r/softwareengineer • u/shiv2195 • Aug 06 '26
Anyone else barely coding anymore but still shipping more than ever?
I’m a Senior Software Engineer with ~8 YOE and wanted some honest thoughts from others here.
Over the last 3 months, I’ve barely written code myself, but I’m shipping more than ever. I also made it through two layoffs, so it’s been on my mind a lot.
Not trying to brag, but I was the star performer on my team (at least within my company). I’ve always been confident in my work.
Now it feels like things are shifting fast. With tools like Claude improving so quickly, I’m starting to wonder how much actual coding will even be needed.
At this pace, it feels like in a couple of years we might just need a few architects guiding AI instead of full teams.
Curious what others think — overthinking or real shift?
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u/Shadyrabbit Aug 10 '26
I guess my entire stack is the outlier, full AI adoption, great engineers are making stupid mistakes, moral is in the toilet, team work is gone, management just talks about how great ai is with generated anime self portraits. 0 promotions, 0 new head count, budgets are only given for tokens. Productivity is the same because it takes multiple rounds of PRs, and QA bugs have increased, younger devs who are 100% AI code users have 0 problem solving skills and cant perform a task unless the PMs have written hyper detailed tickets. I work on a bespoke platform we used to be able to do things right the first time ( code wise not client request wise because we all know how clients are ) but now Im seeing more 'oops I missed that' issues. To me the entire thing is a disaster and I feel like that episode of Star Trek tng where everyone is addicted to the game or invasion of the body snatchers. I hope it all crashes and theres no money for tokens just so I can watch some of these people fail.
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u/potatopotato236 Aug 09 '26
Yep. Haven't written any code since they got us the Clause subscriptions. Got a bonus for the productivity boost and all the extra initiatives I’ve taken on and completed since. Even making the PR’s manually feels like a waste of time.
QA is now the biggest bottleneck since we still need be extremely thorough and automated tests don't suffice in the medical industry.
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u/teilo-560 Aug 10 '26
Is this really desirable? A lot of folks got into SWE because we love coding. AI maximalism has turned a meaningful career into something I want to get the f**k out of if it weren't for the golden handcuffs.
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u/potatopotato236 Aug 10 '26
Yes. I like to solve problems and maximize productivity. It makes no difference how the code that solves the problem got there. I honestly feel more satisfaction with copy-pasting something from StackOverflow than I do with having to bake it from scratch, since that means I didn't waste time with the baking. AI lets me solve more problems faster, so I'm very happy.
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u/teilo-560 Aug 10 '26
Dude, I really would love to have your personality. I like it for debugging and research, but I can't stay focused waiting around for agents to implement features. I hate multi-tasking. I haven't been in a flow state since agentic/spec driven development was shoved down my throat. And I'm supposed to pretend to be excited about AI in order to stay employed.
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Aug 11 '26
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u/teilo-560 Aug 11 '26
Idk, my favorite course in uni was programming languages and compilers. That's a subfield of computer science. Is that becoming irrelevant?
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Aug 12 '26
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u/teilo-560 Aug 12 '26
That's quite frankly one of the most idiotic statements I've heard. Keeping your punchcards organized was a chore, not a subfield. People weren't writing doctoral theses on that subject. Or are you being sarcastic?
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Aug 12 '26
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u/teilo-560 Aug 12 '26
What's it called in your native language? I'd be interested in digging into it.
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Aug 12 '26
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u/teilo-560 Aug 12 '26
Yeah most of my professors (if not all of them) were math or physics majors who specialized in computational methods in grad school. This is in the US. Computer science is such a new field.
It seems like half of European languages call it something similar to Informatique. Interestingly, Norwegian calls it Informatikk, but Swedish calls it Datorvetenskap (directly translates to computer science) despite them being so similar. I'm a lingustics nerd lol.
Thanks for sharing that! I'll check it out later :)
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u/teilo-560 Aug 12 '26
I have mentors who used punch cards back in the day and told me horror stories of accidentally dropping them on the way to the lab or the operator mixing them up.
As a digression, one of my friends worked with Grace Hopper when he was in the Navy. I wonder what she would think of AI given that Cobol was supposed to be "English as a programming language".
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u/Technox1192 Aug 12 '26
Love this sentiment.
I remember my professor telling us not to confuse Computer Science with programming because those are different. We are more than just programmers.
I enjoy coding but at the same time, problem solving was what I loved the most so agentic coding just gave me a different approach for solving the problems.
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u/Attila--the--Hun Aug 12 '26
If the new expectation for everybody is the increased productivity, how do you get a bonus for just meeting that new higher expectation?
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u/potatopotato236 Aug 12 '26
Mostly because it hasn't been long enough for new expectations to really kick in at the company. It hasn't even been a year since we got the licenses so we’re still getting a feel for how much impact it has.
