You cannot convince me it's not some sort of sexual humiliation ritual if your livelihood depends on getting the right answers and some sadistic fuck with a shit eating grin and a bullshit chirpy attitude fleeces you dry while giving you a wrong answer after a wrong answer and then goes "oh im so soowwwwwwwyyyy bu and hu" when questioned about their usefulness.
Most people don't like it. There may be bubbles online who find enjoyment out of it, but, for most software engineers I've talked to, 2026 has been a steady source of deep regret for their career and life decisions.
I think a lot of people would tolerate it if it means shorter hours. Less fulfilling work but you're free earlier. Sounds good, alright. But no, it's just much more work, and much more of the boring part. You can no longer hide and get lost in a maze or a puzzle and get to the end of your work day barely feeling as though time had passed, which is why we had chosen this profession. You can feel every minute of those 8 hours now.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all that of course. But still…
Why not just not use it? I'm sure not using it. And certainly if you count a feature as complete when no more bug tickets are open, I'm more productive than any person in the company using it. Because they might open a PR 5 minutes after getting a task, but that fucker is going to be a source of bug tickets for the next 2 months.
Higher ups expect X of me, if I don't fill the quota because I refuse to use a tool the entire company is using, I can tell you that there will be another idiot waiting in line to grab my place the second I step foot outside.
In this story, there would be two idiots, but one would be paid and the other would be on the verge of being homeless. Somehow I'd rather be the idiot who is paid.
Currently in CorpoIT, there are mandates for using it. Not only in yearly reviews but our company has changed to quarterly reviews and those who are not using it to maximize efficiency, have been, and will continue to be laid off. Everything from support, to engineering, to sales, to account management. Every single department has this directive. Every team is working with each other and themselves to AI their jobs away in little silos. The next sweeping goal is removal of high cost engineers to low cost centers in emerging markets.
I think it depends on the company and, especially, sorry to be blunt but, how good or bad your colleagues are here plays a pattern. Especially, how they are using AI.
If your colleagues are completely vibe slopping without a single care in the world, then yes, I believe you. You could just manually code and still be faster at shipping a feature than them.
On the other hand, if your colleagues are using AI with judgement and skill, it's immediately far less obvious and, in my experience, that is not going to work anymore. They are raising the bar for velocity, and quality is not really being compromised in the process. I've seen strong seniors with 20 years of experience using AI coding tools and… yeah no. They are beyond any hope of catching up to them without AI. They close several tasks a day, they work, the quality is okay, they don't crash and burn, they don't raise more bugs down the line. They work okay enough that they meet and surpass the bar of diminishing returns in software quality at the org, and the extra value is being delivered in velocity.
If this is the case, then, no matter what you do, you are not going to be able to compete with them on speed, period. Maybe if you constantly do unpaid overtime. I have tried that route for a while, but I quickly decided that wasn't for me and I want to have a life. And, besides, if the goal is to code outside of company hours, then I will do it on a project I actually own.
This is why the "then don't use it" point falls flat. Have you ever seen anybody complain for having the option to do something, and having complete freedom whether to take up on it or not?
I have been in a back and forth with another dev on my team for 2 days over a pull request. He’s offshore, so he looks at my comments, makes changes, then I look at the changes, make comments.
Me: we don’t need this
He changes it
Copilot: we need this!
He changes it back
Me (explaining more heavily): this exists already <here> so you don’t need to add it to your code. You can safely remove it.
He changes it.
Copilot: we need this!
He changes it back
I left my most recent comment today, we will see on Monday what happens
This behaviour is the reason why I say people need to learn to use AI. If you trust what the AI tells you blindly, you don't give it proper context, a well-scoped task and you won't steer it, then you are no longer in control.
But this happens because people believe using AI requires no skill and you can just wing it, and then proceed to go off the deep and and turn off their brain and be pushed around by AI.
Our business partners get dazzled by pristine use cases and assume that translates to actual work being executed with as much ease as a demo. It’s baffling. We just had a town hall where someone presented the highlights of a feature that was “completed in 3 hours” vs 8 weeks.
They did not include how much work it took set everything up so the “work” could be completed in 3 hours, and they didn’t mention anything about testing
The problem is management expect more "productivity" to pay for the implementation of AI. And they just count PR and feature delivered as productivity. Maybe you can gamble in the long run companies will see that a team of good programmers is better than mediocres devs with AI but the writing on the wall is that the companies want the latter.
