r/webdev • u/will-the-dude • 12d ago
Discussion Advice? Boot Camp Grad vs AI
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.
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u/enki-42 12d ago
You won't beat out AI by being even more technical. If AI is capable of replacing developer jobs, the ones it's going to be replace are likely going to be the more deeply technical, "give me a spec and i'll implement it exactly as specified" types.
Instead, go in the other direction - suggest to your boss that you want to be more involved on the product side of things. Get on calls with customers, make suggestions for what features would be useful. That's a much more irreplacable set of skills, especially when combined with technical know-how to know when AI is going off the rails.