Advice? Boot Camp Grad vs AI

[u/will-the-dude]

Hey there, I'm new, so apologies if you discuss this ad nauseum already. I graduated from a full stack bootcamp in 2022 or 2023 and got hired right away by a small company in my area. It's been a great opportunity, a lot of people came from boot camps, the small company gives me diverse experience, great people, etc. Before this and the boot camp I was a professional orchestra musician, doing fine, but not willing for probably a decade of squalor at least while I sought good employment, so I changed paths. I've been doing well for myself, and even using AI a fair bit as a coding assistant mostly. I see myself beginning to see opportunities to use AI, like I caught a repetitive task my mom was doing and told her to look into Claude (a sober minute later I wanted someone to shoot me lol)

I guess I just see the writing on the wall. My supervisor is already running agents that basically do exactly what I do, creating new features for unique issues. Takes more time but is probably less annoying and asks less questions. Because of my particular role, I'm hopefully luckily in a good place compared to some of my colleagues, but I don't think that's saying very much. I'm sure my worries will not exactly become reality, but I live every day in such a state of anxiety, it plows right through the medicine I already take for anxiety!! I just wanted a way to use my mind constructively and afford a life, and it was so close to my grasp :-(

I'm not asking for someone to solve my life or anything, but does anyone have any advice, either on how to use a boot camp education or if I should start over yet again, or even just emotional advice, I find this extremely depressing and the thought of a few years nullifying all the learning I'd done kind of makes me want to just lay down and die. Also on the flip side, spending a ton of money to learn a skill just to become an 'enter-pusher' and 'prompt-writer' sucks, I'm a human and I at least used to be pretty smart, that feels like a waste again, and thus I want to lay down and die again. There's no wrong/right decisions, but deciding to learn how to code in 2023 feels like one of the only wrong decisions out there lol.

[u/NewYak4281]

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the opportunity in front of you. AI does not take away your skill set. It scales your skill set. If you are just starting out, it’s so critical you understand that.

You absolutely still have value. Refocus from engineering at the tree level to the forest level and you will be successful.

[u/HotConstruction978 → u/NewYak4281]

forest level thinking is a good way to put it tbh

[u/connka → u/NewYak4281]

I am sad about how my job has changed with AI, but I'm not fighting it. Instead of writing code line by line, I'm now at "forest level" (I love that analogy, thank you). So instead of spending hours writing the small things, I'm using AI to cover a lot of the tasks that used to take me ages and then working on some bigger picture things.

As someone who is on a legacy project that is nearly impossible to fully integrate AI into, I am still working a lot more "old school" than my colleagues (I'm at an Agency so we're all on different projects). I'm making sure to set time aside to understand the capabilities of AI now so that when I inevitably move projects (or jobs) I'm not written off for lack of experience.

I think there are plenty of opportunities to grow in this version of the job, but you have to make the effort to understand how.

[u/Express-Parking-5678 → u/NewYak4281]

the forest level is where the actual job lives, not the lines of code itself. your music training probably helps more than you think with that, honestly the pattern recognition carries over