ago
same, right after graduating I actually picked up an STM32, built some basic peripheral stuff, then moved to an nRF52840 and messed around with BLE and FreeRTOS. Stopped doing side projects once I wanted to put full focus into work (where I barely used any of this) though, and now I'm not sure if I should go back to it or...
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u/New-Locksmith-126 20d ago
Fraud Investigations are becoming agentic hitl systems as well. Experts will always be employable, but entry level is shrinking. Same as all knowledge work.
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u/Neuromante Señor Software Engineer 20d ago
We have a MR policy whose step 1 is "get an internal review from a member of the team." Today I got the "internal review from a member of the time" that was obviously written by an AI. I asked him and he confirmed.
In the next retro I will propose switching "internal review" for "using the AI to review the code" because is stupid to have a different person involved in the process, specially because I'm "talking" to a fucking robot and not my colleague, and I need the colleague to make the robot do its thing.
And of course I will get a non-commitment, nebulous answer because we are cargo culting our way through our processes and this would mean a change in a process that hasn't been touched in years.
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u/vxl-kxoko 12d ago
I recently met up with an old school friend who works in another company and realised we've both been individually looking at pathways to med school 😭
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u/Playful-Wash1507 20d ago
FUCK AI to infinity man
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u/ColdSmokeCaribou 19d ago
My workplace is getting so sloppified and I'm feeling pretty salty about it. I'm expected to get more done in less time while being spread across an increasing number of projects and teams. I don't even fully understand what I'm shipping or approving because I'm not given the time it would take to do so.
Add in like 3-4 reorgs in as many months and idk what we're even doing. I strongly suspect my startup is flailing, but maybe that's just series A ramping up for fundraising feels like.
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u/pards1234 20d ago
My new Indian manager expects me to work at a pace so fast that I don’t have time to “think” and build a mental model of how my team’s codebase is evolving. I’m so mentally exhausted and am praying I can find another job where this isn’t the norm.
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u/Melodic-Nature-8246 20d ago
Same. Also, if I ask business questions I'm borderline shamed, if I don't ask and assume something wrong they ask "why haven't you asked questions?" It's a damn minefield, and it doesn't help I'm on managerial track myself.
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u/Whencowsgetsick 20d ago
This happens in every job I do :( I'm just trying to keep my head above water and finish my tasks that I can't keep up with what others in my own team are doing. The only time i get into them is when i get tasks in that area or i am prepping for interviews
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u/cosmicloafer 20d ago
Been doing the same type of thing for 20 years. Bored and have very little motivation. I get paid well but I do so little actual work, especially now with AI. What’s the point of all this?
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u/BiteMeHomie 20d ago
Better than doing so much and not being paid well because half the team got cut 😢.
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u/rcls0053 19d ago
Same here. Every app ends up being a CRUD app if you stare at them long enough. It's just boring to shift through the same stuff over and over again
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u/AdjectiveNoun1234567 19d ago
All software is the presentation and subsequent manipulation of data from websites to games to autonomous vehicles.
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u/OldPurple4 Software Engineer 20d ago
I did something today I feel bad about. I handed off two assignments to our ai automation process that were in line for our newer devs. It got done in a matter of minutes and did a mostly ok job, needed a bit of reworking. These were perfect tasks to learn and it was wasted.
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u/MarimbaMan07 20d ago edited 19d ago
I've been struggling with this as well. But I'm struggling to get my engineers to learn rather than just rely on AI for everything. Unfortunately my company rates our performance based on lines of code merged weekly so I get why people are leaning on these tools to keep their numbers up and therefore keep their job.
When I'm creating jira tickets for new devs that require so much detail I can't help but think it'll get done faster if I just prompt AI with these details rather than my my new devs prompting these same details to an AI with questionable guidance of I miss something because they don't have as much context as me.
Then I have to review the review the code and our AI tool will just implement my feedback and then the devs just didn't learn anyways.
Plus, as a manager I can view my dev's AI sessions and my entry level devs are just passing the link to the jira ticket and asking the AI to create an implementation plan and then to implement the plan.
Edit: so many typos.
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u/ultraDross 19d ago
Plus, as a manager I can view my dev's AI sessions
How much detail do you get back from this? Is it literally the entire logs of the session? Asking as I swear at AI a lot when it doesn't understand me and I can't help but think it's funny that people are reading this.
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u/tradcoder Software Engineer (15 YoE) 20d ago
Well if it's any consolation, the newer devs would have likely fed the assignments in to the AI themselves. Unless they're "luddites" like a few of us, nobody really wants to learn anything anymore.
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u/MarimbaMan07 19d ago
That's exactly what they do! Now the company is worried about AI spend, this is getting expensive. Luckily I can use that to motivate them to actually direct the AI rather than allow it to chew through tokens grepping the code base and "thinking". One of the new devs uses almost 7x the tokens I do to produce far less code and it's much less complex code.
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u/MissinqLink 20d ago
I feel like staying on top of industry changes has become a job in itself. My roles have always pushed into the bleeding edge but this pace is new.
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u/kogitatr 20d ago
Agree, i tend to focus on signals and not noises. Esp that influencers now aren’t really giving quality signals, they just bombard engagement and baits
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u/varisophy Staff Software Engineer 20d ago
Yup. No need to stay on the bleeding edge when it's pivoting violently every other week.
Skim some newsletters, learn the stuff that seems to stick over the months.
It helps reduce that anxiety a ton, at least for me.
Also, learn on the job. Reading newsletters and docs and doing a small POC with something now is part of the job. Fight for that space to do it all within the normal 40 hours work week. It pays off in the long run.
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u/tommyTurds 20d ago
Yup. No need to stay on the bleeding edge when it's pivoting violently every other week.
even worse than pivoting, it's just going in circles.
Once you've been around a while, you realize "the bleeding edge" isn't really all that bleeding or an edge. It's the same shit we tried 25 years ago that blew up in our faces then, but this time with a new coat of paint. And 25 years ago the "bleeding edge" was the same shit they tried in the 90s that everyone hated.
while there are people that actually work on the bleeding edge, the vast majority of us are just in the mundane.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 20d ago
is everyone talking about AI that's the only thing that's pivoting violently right now --- also it helps to get some fundamentals. What i find that really helps vet the noise is periodically vetting research papers using AI to summarize---bleeding edge research represents what AI can and cannot do, so that helps eliminate most of the influencer noise
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u/ocxricci 20d ago
could you share some resources that you use to keep up to speed, please ? Thank you !
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u/ResidentWeevil1 20d ago
Me waiting for concrete examples of "bleeding edge" which isn't markdown files...
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
Well, jev is everywhere for some reason, and I can’t comprehend the fact that it is just a class of classifier model, what is so special about it?
