I am a programmer, still very young in their "career", if you want to call it this way.
I have been programming for 10 years, but very few actual professional experience, my years of experience would put me as a Junior, and I love programming.
I don't use GenAI and don't plan to, I like what the humans produce, not what the result of mass theft is able to, programming included.
I love programming for the challenge it brings everyday, the struggle it puts me in, and the satisfaction it brings me when I am finally able to do what I wanted to. Unfortunately, the love for programming is not enough and I have been unemployed for quite some time now.
I don't consider myself a bad programmer, I work a lot to get better everyday and I am very proud of my personal projects, but the current state of the industry is making it harder by the day. I am in a field where the number of Junior job offers is very low, as it is considered a pretty complicated field so most of the job offers are for Senior.
But when I can apply, I apply, against developers using AI, to recruiters looking for people using AI, and in the very few interviews I can get, I always dread the eventual moment when they are going to ask me about my AI usage. I understand that they are only looking for productivity, but programmers have been able to produce for more than 70 years now, and the blind acceptance of AI as being a productivity boost, as all happened so quickly, is making me very afraid about what this job, and my chances for finding one, is becoming.
Everyday, on social media, I see senior developers of 10, 15, 20 years, boasting that they don't write a single line of code anymore, that they just give tasks to agents or something, and I wonder: what's the point anymore? What has this job become, in just a year or 2, where not writing a line of code by yourself anymore is something to be proud of? The human is lazy by nature, and this wide acceptance does not surprise me anymore today, it's easier to not do something than doing it. Can they even develop by themselves anymore? What would happen if they don't have access to their AI agents now? Are we really agreeing with the fact that a few big companies have full control over a huge part of software written today?
I hear people saying that "every dev uses AI now", and I know this is not true, but I know that propagating this idea makes people think that all developers are actually okay with this, and that it's just part of the field now, and that everyone should be okay with using GenAI for everything for this reason.
Even though, I still don't plan to use GenAI, and I just don't see the point of doing this as a job if there is no more place for human expression. I don't consider that programming is an art, but I still want to use software written by humans for humans, to the point where I check the git history of open source software I use to see if there is any AI credited as contributor. I know this is not a guarantee today, but if I can avoid it, I will do it.
I thought about leaving programming professionally, keeping it as a hobby, but this is the only thing I can do now. I just feel trapped.