I made a horizontal career move and accepted as a trade-off that at this time I won’t write code.

Old company: mildly toxic environment, out of touch CEO, poor leadership. Increasing AI push and wild gaps between different people’s competence. Constant arguing. The dreaded 5k loc generated PRs started appearing. My role: ~5% web programming tasks (that I actually signed up for originally) rest was design, review, and people-related work. I was not a manager. Hated it.

The project: 1 year of goal-oriented homelabbing, from a 50€ raspberry pi to hybrid cloud, gitops, kubernetes, and all the good bleeding edge stuff you need to run your own cloud. Did this completely without AI, built the resume, applied to a few places. Happens that one of the companies was looking for the exact stack I built my homelab around.

New company: Platform team, 90% hands on, competent manager, capped AI budgets, people treat each other respectfully. I quite like it. When I do coding it’s simple enough that it stays manageable even though I ask some bot to write it 90% of the time. It gets the job done, I wasn’t hired to write code anyway.

It’s probably a patch, but I’m hoping to run the wave long enough by this move. For the first time in a couple years I feel clarity. I trust that I’ll be able to pick up programming by hand if needed. Most people are in the same boat anyway, so the expectation won’t be there to perform on a similar level instantly. I trust that my ability to learn new things keeps being valuable.

On my free time I don’t currently write code, non-technical hobbies and maintaining the homelab I conjured eat it up. I don’t mind too much. I have enough interesting stuff to do. I think most of all it’s important that I get to create something. If I’m not exactly paid to do that it’s not the end of the world. Much worse situations exist, I’m still paid similar €€ than in my software position.

Could one simply write code themselves and ask the AI to make it look like it did it?

My job is 75% maintenance and 25% developing new app features. That 25% is really interesting and is what drew me to my current company, but maintenance is what management cares about most and what our customer service team is constantly pushing us to do.

The problem is that it’s boring and repetitive work. Ever since the company started promoting the use of AI, I’ve been delegating these tedious tasks to agents who work on separate Git worktrees, while I focus on learning new things and implementing them alongside new features that we previously didn’t have the time or budget for. Management is satisfied, and I’m learning a lot thanks to the time I’ve saved. Most importantly, I’m still writing code myself, code that I actually enjoy writing.

In a similar boat. I’ve been programming since my family got a IBM 386 in the 90s and I started dabbling in the dark arts. I’ve been a career programmer for 20+ years now. I’ve loved it, all the way up until the past year or two.

Here are some of my rambling thoughts and perspectives, for whatever they are worth.

• “Don’t try to fix someone else’s mistake while they are still in the process of making it.”. AI is both a useful tool and a giant shit show, but if your company wants the shit show, then let them have the shit show, do not carry their burden.

• Lean into hobbies that aren’t on computers. I do woodwork, gardening, arts and crafts, sewing, home repairs, camping, etc. “Go touch grass” as it were.

• “Fight fire with fire”. (I don’t understand that saying) But the point of it is to say, don’t manually review AI slop, if they are gonna slop 800 file PRs at you, AI slop review them and move on. The Titanic is sinking, you aren’t going to save it by frantically bailing with a bucket.

• Programming is both an art form and a skill and it is also like riding a bike. You may not ride for years, but if you get on a bike it will come right back to you. Don’t stress or worry that your skillset is deteriorating, it will always be there. It may get rusty and need some lube, but it won’t go away.

• When the AI bubble finishes popping, AI will still be around, but it may not be shoved into literally everything as much, and there will still be a place for talented people to do quality work. Examples from 2 of my top hobbies is that we have both automated farming and assembly line furniture factories, but handmade solid wood furniture is still around and worth doing, and there are still gardens in a lot of back yards.

• Most of the people in the top positions in our governments and companies are completely and utterly unqualified to be there. You’ll be fine. Focus on being your best self, being happy with YOU. AI is here to stay, but talented people have not lost any value at all, know what you are worth, have some confidence, don’t let the slop get you down, there is literally slop in every aspect and career, try not to worry about it, ya know? Mass produced, low quality clothing and furniture exists, but people still sew and woodwork. It’s ok, be better than the baseline slop and you will have value to those who understand.