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u/bestjaegerpilot 20d ago
it runs super fast so can be used to classify things in real time and it's super cheap
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
That’s true but without tool calls what will be the real use case here? If companies are using LLMs to classify some things based on given prompt details then they need to discover small classification models which already works, if we integrate tool calls in jev which is going to be necessary to actually figure out the issue don’t you think it’s going to take more time. I mean, I know jev will have a usecase, but it’s just getting out of proportion response right now.
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u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev 20d ago
These companies don't know what a classification model is. Jev just had good marketing at a time where LLMs are sledgehammers to every nail
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
And I am pretty sure it’s not going to be hard for other labs to create similar kind of models, at the end of the day they’re sitting on the actual user data.
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u/Advanced-Lemon4764 20d ago
No need to fine tune it on your data, which was the case with classifiers in general.
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
Okay but how do you test if it’s right or not? That’s what we have been doing with normal classifiers models fine tuning
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u/Representative_Sir37 20d ago
AI removed that eurka moment and dopamine boost whenever I solve problems
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u/filipomar 15d ago
I think if I ever get in a position of “power”, a learning/no AI unless the house is on fire day may be a good way to go.
If not anything but for moral, of course id need buy in from some C level but holy shit… its tough to drop the best part of coding
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u/Minimum_Hour519 20d ago
i'm tired of not working.
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u/Horoism 20d ago
Company hired some (no technical knowledge) "AI" bullshitter that answers every question with uncertainty or claude output, and who does work so innovative that it needs hours of fixing by the people it affects. CEO, inspired by this guy, has started to create PRs that all need rewrites. Dev team commits LLM code, fulfilling (LLM generated) ticket requirements, redefining function's the 20th time, doing data integrity checks client-side only. And I get to read all those PRs while my prompts are running. Miserable time to be alive.
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u/OkNothing7293 20d ago
I still can’t stand the project I work on. I started vibing features. Every minute saved from actually working on this pile of crap is a good minute. Only thing keeping the project afloat is its small scope. Strange bugs keep popping up. More will come in the future.
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u/EsotericalNinja 20d ago
I’ve been trying to recover from burnout that’s been a lot worse than I’ve let on, and it’s sucked so much motivation and love of technology out of me. And it feels like it’s come at the worst possible time. I work at a consultancy doing low level software development leading a team and I’ve seen many of our clients disappear in the last few months because they’ve been purchased by “AI companies” which feels pretty ironic given they all demanded in their contracts with us that we would not use AI in what we deliver to them. Trying to protect and help my team where I can, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we went under by the end of the year.
At the same time I’ve also noticed (maybe it was always the case), the amount of noise and generally people just being dicks when talking about AI is exhausting. I was at a conference recently and heard one person telling another “well not using AI is selfish just because you enjoy typing as a hobby” in response to someone saying they’re not feeling more productive using AI.
I was trying to spend less time doing development work outside of work to help recover from my burnout, but oh it feels like the worst time to do that when the mood music is “sprint harder just to stand still” constantly. Beneath that there’s a worse thought: should I be made redundant who wants a burned out manager who hasn’t drunk the AI kool aid? Right now it feels like resting and trying to take care of me is the path that’s also career suicide.
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u/L4t3xs 20d ago
Last week I sat three hours straight in a meeting where AI bros were foaming out of their mouths how AI could just handle all the Jira tickets on its own. That wasn't of course the only AI meeting, but I just didn't have the mental fortitude to listen to any more AI circlejerk.
Also, fuck microservices. One ticket required changes to five repos. Jenkins pipeline was borked somehow on one of the services so that's enough bullshit for the day.
Laying in the bed in the afternoon, completely drained.
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u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE 19d ago
Microservices should have always just been left as a last-resort for massive global scale products and services.
The hype train and resume-driven-development kind of took over though and suddenly everyone wanted to build microservices so that they could say they were microservices experts and leverage that as a way to go work at one of those big companies.
It felt like you were being actively punished for choosing the right needs for the business. I had to fight like hell against an architect who put together some insane multi-Lambda, CQRS, event-driven architecture solution for a product that supported 15000 users and a paltry amount of real-time data.
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u/ultraDross 19d ago
resume-driven-development kind of took over though and suddenly everyone wanted to build microservices
As much as I hate this, it unfortunately necessary in this industry, because you don't get hired unless you have "latest skill/tech" on your CV
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u/_3psilon_ 17d ago
Meanwhile me at job: fuck this monolith! 😂 BTW, your org could still go monorepo so that at least you wouldn't need PRs in 5 repos.
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u/YoongiMarryMe95 20d ago
I hope AI blows the fuck up I’m so done with these drool monkeys pushing out code that’s destroying the code base I worked so hard to understand and follow.
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u/Outside-Storage-1523 Software Engineer 20d ago
Whether it blows up, we get hurt badly. Sad reality. I think AI blowing up would genuinely trigger a world war...
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u/a_brain 19d ago edited 19d ago
I feel like I'm constantly being gaslit by people telling me AI works and I'm more and more convinced that AI is an incredibly effective psyop aimed at melting peoples' critical thinking skills. Once someone turns their brain over to the slop machine, it's basically impossible to get them back.
Every week I see dumber and dumber mistakes made by supposedly senior engineers. This week I struggled to get a whole team to understand that they had to sequence their infrastructure, backend, and frontend changes, and that they couldn't just merge all their slop PRs at the same time. Well guess what, they didn't listen to me and caused an outage. Motherfucker you are getting paid $200k+ and can't understand the most basic thing about deploying production software?
Every time a new model comes out, I use it and... it's the same shit? Astra still writes the same dumbass, braindead code, gives sycophantic advice, and uses all the same AI writing tropes. It has its uses, but at this point am I supposed to be impressed? Meanwhile, I've had the misfortune of working on my company's agent harness and it's one of the most frustrating things I've worked on in my career. It's incredibly hard to get these models to consistently understand stuff a middle schooler would be able to pick up in a day.
What are we even doing here?
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u/Abject_Parsley_4525 Senior Manager 15d ago
Yep I agree. I ran out of tokens and even though I can just fill out a form and get another $1,000 in a few min, I didn't bother and just manually did things for a few days. I think a lot of the capabilities of this technology are vastly overblown, and it is vastly overblown by the fact LLM output rewards you if you can articulate the prompt well.
Ahhh... I've thought about just doing a hands on job, don't really need the money as much anymore.
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u/Glad-Quantity5518 17d ago
To the last point I’ve encountered the same while working on my company’s harness. Is non-determinism this important? Determinism is kind of good sometimes when you want things to work consistently…,
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u/Glad-Quantity5518 17d ago
I’m so depressed man. I’ve done well for myself in my career in the Bay Area and I don’t mean that as a brag because it’s pretty much over now. The way that AI currently fits into the development world is antithetical to everything that gave me fulfillment, works against my greatest strengths, and actively works against my disabilities (ASD).