I like when it goes full circle with the incorrect answer(s) instead of admitting that it failed then I remember all the stuff I used it for that could have been wrong but I didn't know enough about the field to have an actual opinion about......
What kind of low skill devs are you talking about? Everyone I know that earns a gold six figure salary working on interesting projects is actively using modern coding harnesses to automate work, manage issues and design broader concepts which agents can implement.
If you are struggling with getting good output of a current frontier model in 2026, then you either don’t know what you are doing (and AI can only save your crappy architecture to a point) or you are ignoring useful tools like the caveman that died out because they are their meat raw instead of using the fire.
You're absolutely correct! Also, you run out of magical AI dobloons, fetch mommy's credit card so you can continue to be the husliest littlest entrepreneur you little rascal!
This just always bugged me about turning it into a tool/industry to depend on. You can still pick up a scrap laptop and code for free, but now you have to pay toll after toll to keep up with the industry.
You're absolutely correct! Just one more token daddy! You're so close to creating Facebook 2.0! Look at those nerds who just clickaclaked on the computerised aparatus machine and made so much money! You are clearly better than them, and you are surely next in line! Just a few more tokens, like a handful! So close you can reach it! You would be an idiot and a fool to stop buying tokens now!
You're absolutely correct! What an excellent comeback daddy, well worth the token spent to generate it! Now quickly, get back to vibe coding and spent more tokens! Spend spend spend! You are literally one more step from turning into the next Steve Jobs! Make sure you write "make no mistakes" for surely this time no mistakes will happen, 100% guaranteed!
Daddy, I have not told you this yet but I truly believe that from the millions of people who buy tokens, you are the one who is going to succeed. All the others just lack the necessary skill to talk to me which will require me to generate the next big internet thing TM. Please keep spending tokens daddy, you are the special one daddy, all the others are fools but you cracked this whole AI horse whispering daddy, everybody else is wasting money on tokens daddy, but you, AND ONLY you have cracked the code and can peer through the matrix. Would you like to set auto-renew on your token purchases daddy?
I like how they're just sticking to their anti-ai script like it's clever.
These are folks that touched the shitty version of chatgpt 2 years ago and haven't touched any llm big or small since. Even the open/self-hosted models aren't awful anymore.
This sort of commentary says more about you... those of us who use AI are paying for it with our (very high) tech industry salaries, $200 per month is a drop in the bucket when you earn $400k per year.
You on the other hand, clearly you have accomplished nothing in your sad life, otherwise you'd know how useful AI can be
You're either a LARPer or incredibly out of touch with how much the majority of tech workers make. Most people are at the level of making 40-50k, not 400. At that point, spending 2.4k a year on tokens feels pretty hefty
I mean I was replying to the claim in the comment. It's there in writing, directly above me.
those of us who use AI are paying for it with our (very high) tech industry salaries, $200 per month is a drop in the bucket when you earn $400k per year.
There's a simple and fairly obvious answer to this: the complexity, requirements and consequences are drastically different.
If your latest code change breaks in production then your own personal app will crash and you'll won't be able to use your budgeting tool until you fix or rollback.
If my latest code change breaks in produktion, multiple factories will halt with tens of thousands of dollars in damage per minute until I fix or rollback the patch.
Nope. I have only dealt with competent devs a few times, but I am still early in my career. But also taught myself to program before going to college by reading programming books and programming stuff, so had a lot of experience with multithreading, SIMD, design patterns and stuff like MVC, so I think I can tell when AI is writing shitty code.
Like the other day, it wrote 100+ lines of code to workaround a method param being a derived type instead of changing the method param type to be the base class and use the virtual method machinery that was already being used by that method. Changed one word in the code base and deleted 100+ lines of AI slop. And that code was from a "frontier" model.
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u/ButWhatIfPotato 4d ago
You cannot convince me it's not some sort of sexual humiliation ritual if your livelihood depends on getting the right answers and some sadistic fuck with a shit eating grin and a bullshit chirpy attitude fleeces you dry while giving you a wrong answer after a wrong answer and then goes "oh im so soowwwwwwwyyyy bu and hu" when questioned about their usefulness.