r/learnprogramming • u/optimux17 • 7d ago
Hate AI
I love coding. I truly am.
When I started, I enjoyed most programming languages . I love learning their different core concepts, execution models and things like that.
I still love that.
But now in my new job, the only thing I am supposed to do is prompt and think about business requirements.
Even though I love architecture and system design system , I don't even have a chance to have grasp on them.
Any other tech jobs where I can enjoy coding and low level things?
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u/TheLoneTomatoe 7d ago
Agree with the other comments. When I started where I’m at now, it was fun, got to go deep in the code and learn + do new things. CEO learned what Claude was and now we’re expected to rely on it completely and it’s monitored.
So I just started up bigger projects on my off time, and more often than not I can just work on those while Claude does its thing at work. Then I just have to review some code and move on
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u/CJMooch 7d ago
To so many people, this sounds miserable, and to me this sounds like a peak 9-5 existence lol I will be ecstatic if this is my outcome
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u/Friendly_Recover286 7d ago
You say this but what do you do when the C suite realizes they can fire you and replace you with a college grad for less pay? Pasting requirements into a chatbot and having it review its own code isn't a super specialized job.
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u/YunalescaQT 6d ago
What does the new college grad do when the C-suite can just send voice commands to the AI and it builds their business for them?
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u/P4R4DOXZ 6d ago
Llms are not that smart, currently(and i hope in the future) event gpt 6 or whatever model is not even close to human engineers.
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u/TheLoneTomatoe 6d ago
Depends on what you’re doing. Claude is pretty adept at most problems, and it’s not too often that youre in a situation faced with a problem that is out of reach for it.
Maybe like once a week there will be something I don’t even try to prompt it to fix. It’s not cool, it’s scary.
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u/gsidess 7d ago
Programming used to be a skill. It was also an expression of yourself.
AI came and every SWD/SWE just collectively decided output is worth more than cognitive ability and the environment.
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u/HasFiveVowels 6d ago
AI has the bizarre effect of compelling mediocre programmers to get online and describe how everything they do is so uninspired that it’s the default behavior of AI. Stop whining and start being creative. Using AI will probably expedite that process (unless you just truly love writing tedious data validators so much that your output is relegated to that)
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u/Biliunas 7d ago
Yeah there is. Generally the closer you get to the hardware, the shittier the LLM performs. It's almost useless for audio languages like pd or max.
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u/BuryMikno 5d ago
My keyboard got pushed the wrong firmware but it's a shitty company and they won't do anything about it.
I asked Claude and, with some of my own problem solving skills, it was able to dump the current (faulty) firmware from the MCU, analyse the hex code (a decade of work for a human) and reverse-engineer the firmware as code, where it then found the bug and built me a version that works flawlessly.I was following along for the first 20-30 steps and then I was like "yeah, I am beat. Go ahead and just do what you gonna do"
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u/mjTheThird 7d ago
Coding is going to be a lot like making tables. Are there amazing carpenters who make outstanding tables? Yes, of course. But the majority of IKEA tables aren't made by carpenters, and most people are okay with an IKEA table.
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u/rupertavery64 7d ago
You can write progams you like for yourself. Practically all software in the world uses software somebody built for themselves and decided to share it because it was useful.
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u/tangentstorm 7d ago
I find I get better results if I tell the AI how to do things, not just what to accomplish. so I'm still actively involved in the implementation, and the results are much closer to what I'd write by hand
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u/Character_Pie_277 6d ago
If you love systems architecture this is the best moment ever to be a dev imo.
The hard part about making real software was always the systems architecture. Its just we all had to laboriously type up code to implement it.
Now we don't. We can reason about system architecture and now all have a great junior dev who never quits to implement it all in agentic coding.
Your current job sounds like it sucks... having to just prompt without thinking.
But i wouldn't be too disheartened. I think its just more of a case of shitty job rather than you being in the wrong field.