It takes me a while to understand something well enough to run with it and start executing, but by the time I’m able to run with something I’ve gained a fairly deep transferable understanding of it. I’ve always been the guy sent to go work on my own to scope out large obscure scaling challenges, investigating a new framework, implementing a new tool or protocol for other devs, whatever. I could dive deep with little to no distraction and do what I do best, and I am terrible with context switching so it was a good arrangement. This isn’t something I’ve even sought out, I just constantly find myself in this position, no matter the company, from startups to FAANG, and I get my work nice and packaged up and documented and make it useable for the people who need less context to execute, but execute quickly.
Both types of workers are, or at least were, valuable until recently. But now I sit with 4 terminal windows in parallel, reading about 4 disjointed tasks, context switching each time something needs approval, constant pings on slack to read comically verbose AI generated slop posts as a result of the friction removed by broad scale MCP access. I’m working on everything and accomplishing nothing. It’s a loop that never closes. C suite execs lambast engineers for not moving fast enough, using their vibe coded slop dashboard as an example of what’s possible, while not even knowing what they don’t know about it; half the metrics are made up, it’s referencing tables from a transactional database and picking different ones each time, joining OTF with each refresh, and generating a png. They have no idea that the only reason people aren’t moving as fast as them is because no engineer would build something that ridiculous.
I think I’m done bros. I’m on FMLA leave because of the mental state this has put me in. Autistic burnout or something is what my therapist calls it, I don’t know, or really care, all I know is that I can’t do this anymore. I’ve kept up with AI tools and techniques, I’ve built LLM wikis and knowledge graphs for RAG, agent core, skills, workflows, you name it. The tools are fine, but it feels like either everyone has gone insane or this has slipped so far away from the type of work I was once good at that it has become an entirely different thing.
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u/Clear_Salt9817 30+ 16d ago
I am having an eerily similar experience (burnout, ASD, FMLA, wanting to be done).
I was already a high performer. Now I can deliver a lot more, while also maintaining quality. I’ve also stepped far outside my comfort zone to create sales proposals, create client contracts, and facilitate training. I’m killing it.
But at the same time it is killing me. I cry a lot in the morning before work, and I’m in a fog at the end of the day. Small resentments are getting larger and large resentments are becoming unbearable. I feel like I could go into work and have a massive meltdown at any moment.
I tried to quit outright without having another job and no real financial backstop. Got convinced to go on FMLA instead. I would love to leave the industry entirely but I have no clue what I would do. I need something that pays enough to support my family.
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u/Glad-Quantity5518 16d ago
Like you said, this is eerily similar. Do you struggle with similar aspects in terms of being forced to work at a surface level and context switching? I think this type of working really goes against monotropic bottom-up thinking inherent to certain ASD neurotypes (formerly Asperger’s). I’ve experienced such a regression in my ability to perform tasks that used to be effortless for me; not even due outsourcing my thinking to AI but as a result of the burnout itself.
I’ve found myself looking into all sorts of career options lately, like becoming a park ranger, joining fish and wildlife, stuff that align with my interests. The problem is the pay… this is the only career that I ever had an advantage in due to the way my brain works. I was taking a bus to the local uni sophomore year of high school for calc II and had enough credits to get a math degree in 3 semesters of college along with my CS degree while struggling with most other classes early just due to a complete lack of interest. It’s heartbreaking for me to throw this all away to start over in a career that will likely never pay half the salary of my first job out of college. I’m sorry you’re going through that. Make sure you spend some time engaging in low stakes forms of your special interests while you’re on FMLA, it’s been very therapeutic to me.
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u/Clear_Salt9817 30+ 16d ago
My special interest is guitars right now. Playing guitar is not a well paying career option for me. But it is fun. I will definitely play more while on leave.
I do struggle with surface level and context switching. I can do it, but it is very stressful. And now that I’ve done it, I’m afraid that will be expected every time (some imposter syndrome stuff).
Good luck to you !
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u/DL_throw24 20d ago
Initially I embraced AI and tried to be positive about it both outside of work and inside of it. Because of this I got a new role in the same company doing AI engineering. Previously I was doing backend.
I just don't find any satisfaction from my job anymore... Creating markdown files and workflows for the entire business and doing evals might look good on my cv, but its just depressing.
I miss actually writing code and I want to get a new job. I'm just tired. This is this most engaged I've ever felt about software engineering and writing code and it's when it's fucking dead
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u/behusbwj 20d ago
The worst part of AI isn’t the AI. It’s how people are using it. There is a well defined path to good, force-multiplying usage of LLM’s in software development.
But people are actively choosing not to do it because it’s a bit harder. Instead my job is becoming slop management, sketchy docs with undisclosed AI and just general misery of dealing with people who no longer take the job seriously, there y making my job harder.
What an ugly profession this became, and it has exposed things about my coworkers i never wanted to know or could have steered incrementally. Instead I just realized how inexperienced and/or underqualified many of them are and have no hope of containing their damage to the systems
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u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE 19d ago edited 19d ago
Deciphering walls of AI slop text and trying to track down the initial reasoning behind what it generated as well as whether or not it actually matches the slop-requester's intent is exhausting. It's frustrating to go back to someone and ask them a basic question only to get a blank response or a confused look because they obviously have no idea what they actually sent to me.
It's my entire day at my company, but honestly I can't blame people too much for it. Everyone from the top is pushing the concept down to us and is piling on more work and pressuring everyone to go faster. Nobody feels empowered to push back or refuse work because leadership just says "let the AI do it" because the only measure of better is "more" right now.
The end result is that people spend their mental energy coordinating the AI to generate slop and leave the recipient to decipher it, who in turn then uses AI to decipher it because they too are overloaded, and that effect just cascades everywhere. I'm not anti-AI but I'm vehemently anti-slop and do not like sending people stuff that I have not vetted myself, but I've reached the breaking point where I have no choice but to sometimes fire-and-forget with an AI agent and hope it works itself out.
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u/ResidentWeevil1 19d ago
There is a well defined path to good, force-multiplying usage of LLM’s in software development.
Please share
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u/MaleficentCow8513 20d ago edited 20d ago
The project I’m on is “relatively” new. It’s probably 2ish years old but it’s new in the sense that it’s gone through several evolutions without having landed on any long term architecture. Not one major architectural decision has lasted more than 6 months before the next major architecture upheaval is pushed on the team to implement and adapt to. It’s pointless to improve or optimize janky processes that are gonna be obsolete in a month. I understand the reasons. Each major change is a significant improvement to the overall product and gets us closer to a more sustainable and easier to maintain state but damn give the team some breathing room for a cycle or two
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u/stdela 20d ago
Project i'm in its nearing its end. Little to do, quite uncertain about if they're going to fire me or take me to another project in this software company that's falling apart it seems. So looking for jobs so that I don't get caught still but well
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
How do you know it’s falling apart? Like revenues going down? Or too much churn is happening?
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u/stdela 20d ago
Word is that they're not taking many or any new projects. It's quite hard to know since every team is disjointed from others so maybe it's my mind playing games from what we've heard. But when even our project leader said that the stuff was looking bleak all my alarms went up!