• Being a “Jack of all Trades / Master of None” isn’t a bad thing, neither is the inverse a “Master of one thing and nothing else”. All of that is also very black and white thinking, it’s not reality. People are more than just their skills.

Final thoughts and summary: The AI slop is here to stay. As I learned in therapy “Don’t fight the current/flood/rising tide, learn to swim and float above it.”. The river is going to go where it is going to go, you can either be swept away and dragged under or you can sail along the surface and enjoy the breeze. I, personally, recommend the latter.

Good luck out there! You got this!

If job wants slop, I just queue up work back to back in the slop generator. While the slop generator is running, I’m reading a book or building something by hand to make sure I stay sharp. If my engineering leadership doesn’t care about quality, then why should I? Give em what they want and take care of your own needs

Personal projects done without AI. It’s like artisanal coding. People will pay tons of money for it one day. We will be able to sit in museums implementing simple scripts without AI so kids on school trips can see how human brain works without assistance. Of course the AI will have to explain to them what’s happening.

I don’t know but I’m in the same boat except its just killing all of my motivation. I really love software but not like this and it’s making me want to switch fields

Same boat. I’m not even really reviewing the diarrhea code. I just tell the bot to review it. I don’t care. Let it explode. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

I’m also not even paying attention to the implementation tickets. Just tell bot to do it. Whatever.

I’m super checked out at work now. They want me to use AI. Fine. I’m not babysitting it though. If it blows up, it blows up.

I don’t know, but I can only say that I share the situation.

I work at a very large company that has pushed Ai. I also have 27 years of professional experience, so I lead position hasn’t changed too much, except reviewing Ai work as well. All your problems sounds like a team issue. People shouldn’t commit things they don’t know how and your commits should be small enough that they are easy to review. I had this issue before Ai. I would tell my team to please make small co.mits because either have to review them. We still do the stuff we enjoy ourselves but use Ai for the coding equivalent of “please read this 200 page document and remove all i stances of dog”. Basically something that requires no skill but an insane amount of time.

That being said, I do worry about the new grads.

I throw it the mind numbing shit. Heres a bunch of sites, group them geographically for tech installs. Eat these logs and isolate element XX . Find instances of bullshit in this YAML. I keep the real work for myself.

Tried using claude for documentation, it was very clear the literacy and clarity rates of the files it was based on were dogshit. If you can’t even write a process document for hbs sync that a drunken monkey can follow i got no use for you

from the other side, i’m the cto of a small agency and i wrote our rules for working with ai, so maybe it helps. the first one is that the author answers for the code, “the model did it” is not an explanation for anyone. asking the model to review its own diff is a first pass, not a review, the same model that got it wrong is checking itself. the way i put it to the team, ai makes producing cheaper, not deciding or verifying, if you ship double with the same error rate you get double the errors. if your company only measures volume, the atrophy is more a management problem than yours, i’d push back with incidents and rework numbers, thats the language they listen to

Simple. My job currently being full-time unemployment.

I’m a CS instructor now (after two decades of industry), but it’s unclear how long this job will exist despite my modernization efforts. When I think about what I’d do instead, one of the top things is working for a non-profit or public-sector gig doing Good and heavily leveraging AI to get the work done (using my SE skills to keep quality up). I figure it won’t pay much, but I’m old enough now that the nature of the work has more value than the money.

And after the workday, I’ll hopefully have something that I’ve never had in any other coding job: enough energy after work to code my own projects.

Hopefully.

If I had a manager who was telling me to review huge, unreviewable PRs every day, I’d just punt that to an AI with piles of tests. Under that management direction, there’s nothing you can do to save the product; you can only postpone its inevitable demise.

I’m not really worried about skill atrophy. I don’t really buy that using AI to write all my code for a month will do any long-lasting harm to my ability to write code more than not writing any code for a month would, and I’ve gone much much longer than that without writing code before, with no long-term consequences.

I think it’s more about motivation, which again is something that you can regain pretty quickly if circumstances change.