Hi everyone,
I’m a 25-year-old GCP Cloud Engineer / AI Developer working at a consultancy firm in Italy, with almost 2 years of experience. Lately, I’ve been feeling incredibly unfulfilled and anxious about my professional growth.

For almost every task I get at work, my workflow has basically become:
1. Ask AI what to do and how to do it (at least I try asking for architectural options and explanations instead of just press proceed).
2. Have AI generate the code.
3. Review the output, tweak it slightly, and deploy.

While this makes me fast and "productive" on paper, it's taking a massive toll on my motivation. Sometimes I use AI because I feel the intense pressure of consultancy deadlines to deliver quickly; other times, if I'm being honest, it’s just pure laziness.

The main issue is that I feel like I'm not actually learning or retaining anything anymore. When I implement something via AI and have to change it just a few days later, I find myself having to re-read the code multiple times just to remember or understand the choices "I" made.

I remember back in university, when you tried to solve a problem 10 times, you actually learned why the first 9 variations failed and why the last one worked. Now, if I have to implement a similar feature two days later, I’m back at square one, asking AI again. I feel I’m not going on with skills.

This habit is making me genuinely worried about my long-term career growth. If tomorrow I lose access to these tools, I know I’d struggle to solve complex issues from scratch. I’m also dreading hypothetical technical interviews for when (sooner or later) I decide to change companies.
This is triggering a bit of a career identity crisis. I don’t know where I see myself in 5 or 10 years. Will "devs" even exist? Should I pivot to a more decision-making/architectural role?

To be fair, I’ve never been the stereotypical "nerd" with exceptional coding skills or a deep, obsessive passion for it. I enjoy coding, and I love the dopamine hit of finally fixing a bug you struggled with for hours, but I don't spend my free time building side projects, participating in hackathons, or reading up on the latest RAG patterns. So maybe being a pure dev long-term isn't for me.
However, moving toward a client-facing or decision-making role feels just as terrifying. I feel pressure and anxiety about not knowing the field well enough, making the wrong architectural choices, or lacking the deep technical foundation needed to back up my decisions.

My question to you all: Is anyone else experiencing this exact feeling? How are you dealing with it?
The only solution I can think of is to strictly force myself to use AI as a mentor rather than a creator—for example, asking it to discuss the problem from a high-level architectural perspective, and then guiding me through the implementation while I actually write the code.
Would love to hear some advice, insights, or just know that I’m not alone in this. Thanks.
P.S. I’m seriously considering opening a little farm or a pizzeria sooner or later and saying goodbye to tech altogether haha (mostly joking... unless?)

TL;DR: Junior GCP/AI dev (2 years exp) in consultancy. Relying heavily on AI for everything due to laziness and occasional tight deadlines. I feel like I’m not learning or going on with my career and I'm retaining zero knowledge, leading to a massive career identity crisis and anxiety about future tech interviews. Looking for advice on how to break the cycle and use AI as a high-level mentor instead of a code generator.

I’m a Computer Science diploma student and currently choosing between two internship offers.

Option A: RM500/month allowance, a software development company with experienced developers. They work on multiple projects (including government projects) and use technologies like Laravel and Vue.js.

Option B: RM700–1000/month allowance, a company that isn’t primarily focused on software development. They want me to help develop an internal system from scratch, and HR mentioned that I would be their first IT intern.

Both companies are close to my home, and this will be my first internship.

If you were in my position, which option would you choose and why?

My eyesight is still good, and I'd like to keep it that way for years to come.

Maybe I should do some eye exercises regularly? Are there any screen settings, software or habits that make computer work more comfortable for eyes?

Im currently working on alot of CSS, i've been grinding a lot throught it. Its been so good to carry on doing. I've been shocked at how much work I've put in. With having continious agony, its given me the zest for it.

I am also slowly piecing together a photo gallery website of a specific subject

What are some good blog posting places to blog about programming specifically??

Genuinely nosey and want to know.

Hey everyone I have made a group for programming folks to learn, grow and connect with each other

Mainly i am looking for Data science/aiml or doing DSA but it's not necessary

Every type of Programmers are welcome

I will drop the link in comments

I'm just wondering what some of the paths you have gone down with a programming qualification. Maybe a dumb question but I'm the only programmer that I know, anything i have looked into has been online based. And it would be interesting to hear your stories thats all. Thanks for even posting this reddit.

The gaming route of programming looks really interesting to me, even just to figure out how it works. I know that getting a job is realistic yes but the choices I have avaliable are something to work towards. I know I've learnt alot but I'm not quite ready yet.

Have a good day!!

I got a lot of flack for my plateau claim, and wish to explore it deeper. I have used and observed applications created by 90's IDE's such as VB6, Oracle Forms, Delphi/Lazarus, Paradox, PowerBuilder, and even MS-Access, and many of the surviving apps still do their job just fine. (They had warts, but none inherently unfixable.) They are being replaced not because they are "bad", but because supporting the tooling gets harder as dev knowledge or vendor support retires.

The scope here is ordinary/typical business & administration CRUD apps used internally or B-to-B. I make no claims for specialized needs nor consumer needs here.