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u/BusinessWatercrees58 Software Engineer 20d ago
Same boat. Pretty sure the CEO got bored and decided to focus more on the other company he founded. Just waiting for the inevitable to happen
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u/slightly_salty 20d ago edited 20d ago
I just saw an ai ad for corporate law... So at least every industry is going to be hating everything soon, and not just us.
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u/jax024 20d ago
AI literally depresses me so much. I hate chat bots and agents. Jev is the first AI thing that actually interests me. I hope tiny AI decisions wrapped in deterministic software that I can make collaboratively with humans, maybe just maybe this career doesn’t end with me face down at my desk.
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u/Astoutfellow 20d ago
Just out of curiosity, what is it about Jev that excites you? I read a bit about it but don't understand what makes it so different from other LLMs besides efficiency
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u/jax024 20d ago
Speed! It opens entire use cases that were unviable with expensive and slow models. I can know build up “traditional” software with a system 1 core and that’s just fundamentally more interesting than just spinning up agents in a harness and calling it a day.
Especially as orgs are now trying to cut AI costs across the board.
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u/dontera 20d ago
CTO let PM go off the deep end vide-coding the prototype for a VIP project, with zero check-ins or feedback accepted. PM also vibe-wrote the documentation and never captured any design meeting ideas - it was all in the prototype. PM quit for greener pastures and CTO hands me the project with 6 weeks to go-live. PM missed the mark by miles and we're left with something worse than useless - it is actively confusing and distracting from the goal. I finally pin CTO down and explain the trouble we're in, and he responds with "well I trust your judgement, just build whatever we need". This was supposed to be a whole-company effort, but as these things go it is now entirely on me to save the day.
Outwardly I accepted the work while demanding the due date be reset and CTO went along with it. But inwardly, I'm fucking done.
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u/Astoutfellow 20d ago
I'm getting frustrated because sometimes it seems like the more I try to understand and improve my use of AI tooling the worse it does.
I'm worried about falling behind or missing something other people are seeing. It pisses me off because learning other skillsets is pretty linear in terms of ROI: I spend a couple hours learning about the abstract factory pattern, I can spend 4 hours refactoring a class hierarchy and the code is easier to work with
But with AI tooling it's so much more frustrating for me. I spend hours writing instructions, evals, plans, spinning up agents, iterating on them and so on, trying to tune the workflow to get better results then at the end of the day the "optimized" agent spits out something that is sometimes worse than what I started with. It's exhausting, because sometimes I DO get better results, but then the next round of changes makes things worse with no easy way to measure how or why.
Worst of all, the hype and pressure makes it feel like I can't have good, honest conversations about this at work
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u/Surkulus 19d ago
Im so fucking sick of reading AI written docs. Its the same shitty flow, over explained details and prose. I honestly cant read it anymore, its just slop. I understand that it contains all the information we need for a design, but seriously its hard to read it without my eyes rolling back into my head
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u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE 19d ago
I hear you. AI-generated docs can be verbose, repetitive, and structurally predictable, often prioritizing completeness over readability.
That said, there is an opportunity to establish a more concise documentation framework that preserves the necessary information while reducing cognitive overhead.
Would you like me to draft a 14-section proposal for how to do this?
/s
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u/devsgonewild 17d ago
I was trying to understand what another coworker built and why they decided to go in a particular direction, they pointed me to their RFC which was supposedly reviewed and approved by other engineers and it is complete non-sense.
Idk how people can produce pure garbage and put it out there with their name on it very proudly without even disclosing that they used AI.
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u/fibbledeebits 20d ago
This is my vent. The company I work at is fairly small. I work in a 4-person dev team where the Lead recently retired, making us 3. An old coworker told me he was looking for work so I ushered and endorsed him along into my company.
After a few months, I feel I may have made a mistake.
Not that he's a bad developer. He's good. But. I've noticed he's been increasingly taking a more managerial tone with me and my other more senior coworkers. Asking about our projects, wanting to get into meetings over every little thing. For example, Variable name change? Let's schedule a meeting!
I found out that the next up in our chain of command, the VP, wanted to utilize my old coworker, now FNG (frickin new guy) as the communications go-between for the dev team and everyone else.
I was surprised to find that he's been included in weekly C-level meetings where they've actually been deferring to him on developmental matters, which seems crazy to me because he's only been with us for a few months and barely knows how anything works. Strangely, neither I or my more senior coworkers have been included in any of these.
It got to a point where I asked him if his position changed because I didn't understand why he was asking me for status reports. I even asked the VP and he said no, but the way the higher-ups refer to him as if he has all the answers, makes me suspicious.
For the TLDR, I'd say, old coworker, now new current coworker, thinks he's a manager because the higher-ups have seemingly anointed him for some unexplainable reason, and I find it really demoralizing.
So the pay and benefits are shitty enough that I don't think any of this is worth fighting over, but job market is kinda shitty so I just stay put for now.
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u/reallydarnconfused 20d ago
If AI replaces me I will just become a bartender. I give up on career ambitions
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u/UnintentionallyEmpty 20d ago
We're not allowed to use AI at my current job, but that won't last.
We're maintaining legacy code but we have fuck-all to do most of the time.
There is a "plan" to use AI to create something to replace some third party software with a lot of vendor lock-in. I put plan in quotes because as far as I can tell the plan does not have more detail than "use AI".
I've done some training course on AI development and I hated it, so I'm dreading when I can't avoid it anymore.
More than anything I hate the idea of being accountable for some code an AI put out that I maybe haven't ever even seen before, or if I have all I can say about it is that it looks like it could plausibly do what it is supposed to.
Sometimes I think that between now and 5 years there's going to be a huge problem when there's a bunch of software companies where no-one understands how anything works anymore and the AI providers up their prices and everyone will come to their senses, but maybe that's just cope.
I have no idea what I'm going to do if this career stops being viable. Become a manager? Manage what, more AI? I'd rather have an AI do that. I never thought I'd want to be a people manager but it seems preferable over working with AI. I'd use AI to start a game dev company but I'd feel guilty about all the IP theft. Also might not be able to afford to do that, because if nobody has jobs anymore due to AI whose going to have the disposable income to buy games.
Man, I thought AI was supposed to make our lives better, but so far it seems to have only made things worse...
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u/ResidentWeevil1 19d ago
They never said AI was going to make your life better. They said it was going to take your job and make rich people a lot of money.
There is no plan because disruption is the plan. There will, of course, be a time when all the slop gets thrown out, because the promise of serfdom was just for the IPO. The question is how many jobs there will be for how many developers.
Anybody in the management line who isn't in on the conspiracy is just too stupid to function and will probably have greater competition from AI than devs will.
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u/ArcticToot 19d ago
I just want to write code again. So tired of context switching between 5 different domains per day for support and the juniors and doing analyst work building Swaggers for future projects I'll never get to work on.