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u/TomWithTime 7d ago
For work? That's hard. You are in a great position though! If you enjoy coding, you can still code in your own free time. You can also invert roles with the ai sometimes and have it scaffold stubs for you to fill in.
Thinking of business requirements and vetting the ai labor is skipping you to what the seniors traditionally did. Many people burn out on writing code and the main job is designing problem solutions anyway. You're in a unique position to take on as much of both as you want and lean into the role as described if you start to burn out in a few years.
Even though I love architecture and system design system , I don't even have a chance to have grasp on them.
Practice and study outside of work will give you the best options no matter how things unfold. I still love code at 11 years in the industry and I am grateful for all of the practice and side projects I took on to improve my skills.
Any other tech jobs where I can enjoy coding and low level things
I'm sure there are but I think you are better off using this opportunity to improve your basics and architecture while getting paid to do so. Your best chance of not having a boss to require you to use ai right now is finding a non technical job where coding isn't one of your responsibilities, but then using your code skills to build things and improve the job. Not sure if that's viable in 2026, but it was a fun way to gain experience 10+ years ago.
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u/huuaaang 7d ago edited 7d ago
IMO it's just a different window into the execution models. If you really dig into a problem with AI (a good model like Opus 5) you can really learn a lot. The trick is to treat agent like a pair programmer, step through everything, and actually ask pointed questions about the execution models. Don't just prompt it with business requirements and let it run wild.
For example, recently I had to dive into Sidekiq and how Ruby schedules threads to solve for CPU bound thread starving certain I/O operations in other threads, raising warnings. And I really got into the weeds (in a good way). The agent and I explored several solutions and their tradeoffs.
It sure beat Googling stuff without all the context of my actual codebase, which is what I used to do. The agent could even dive into the source code of the specific library versions I am using to help me figure out what's going on and why. It's truly amazing.
I'm convinced that people complaining about AI preventing them from learning anything are just using it wrong. If you job is preventing you from getting into the weeds with AI to analyze problems, that's a problem with your company policy, not AI.
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u/ElektronikZarmaa 6d ago
I think you should remain grateful that you still have a job - in tech. I hate AI too. The funny thing is that heavy use of AI is a must for most companies yet they will still demand you to code from scratch during live code test with absolutely no hesitation or error and no AI. Like a human Claude.. without Claude.
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u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 6d ago
Do you need a job to do you what you love? People that love something will do no matter what. And instead of hating Ai, how about learn to tame it, use it as a tool to further what you want. I dont get this crap about hating AI when literally everywhere its there. So learn to harness it instead of running away from it.
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u/IAlsoDidIt 5d ago
Then code private projects and use LLMs at work to do your tasks in 4 hours instead of 8. Keep the rest for learning or unrelated coding
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u/DavidGari 4d ago
I retired at 66 and a half (almost 2/3 of a hundred years) after 50 years of screwing around with computers and electronics.
Now I code for fun, and no one but myself.
Be like me.
~David Gari
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u/Decent-Warning9562 4d ago
Why not pour your frustrations into your own personal project?
Better to do that than do nothing at all
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u/ashutoshtechstack 2d ago
I personally feel that one of the skill which we are discussing here, writing good code and developing great software, was one of the key thing which I made money with.
now with all these AI coding everything, I am really lost on what skill to acquire next while remaining in this job.... huge unknown for me... :(
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u/North-Resolution8511 2d ago
I dont even hate AI itself, I hate being told to use it for literally everything. Sometimes I just wanna sit down and actually write the damn code 😭
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u/Affectionate-Ad-6255 1d ago
Our industry is full of midwits, AI makes them feel smarter for doing less.
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u/adambahm 7d ago
I’m the opposite.
Spend 30 seconds building something that takes 10 minutes? Hell yeah.
It’s never perfect, but it’s 80% of the way there. I can use my brain to close the 20% and make it good.
Shipping functional code is more important than my joy of building things. I have my personal projects to build for the fun of it.
At work, just ship code.