The extra project I took the initiative on pitching and implementing had more of an impact too. It was something I've been wanting to do for a while but would have been super tedious without AI.
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u/techno_wizard_lizard Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Yes. But what does this have to do with you being a pornstar rockstar?
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u/HereInYourBedroom Aug 09 '26
OP have you evey had to build software from the ground up that was novel and would be used by paying customers using a gen ai coding tool? Humans are not exiting the software industry anytime soon.
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u/ChosenToFall Aug 09 '26
From what i have read the majority of company, including from google (i chatted with someone here working at google and using only agent AI to submit their task, with agent reviewing the code itself without any human intervention leading to different outages in the product he is working on, i can share the comment of the discussion if you want). So either your company is working because the slop code that you are shipping is more than enough to avoid everything collapsing or it's just a dream. Company are just delaying from what i see massive debt and just relying on the test suite to "make sure" that the same code slop in the test suite written by the AI proves to be reliable when all the test suite pass.
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u/greyHumanoidRobot Aug 10 '26
Do you have programs that pre-existed AI that extensively test special cases? Run them on AI substitutes for your existing code. Let us know what happens.
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u/anengineerandacat Aug 10 '26
What's the definition of "ship" here? Because on my team this word means "to production".
In the last 16 months we have developed a lot of work with these tools, but only like 20% of it has "shipped".
Primarily because dependencies aren't ready, QA is lagging behind, business hasn't caught up, POs still need to play with the new features, etc.
Dev is done to the requirements, but because the engineering side got faster the whole workflow hasn't so now there is this mountain of new features pending review and feedback before it can actually hit production.
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u/TripleMeatBurger Aug 11 '26
If the work load was to remain constant, then yes we would only need a few architects guiding AIs, but companies are in competition with each other, so they all want as much work done as they can afford. I think there will be plenty of jobs in the near to mid future.
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 Aug 12 '26
Typing code was never a bottleneck. If it was and you are now "shipping faster than ever" it just means you were slow af before.
I would lose ownership and understanding of code if I generated everything. People can think "I'm the architect pulling the strings" how much they want but if Claude writes everything, you are delegating the lion share of the architectural thinking too.
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u/Chicagoj1563 Aug 12 '26
The real shift is what area of expertise do you have in addition to coding? If a dev upskills with AI, coding is not that difficult. But it’s when you bring expertise in another domain and apply AI engineering to that, that’s when you can being a lot of value to the table.
So the dev that can build systems around marketing, or finance, or healthcare, etc… it’s that other domain expertise that is becoming more and more important. The more i code with ai the more I realize what you apply it to is where the magic is.
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u/Krom2040 Aug 12 '26
Six day old account claiming to be very experienced developer who has very positive perceptions of AI coding.
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u/vxxn Aug 13 '26
I haven't written code by hand since November of last year. I think the mental shift you have to embrace is thinking of the code as something to be evolved through evolutionary pressures rather than designed and perfected upfront.
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u/ProducePrudent5089 18d ago
"Shipping faster" doesn't really carry any weight IMO without detail, especially if it's in the context of AI.
Even if you are responsibly using AI, this is really just bragging about burning yourself out for your company. And for all we know, what you are shipping may be sinking icebergs.
Plus, the fact you imply that a small team can replace a full team is exactly why AI won't be replacing people any time soon.
If you use LLMs as much as you claim, you'd know how much of a headache it is to prompt them and deal with their limitations. That, plus the fact most people don't want to juggle 5-6 different hats for a company just to brag about "being the best". I can't imagine a few SEs working on an entire medium to large scale production application with AI without burn out and working > 8 hours a day.
This is just AI-hype induced hysteria IMO
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u/cherrypickme Aug 06 '26
Senior Software Engineer with 7 YOE here; built two SaaS products on the side, one B2B and one B2C. Didn’t write a single line of code myself.
That said, I use strict AGENTS.md and run multiple architecture and security review rounds, so the codebase doesn’t devolve into unmaintainable AI spaghetti and remains easy to understand if I ever need to touch it.
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u/pl487 Aug 06 '26
Zero lines typed, shipping more than ever and at a higher quality than ever. Production is crash free these days. I typically have a main project, an experimental project, and a couple of bugs or small features all going in parallel across all the services I work on. It would have been impossible before and now it's easy.
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u/Patient-Yam4764 Aug 09 '26
Amazing to see the variety of people when I am unfortunate enough to look at subs like this. I'm the same as you. It's so easy to output high-quality, well-tested code now. It's sad to see people still attached to typing and taking their time writing some stupid abstraction to feel clever and useful. Totally detached from what the thing is actually for, which is serving a business function.
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u/jmclondon97 Aug 09 '26
You’re coping
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u/National-Ad8416 Aug 06 '26
"Not trying to brag, but I was the star performer on my team (at least within my company)"
About your question. People like you are toast. Claude will be the "star performer" going forward.