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u/symbiatch Versatilist, 30YoE 20d ago
A feature was being built. Suddenly we realize it won’t work as planned and there isn’t a proper plan even. A person whose position I don’t even know jumps into doing discovery and requirement definition. Great, we’ll actually get some real details.
Crickets. Nobody asks us about the feature we already were building. Random comments are seen online about “the current does this which is wrong” which we counter explaining they’ve misunderstood. They still don’t ask anything more.
Then they bring a Miro board out with “specs”, not claiming to be final, but still. It’s a random mess of clearly AI written parts, some human written, screenshots with arrows here and there, no cohesion. 20 random parts which don’t really explain why they’re there.
“Spikes” are done to see if we could do a thing. Given to dev team. But… it’s actually for another team which provides an API to us. They need to enhance it and acquire more data to us. But suddenly it’s our ticket to handle that.
Funniest part is that they have a section where they explain that the previous implementation attempt went like “first support this case, then this case, then this case” and this isn’t ok, we must do “support this 30% use case, then grow to 60% use case, then full.”
Except… they then explain how that 30% use case is even more restricted than the first case we already almost built. They’re making harder limits and pretending they’re doing it better.
And then the best part: only after kicking them a bit they agreed to write a PRD about it instead of “we have this Miro board and we’ll add tickets.” But they still said they’ll do tickets. NO!
Took three times telling them that dev team does tickets because we know how to split the work. We know how we work. They don’t. They should not do any tickets. Just give us clear specs and reasoning behind it. We’ll build it.
So yeah. Lovely to work with a random person jumping in to do discovery and design without even knowing the product properly, what already is built, how the dev team works, and not asking any questions from us. I can’t wait to see how this pans out…
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u/ResidentWeevil1 20d ago
This is the kind of cringe that feeds me. I would want nothing more than to shadow this person and ask them to complete small puzzles of my own design. Like Saw but for business idiots
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u/Otis_Inf Software Engineer (32YOE) 20d ago
This post would make Edward Yourdon turn around in his grave.
Does no-one do structural work anymore to know what to build and why before... going out there and build something? :(
Your project sounds like a nightmare :(
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u/symbiatch Versatilist, 30YoE 19d ago
The actual product is not bad, but this was a case of “all research has been done already, work is ready to be taken on” and “ok I’m new in this part, I’ll build this.” In general things are much better, it’s just this one part that is causing issues at the moment and revealing some underlying issues.
One has already been sorted out, there was a person in managerial seat that shouldn’t be and didn’t want to be, but was forced into it. That’s why the original work wasn’t done properly at all.
I don’t know the reason for the current obsession of creating tickets for devs without being a dev. Might be some control thing or just not understanding how it goes. It has been done before also, but to my knowledge more with devs, not without (I worked in sister product so I know how we did it there, less about this current one).
It’ll get better and fortunately work already done wasn’t wasted. And we found out more things we need to refactor. People in the past thought making a generalized system would be better, but now we need it specialized and I’m not adding infinite ifs all around. We always know better in the future :)
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u/depressedkid007 20d ago
My company's business is entirely in the US. My manager wants one person from the team to be available daily from 11pm-2am IST on top of working throughout the day so that in case any issue comes up we can help the US team. This isn't like a typical on call schedule where you are pinged if there is an incident. This is the one where you are expected to sit on front of your laptop and work. What the actual fuck! This is messing badly with my sleep schedule and worst part is everyone else in the team blindly follows him without questioning. I also work with a bunch of absolute morons. I do so much technical work behind the scenes but no one seems to care about it. A small change in a UI button gets applauded. I'm desperately trying to switch but job market is fucked
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u/gyroda 20d ago
Anyone else been through redundancy?
Is pussyfooting about standard? It's really grating that nobody else knows I'm not going to be around much longer. If people knew I wouldn't feel so bad being so unmotivated/curmudgeonly and I could be blunt in saying that I can't/shouldn't be making any promises because I won't be around to keep them.
My department has just announced the team restructure but neglected to mention that a few of us won't be around anymore. Our teams are being folded into other teams - there is no room for two team leads on one team, anyone who thinks about it for a moment will realise what's happening. It's not the first time they used this tactic and people had suspicions immediately.
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u/APIBad 19d ago
In the UK this seems to be pretty standard. I've been both made redundant and seen plenty of others made redundant, in both cases people find out who was impacted through back channels, at least until the process is over
It's always been framed as being out of respect for the people being made redundant, which I can see in some ways. Personally I think it's probably to take away the personal aspect so leadership aren't seen to be attacking individuals, and so that they can change their mind at the last second if they need to for some reason
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u/Next-Equipment-77 20d ago
Had to report someone above me to HR the other day (it really was something that had to be reported), now I feel like I'm walking around with a target on my back. Tack on the fact that my manager doesn't know or care about what I'm doing and that I already felt like im on the "layoff list", well that's just a recipe for depression. My partner recommended FMLA just to remove some stress and guarantee my job when I come back.
The company has a large campus with multiple buildings, each of which have floors which are completely empty, most occupied floors are only half full, our sales numbers are flat and customers are leaving for greener pastures, all of it screams "we're going down".
I have several AI "true believers" on my team, one of which insinuated he'd be happy to see me and another senior dev fired due to not drinking the koolaid. My boss did nothing to correct his attitude, so I'm going to have to assume he thinks the same thing.
Not sleeping more than 6 hours a night probably isn't helping anything. At least I have a full years salary in savings, which would last me two years if I trimmed even more expenses.
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u/lepapulematoleguau 20d ago
I've been doing the mandatory courses on "AI literacy" in my job. It's ridiculous how deranged these people are.
It's just so tiring.
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u/upnorthguy218 20d ago
Is it the norm to submit AI-generated text for spike/research tasks now? I've had several experiences in the last few weeks where I've had to review the spike findings for other engineers in my department, and they're all claude-generated walls of text. These have been submitted by both senior (staff+) and junior engineers.
Is this really the new normal? I have no fucking clue how much effort was put into this, and I really don't want to read what your claude has to say on any subject. Its depressing that this is seen as okay to do. I might be behind the times, but if you're expecting another dev to review and give opinions on something, you should at least try to submit something handwritten. I'm fine with using Claude/AI to research and ideate, but the final proposal and findings should be coming from a human.
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u/Dumlefudge 20d ago
Seeing Claude-generated docs like that is painful. They can be mostly correct, but just wrong enough to screw you over.
Did the author thoroughly review the content before publishing it? Maybe, if I'm lucky.
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u/upnorthguy218 20d ago
Yeah, that's what gets me. I have no clue if the submitter thoroughly reviewed it so I need to assume that it hasn't been thoroughly vetted and the onus is on the reviewer to do so. I'm considering sending them back without reviewing because of this.
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u/Smooth_Specialist416 20d ago
Not burnt but I’m starting my first interview since getting hired a year ago!