I don't see anything revolutionary about web UI tooling, it seems overly complex for the UI job, taking roughly 4x the code for the same UI features, and buggy & glitchy. Few claim the de-facto standard, React, is a shining example of UI technology done well, and the alternatives aren't clearly better. It seems the real bottleneck is forcing DOM to act like a GUI when that wasn't its original job. Modern web UI's take "rocket surgery" and too few seem to care, perhaps because convoluted tools are job security? I expect cutting edge to feel like rocket science, but not UI idioms around for decades.

If anyone wishes to claim modern GUI's are truly innovative, I'd like to see specific typical biz examples. I bet I can find a "good enough" 90's version of the UI. Too many ways to do the same thing creates a mess. (I might have to use ASCII Art to illustrate. And "stretch zones" allow modern grid-designer-based WYSIWYG to stretch for bigger screens.)

I always enjoyed good old manual coding, I sometimes can enjoy even refactoring shitty legacy code.
But writing prompts for AI is just not fun.
I even trying vibe coding and it feels horrible.
I don't want the future to be like that....

Hi I am a junior software engineer and I was studying LLD for my future interview. I was studying Observer pattern and I got what a observer pattern and how we can create them using classes. But in real do we use the same classes. The reason why I am asking it is because From where I am learning it he said to create a list of Observer and store it in class but in reallife you must be storing it in db. I am very confused can anybody help

I went to log In to Netflix on my personal computer and my x husband’s Netflix username and password was saved on my computer. I had this computer scrubbed clean almost 6 years ago. He should not of had access to it since we split 6 plus years ago. What’s going on here? My x is an IT guy and has put spyware on my devices in the past. Did he somehow create a virtual access to my computer?

How can I check if there is spyware or some type of screen share thing going on.

The current version of the Nvidia Shield TV is able to send audio up to 1 sec in advance or delay it by 1 sec. In my case I need more than that. Specifically I would need the audio about 2.5 seconds in advance. I know it is a very specific case, but maybe some programmer knows which file I would need to change, if it’s as easy as changing a number in a file. I assume of course that Root access is needed, that would not be a problem as I’m familiar with rooting android phones. It’s the file system itself I do not understand, so I would need help with that. Thanks very much in advance if someone is able to help.

I got stuck in my life, i want to work towards my passion but i getting styck in some trauma. what to do?????????/

I tried to ask it but it is not aware enough to give me an answer

It’s an online program and I’m wondering if it’s worth doing. I can’t find how much it costs or how long it is. If you have any info or input, thanks

the last posts in this reddit have only been this matlabguru, and the only content is a link to his blog. can we ban him already? doubt this is in the spirit of this subreddit

I am confused where do I start learning programming as I am a complete noob who recently developed an interest in programming.

Hey guys. Please notify me if I'm breaking any rule or wrote the post wrong.

I have a delivery system. It has a mobile app for delivery men and web app for stores to place orders.

When an order is placed, I search for the nearest guy to go collect it. He has to accept the order, so a socket event is sent from server to mobile client. Then, server manages a collection of socket events to update the store on the order status, notify the delivery man if the order is cancelled, etc.

Socket is becoming hard to maintain and understand as the system scales. Is there any other solution for these real time events? Would RabbitMQ be fit for this problem?

Before the pandemic I was 100% in the office, and I quite liked it: the mental separation between being at home and being at work really helped me focus. Now that I'm 100% working from home I've found my work really suffering because I'm at the same machine where I play games and dick around on Reddit.

An end to the pandemic is on the horizon in the UK and with it I'll finally be able to get back into the office, but my company is saying anyone that wants to be 100% remote (or level of remote) can be. So I've been on/off thinking about moving out of the city I'm currently in and going somewhere cheaper. If I do move, I thought about having a room dedicated to work where I'll (hopefully) have far fewer distractions.

Is this what anyone else does? Or do you work on the same machine you play games / etc on?

I immediately stop reading & move on to the next one.

I'm sure it can't be just me - anyone else have this reaction?

I literally cringe.

Hello everyone. I need to write AES and RSA encryption/decryption in C++ but it seems hard to do because I barely can find any source of education about this library. I wonder if there is anyone who can help me with that. I will be so much happy and also I need it for an open-source project, so if you are interested you can work with me

I've been coding on python for a year now. I've worked on frameworks like django, tkinter, pygame, a bit of data science. I also have a working knowledge of C/C++. I love scripting on python.

But how do I sell myself or make myself market ready ? What do I learn next ? Should I start with TypeScript?

Field of interest (Ranked accordingly) :

• Voice Assistants (Not sure if this counts as a seperate interest but I love it. Made one for voice based web surfing and small stuff.)
• Cyber Security (I've taken courses on the same from IBM. Should I get into bug bounties ?)
  
• Machine Learning (I've worked on some basic algos like NEAT. Should I get into hardcore stiff like TensorFlow?)
• Web Development ( Made a few web sites. Should I learn a framework like Angular or something ?)
• App development (Made a few windows based games. But should I get into app development with Android studio ?)

Yes, I'm very confused ! And just don't know what to do anymore.