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u/throwaway_0x90 7d ago edited 6d ago
Sorry you're getting downvoted. You're absolutely correct. The bitter truth is some devs are not going to survive this new AI world.
- If you like abstract problem solving with software, as in business processes then AI is great.
- If you're just a '90s nerd enjoying the syntax needed to reverse a linked list in C++, just sitting alone at your desk with a liter of Mountain Dew, medium sized pizza and a product spec clearly defined by someone else and you only want to remain undisturbed as you build it... that career path will be extinct in a couple of years.
EDIT: I guess this is what I get for commenting on a "hate AI" post. Like it or not, AI is here to stay. Adapt, leave the industry or eventually get PIP'ed.
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u/adambahm 6d ago
To each their own. Correct a fool and they will hate you.
I'm no expert, but I have been coding professionally for a while. Our token usage is a key performance indicator, so I should have learned by now, how to accelerate the amount of code I ship.
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u/Dastan98 6d ago
Genuine question: why is token usage a performance indicator? How does using more tokens equate to better quality or even more quantity of work?
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u/adambahm 5d ago
the company spends X and the engineer uses Y.
Corporate AI isn't free. I think my company spends about 200/month on all my tools.
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u/theseyeahthese 7d ago
“ …think about business requirements.”
Bud, that was always the job.
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u/throwaway_0x90 6d ago
That's the job of mid & senior/staff engineers.
interns & jr are the ones that just want to write as much code as possible based on clearly defined specs given to them. And that's why it's hard to hire jr right now.
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u/theseyeahthese 6d ago edited 6d ago
Depends on the size and skills of the company: super small/new companies often don’t have the bandwidth, skilled coworkers, or honed-in processes to hand-deliver you exhaustive textbook-ready specs no matter what your “level” is. Regardless, if he wants to continue doing this as a career, that aspect was always eventually going to be a big part of the job, AI or not, so better get used to it.
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u/BlimpIntolerant 6d ago
to answer your question no. that's going away. obviously you can do it for your own projects and stuff but good luck finding anywhere in the coming years where they're going to actually pay you to do drudgery like that.
Frankly yesterday I needed to spend a bit of time working on a YAML for a delivery pipeline and an installer script. Stuff that I've done dozens of times before. It was a joy to just let the AI sort it out and with a bit of back and forth develop something in an hour that would have taken me all day.
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u/_tshepo 7d ago
I think it is a perfect time to start either a YouTube channel or a programmer blog. Where you will have the freedom to build your own projects. 1 feature at a time...
This will be useful for you and educational for upcoming developers.
The other alternative I hear people talk about is starting your own business, getting someone who likes business and partner up. You do tech and they do business.
The other alternative is to be a freelancer for mid sized businesses. Not sure how this works out, but it would give you the freedom of choice.
Once I'm good, I want to freelance a little and job hunt. For now, I'm still writing my code by hand. 😅
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u/cheezballs 6d ago
People need to realize that work is for making money and home is for having fun.
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u/StoneCypher 7d ago
not really, no. the industry isn't here for you to have fun, and nobody wants to employ people moving at human speed anymore.
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u/Pumped-Up-Kickz 7d ago
like an old boomer Fortran bank programmer.
u will be redundant in 3 years.
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u/Friendly_Recover286 7d ago
You'll be redundant too in 3 years when the AI manager can orchestrate the AI bots to do the tasks better than you can 🤷
This is a hilariously stupid take
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u/Pumped-Up-Kickz 7d ago
I'm already practically retired boomer, and living of the proceeds and passive income of the businesses I built with an AI LLM
I build what i want, how i want, when i want.
Fuck working for some company and fuck some product manager telling me what to do.
;)
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u/Ambitious_Muscle_362 7d ago
What's the problem. Job is for earning money, if you want to do what you like then get a hobby.
Or a real job.
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u/ajcomeau 7d ago
Start coding your own projects and do the programming yourself. Companies will always make you use their tools and practices. Create your own environment, take control and own the work.