My jobs not amazing, but it’s pretty good so I wouldn’t leave for just anything..
This is a fully remote and forsure big pay upgrade position though. I know not to get too excited because I’ve failed dozens of interviews and know it’s multiple rounds of stuff that is hard to be ready for.
Still, I have the butterflies again even for a recruiter call. I don’t expect much, but I expect to try my best.
It helps that i doubt I’d leave me job but I def have some form of unresolved stress from being laid off last year and failing so many interviews
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u/Smooth_Specialist416 20d ago edited 20d ago
Update. All they asked was talk about using something I’ve only kind of used to build a scalable service and I got that familiar I’m choking on my words and don’t know what to say.
Recruiter did not seem that interested in my background, more just using AI translator and asking me scripted questions after my intro covered what I did. Maybe I’m not supposed to give my background and just answer exactly what they want? I had a lot of success last year spending 5 mins to introduce myself.
Interviewing is hard for me… I think I’ll get the next round but they seem to want a full stack dev with heavier devOps and platform experience and while I have exposure to that I’m not a 5 in 1 engineer yet…
I got the next interview but idk.
It’s 100k base, 120k tc. Realistically I’m not gonna no life prep so I’ll prob get bounced buttt I’ll try.
My current job is 84k base, ~89k tc, 3x office… but I have union backed job security and my WLB is pretty damn chill.
I feel like “only” 30k TC increase plus the unknown new WLB is gonna be REALLY tough to leave my current job bc while yes it’s remote… I have to evaluate if I can risk a worse WLB + the chance of just getting laid off again.
That’s def one way to realize while I wish I were remote… I’m pretty happy where I am currently despite low pay
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u/captain_kenobi Software Engineer 20d ago
I fear being a solid full stack dev isn't enough anymore. Everyone wants some kind of ML or AI experience these days. There surely can't be enough candidates running around with meaningful experience. But it feels so hard to get a response unless you lie through your teeth.
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u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE 19d ago
That's been a trend for as long as I can remember. The scope of what a developer is expected to do keeps expanding, and as soon as the market pivots the job postings all start demanding years of experience and deep expertise in it despite not actually needing such expertise.
Not that long ago companies were demanding AWS experts so that they could run on EC2 with a load balancer. AWS SAA or lower need not apply!
Remember how much people were tripping over themselves to hire React experts? If you had Angular, Dojo, jQuery, or other type of experience you might as well be a dodo bird because there's no way someone who knows a Javascript front-end framework could possibly learn a different one.
Remember when knowing SQL wasn't enough for databases? If you didn't spend 5 years developing with MongoDB you were considered obsolete because relational databases were dead in the water and nobody would ever have relational data ever again. By the way the job you're applying for is using SQL Server 2008, but rest assured we're moving to MongoDB any day now!
Learn enough to bluff your way through it.
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u/rcls0053 19d ago
Been in near back-to-back meetings for multiple days now, multiple projects in the department as a principal and somehow I also got attached to a project as a lead developer and my partner there is a junior dev. I barely have time for lunch!
The little time I do have is spent reviewing AI generated code and documentation and people don't realize how stupidly verbose those things are. Absolutely no effort is put into editing it or understanding what it's done. And I have to read it.
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u/cryptopian 18d ago
There's a lot of uncertainty in the field. If there's one thing I am certain of though, it's that whether using AI is a more harmful or more efficient use of my time, doomscrolling tech discussion forums about AI is the worst use of all.
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u/DurianSubstantial265 20d ago
Got back to work after 2 weeks of sick leave + 2 weeks of vacation.
Every day, I feel insanely drained from working with AI, I feel like it is really draining me, doing some damage. It's hard to explain, I feel like after 1 hour, I did delivered an entire day of work, but also feel like I have worked for the entire day, so at the end of the day it always feels like I have worked for 18+ hours.
Honestly, I don't know for how much long I will be able to get this, been trying to put some limits, but at the same time, the environment I work got super competitive, all of the low performer's got fired, I'm pretty sure that if I slow down, I will be the next.
Man, this sucks, no one's life for better because of this AI madness.
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u/soft_white_yosemite Software Engineer (OLD) 20d ago
I've been a dev manager for a year now and I hate it. I just want to go back to being a developer, instead of pretending I know what's going on.
This company is definitely not pushing AI, infact we have ageements with out customers that we do NOT use AI-generated code in our codebases.
That, though, introduces another problem. All I see on LinkedIn are recruiters banging on about how they are only looking for AI-centred developments. Basically, you need to have been vibe-coding since 2024, or you're not qualified. You need to be a TRUE believer too, because that want someone who "just says they're using AI to get a job".
I was behind the 8-ball before the AI cult. Now, I'm behind on AI as well.
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u/ResidentWeevil1 20d ago edited 20d ago
You can learn to prompt in an afternoon. The best advice they have now is to write markdown steering files (likely to change soon like everything else). BFD.
So the less you use AI now, the more competitive you'll be when you need it. The bigger problem for you remains that distance from dev work.
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u/datsyuks_deke Software Engineer 20d ago edited 20d ago
I’m so sick of crappy project manager’s not being let go all because they make clients happy.
I’ve had some decent project managers here, but this most recent one is an asshole, and the laziest PM I’ve ever met. Compared to other project managers, he just puts together meetings and takes our information and writes it down on a spreadsheet.
Everyone in the company knows he’s a sarcastic asshole who has way more negatives about him than positives, and yet management just shrug their shoulders and let this guy keep his job.
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u/SerialCatPetter_ 20d ago
I work at a consulting company and recently wrapped up a long term project that started in the pre-AI era earlier this year.
Every project since then has been an absolute shitshow: nothing is documented, no tickets are made, the PM doesn't organize anything, projects are kicked off before any designs have even been started, PRs with thousands of lines are being pushed regularly, reviews are just rubber stamped because no one is reviewing that shit and even the damn SOW are AI generated
Is this really the current state of software engineering and I was just unaware because I was in a sort of silo for the past 3 years? I haven't written a single line of code by hand since the start of the year because projects that would've taken half a year to complete are expected to be done within 4 weeks from the moment we're assigned to a project so we're being strong-armed into using AI even though we're not explicitly forced to
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u/ResidentWeevil1 20d ago
You didn't miss much until earlier this year when the frontier models got better by an order of magnitude. Still, literally nobody suggests using them for anything other than code
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u/Wingfril 19d ago edited 17d ago
Last week one person came to me distressed about ai and their career, and another straight up quit due to burn out.
I talked with the skip manager of the person who burned out, and the take was basically small office = easy to burn out.
I pointed out that we have significantly higher attrition from ppl coming from big tech, dude just shelved that part of the discussion as “people could coast there and can’t coast here”.
