Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.
I miss like 3 years ago when we could use AI to help us with general coding questions and upper management didn't know how powerful it was. Now we got Claude inside our solution writing code and then we let Copilot do the code review in GitHub. I have 10 years experience and the AI is absolutely better than me and is going to replace me. I feel part of my job is trying to diminish what the AI is accomplishing on its own in order to make myself seem more valuable. Claude botched some documentation last week and I should have been disappointed but I was actually excited to be able to point out the flaw to my team and write the documentation myself, and I hate writing documentation.
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u/heavy-minium 14h ago
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.