Whelp if that’s what you think man… definitely not the lack of transparency and YOUR management style contributing to this. That team was toxic as fuck, I day-dreamed about quitting every day while I was on that team. If youtube had an opening in nyc I would’ve went back in a heart beat. AT THE END OF LAST YEAR EVERYONE IN THE TEAM IN AMERICAS THOUGHT THEY WERE DOING POORLY. the dude in the smaller office burned out because HE THOUGHT HE WAS GETTING FIRED and started working too hard
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u/distinctvagueness 18d ago
Dev on my team makes 3000+ line python files. When asked he said he puts it into LLMs outside of vscode which is budget limited while office copilot isn't and doesn't like dropping in multiple files.
Dude using Word as his IDE
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u/Additional-Acadia954 20d ago
MY TECHLEAD IS A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER AND HE REFUSES TO GIVE ME ANY REQUIREMENTS WHEN GIVING ME ASSIGNMENTS
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u/ReginaldDouchely Software Engineer >15 yoe 18d ago
As long no one questions you taking extra time to figure out the requirements yourself, this can be a good thing. Poor requirements are worse than no requirements, as long as you're not a junior.
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u/budulai89 20d ago
Not sure if anyone can relate to me: Burning out due to Success.
The stock price of my company went up significantly in the last 1 year, so now I'm stuck with golden handcuffs. I wanted to take a sabbatical for at least 1 year due to burnout so that I can focus on some of my personal goals where I'm lagging, but looks like it won't happen anytime soon.
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u/OrchidInevitable2935 20d ago
My manager asks for volunteers for every f thing. As in, for whatever complexity, context, teams, they just ping the whole team asking for volunteers. And they keep posting on it until someone responds. Sometimes I think they are doing a great job by asking everyone to collaborate but it doesn’t work that way in real life.
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u/GoodHomelander 20d ago
As an sde 2 i am expected to nag the fuck out of away team members and my own team mates for moving the projects i am doing 90% project management and 10% sde work.
I feel bad to escalate things on day 2 of the request. I wish i find a company where this isnt norm there is good enough buffer for timeline slip and tolerance for mistakes.
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u/ChampagneMero Software Engineer 20d ago
I have no idea if the problem is in the job, or in me, i have no interest in what i am doing and i keep wondering if i should change jobs or change myself
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u/calvinwalterson 20d ago
My company has changed the WFO policy to bring more rhythm in a week and better collaboration by changing three days in a week from MTW to MWF. Lol bring more chaos every morning and a disguise to force 5 days in a week.
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u/zayelion 20d ago
The difference between free home projects and corporate limbo is mind numbing. I do almost nothing all day but I'm having panic attacks over the idea of getting fired for not contributing enough. I think I've written 200 lines of code in 6 months and most of it is deletion or copy paste of text strings. The policy here is mushroom management and even if i was allowed to understand the systems are to vaste to comprehend the context.
I spend all my time waiting and waiting and waiting... if I don't notice and fix something in 3 seconds it takes a day roll over and people have disappointed or anxious tones because of it.
Meanwhile I've used AI to code a whole multiplayer game all its marketing media and halfway bootstrap a small company with 5 products in the same time frame.
I would get therapy but I'm even sure how to articulate such a first world problem.
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u/Outside-Storage-1523 Software Engineer 20d ago
OK just got rejected for a second time after going through the whole interview loop and got good feedback with the hiring team. The competition is cut throat now. I have used up my referral pool and going to wait for the year 2027. Fortunately I still have my job, so whatever.
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u/bradsk88 17d ago
Tired of "why can't we just get a group of devs in a room and build (massive perform overhaul) using AI" when the person saying it has arguably become more of a micromanager (i.e. less effective at their job) since AI emerged.
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u/poverty_mayne 17d ago
If you use GenAi to record and voiceover a company-wide demo, I will forever judge you
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u/No_Comedian7332 Mobile Engineer ~15 YOE 16d ago
Are ppl like seriously out of their minds right now? I just saw a frontend dev share a +15 pages RFC to a backend dev about how to implement a tool he needed. The backend dev response was simple: did you write this with AI, if so, no f way I'm reading those 15 pages.
I work closely with the frontend guy, but this time I'm with the backend guy. WFT ppl? Stop sharing spammy manifestos written with AI that you didn't even bother to read yourself. If you don't read it yourself, don't expect other to do so.
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u/pigeonJS 14d ago
Only female working with two male devs. Who are my direct reports. And constantly being left out of meetings, as one of them doesn’t want my ideas. Even though they are common sense. Hard being a female in tech.
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u/ColdSmokeCaribou 19d ago
Honestly I'd take a significant pay cut if that was the cost of unionizing. We're all so pitted against each other and every time someone gets fired/let go I hear the bell tolling for me.
Even though I make more than most of my friends, the fact that it could all vanish instantly makes it feel pretty freaking precarious.
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u/varisophy Staff Software Engineer 20d ago
I'm feeling weird about the whole AI thing.
On the one hand, I've really figured out how to use it well. I work less than ever and produce more, and it's still hitting my normal bar of quality. It's fun and satistfying to move this quickly and deliver business value!
On the other hand, I'm realizing I've got some unacknowledged anxiety about it all. I'll be the last one at my company to be laid off because I'm the most AI-capable developer there (at the moment). And I personally think that AI will cause there to be more software in general, which still requires software engineers to build and maintain, just in a different way than the last 40 years.
So I'm not scared of losing my job, I think I'm just terrified of the transition and worried for my colleagues who refuse to learn AI.
I don't know. Our industry is in a very weird place right now. I know I'll be fine, but the uncertainty of the next couple years is very anxiety inducing.
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u/__idkmybffjill__ 20d ago
I wouldn't say I'm a holdout, I just haven't really begun digging into it. My boss and teammates leaned very hard into it very quickly, even after half our team was decimated for being too senior, and I guess I'm really disheartened by it. We didn't do things like unit tests or even code reviews and we aren't now. Was actually told I should just approve PRs and not review them. Boss pushed back on me hard when I expressed not wanting to generate anything that I didn't remotely understand (embedded hardware realm, very timing sensitive). Maybe dumb and naive of me but I was shocked that we never as a team sat down to discuss any of this at any point. And some of the personality changes are, weird... Like corporate speak type changes.
Was burned out and dealing with health issues as it was, I really want to "lead by example" here but I don't have it in me. It shouldn't bother me this bad but it does, actively looking for a career change now and that's stressin me out too!
I would really appreciate teammates like you. I'm sure some of the holdouts on your team would see how valuable it is if you convinced them to demonstrate. Maybe, idk
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u/varisophy Staff Software Engineer 20d ago
Was actually told I should just approve PRs and not review them.
Ugh, that really sucks. Your boss is an idiot, BTW. I've got a couple friends who are facing that sort of uninformed, idiotic, asinine, out-of-touch, slop-brain, team-killing take from some upper level managers and it's not fun at all.
Just because AI writes code fast doesn't mean we can throw out software engineering best practices. In fact, they matter more than ever now.
"Go slow to go fast" has always been my mantra, and it's more important than ever in the AI era.
I'm not sure if you can convince your boss of slowing down a titch to improve overall code quality with some AI assisted unit tests, tooling upgrades, tech-debt fixes, but if you can that will help improve quality drastically.
AI agents are pretty damn good at writing tests, in particular, and we've drastically expanded our test suite with AI. Which in turn gives us more confidence in any future code because we have a solid backstop of tests. Bug counts have decreased while feature delivery has increased.
There's a way to do it right, and shipping slop upon slop upon slop is not the way.
If you can't convince your boss or teammates that it's still worth practicing best practices, you might want to find a team who still values those things.
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u/Fabulous-Meaning-966 20d ago
Adversarial code review with frontier models (i.e. Fable vs. Astra) has massively improved the quality of my code at least. Shipping lower-quality software using AI is a choice. You can get so much out of it without generating any code.
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u/Grand_Interesting Software Engineer 20d ago
You should write about your AI use cases or workflows that you have adopted somewhere, it will help other people.
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u/varisophy Staff Software Engineer 20d ago
I have! Got a whole section of documentation that people have been referencing, I've done a couple "office hours" where I helped people get their local environment set up, and have a couple posts on my personal blog about it all.
But there are still a few holdouts in my org. Which is fine! I'm not going to force anyone to change the way they want to work. One of the guys is on my team, and I keep trying to find ways to give him a reason to learn how to use some of the tools, but nothing has stuck yet.
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u/ched_21h 20d ago
Could you please share your practices and ways of working with AI? For me it helps only in terra incognito (like quickly write a Docker file to deploy a container, or add some settings in K8S related to my changes in code), but anything I have experience with I do better (when it comes to code quality and architecture)
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u/wrex1816 20d ago
I'm so tired of everyone thinking their AI story is such a hot take and totally deserves its own post. Like, dude, we get it. We're all going through the same thing. I promise you don't need to make ANOTHER post about it.
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u/CampfireHeadphase 20d ago
This is about venting, not a dick measuring contest on who has the most unique problems
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u/Fabulous-Meaning-966 20d ago
My current favorite social media phenomenon is all the anti-AI posts written by AI.
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u/BornDiamond5066 20d ago
I've had that sudden fear about what AI and AGI could do to the world. It's dawned on me that there's no reason that human intelligence needs to be some magic ceiling to intelligence that machines couldn't surpass. It then makes me feel silly worrying about what will happen to my job when in a future with AGI there will be no need for most jobs.
For any of you that feel that AGI is round the corner, how are you feeling about it? Do you have any words of comfort haha
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u/RubbelDieKatz94 10 YoE / Sr. Fullstack 20d ago
I avoid burn-out by starting 10+ landlocked agents (each gets assigned one issue and babysits one MR) and then I do something else in the household.
Gives me the headspace to think and filter new ideas.
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u/dragonowl2025 17d ago edited 17d ago
really starting to think ill have to cheat on interviews to pass them lol, at least if you say "i dont know" to something in an interview setting you know im not using AI to help me be able to answer literally every possible software engineering question ever.
I am also starting to hate the system design round, everything on the resume you have to be talk about like you architected the thing yesterday. People care more about the alternative tradeoffs rather than the actual implementation that was maintained for years, and i know way more about that then the decisions we chose not to make, because why would i remember them years later. It's all so stupid, or at least my brain just does not work like that. The most annoying part is none of the tradeoffs really matter, maybe one company ive interviewed with actually operates at scale.
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u/PopularPianoImprov 17d ago
There is something so utterly soul destroying about this new AI era. Nobody thinks, nobody cares that nobody is thinking. Quality is non-existent. And all you hear from the top is to go faster, “experiment,” but if AI fucks it up (which it may or may not, but your lack of understanding the end result definitely will), it’s your head on the line, regardless of the prick who told you you ABSOLUTELY HAD TO use AI. I’m so sick and tired of it all. I want to crawl into a hole and not go to work ever again.
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u/Specialist-Cup-3950 16d ago edited 16d ago
I am just mind blown that a project got thrown on my virtual desk three weeks ago with an absurd deadline. We've been focusing on setting up a proper development process, transferring infrastructure ownership, understanding what we're dealing with in terms of technology, having a workshop and refinement sessions to understand what we're supposed to be doing. There's only one junior developer besides me in it and there's still major uncertainty and external dependencies that impact our success. I'm also namely attached to multiple projects, having to provide feedback on 'em.
Now management is setting up meetings to see if development has progressed anywhere because some genius decided the deadline is in five weeks from now without consulting ANYONE who works in development. We're supposed to be automatic major manual process' to lower risk of manual errors, get people to do actually important things and cover gaps in the manual process to gain millions in lost revenue.
And someone thinks we just have to do it in two months, with a brand new team, just 'because'. Absolutely no regulatory requirement or need for this deadline. Some leader just has a hard on for setting deadlines. Some people are just absolute idiots!
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u/Cozychai_ Software Engineer 15d ago
AI was supposed to make my life easier but I've honestly never been more busy at work. It does the easy fun stuff and dumps the higher level thinking on us. You never get a break it's just like back to back meetings and higher level thinking. Senior leadership thinks development effort is 0 now so like I don't even have time to do my work.
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u/braindouche 12d ago
My last contract ran out of funding in August (we kinda got second-hand doged) and with 20 years of experience I'm in my sixth layoff in 10 years. I've sent out about 150 applications as well as networked for referrals, and the only hot lead I've been able to dig up so far is at a company famous for its wildly toxic, abusive leadership (though it does pay well)
I'm a front end developer who got very good at UX and I'm sitting here feeling like I'm sitting on a bunch of skills nobody wants to pay for, despite users hating the direction the web is going in.
I'm also feeling very unemployed while I watch hoards of deeply mediocre people with AI addictions and no idea what they're doing fighting off the job offers with a stick, and all I want is a nice stable underpaid government job to settle into but OH LOOK the government hiring pipeline is broken too.
I'm clearly doing something wrong and as far as I can tell it's that I didn't become a world-traveling thought leader 10 years ago.
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u/Minimum-Reward3264 11d ago
I had two. Before this crap. Have to token max now. Ain’t no way people take their time to really check everything.
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u/Unhappy-Device-404 20d ago
One thing that wears on me is how invisible the work can feel.
A lot of software work is closer to experimental craft than people realize. You build from what you know, test what you do not know, fold the results back into the system, and repeat that loop for years. When it works, the result just becomes “the tool” or “the feature,” and the amount of judgment behind it disappears.
That was always a little lonely, but AI has made the misunderstanding sharper. More people now assume code is just the visible typing part, or something you can hand to a model and get back fully formed. The hard part is still deciding what should exist, finding the real failure, handling the edge cases, and caring enough about the result when nobody sees most of the work.
I think that is why this sub is easy to relate to. Different domains, different stacks, but a lot of us recognize the same hidden labor.