My company gave us access to AI tools and encourage us to use them, but nothing is forced, which is nice. I like using Claude for light scripting, explaining bits of code, and as a second set of eyes during review.

If you have AI generate all of your code, you're going to have a bad time. But if you're completely against AI and unwilling to use it, you're probably going to be left in the dust.

Run. Run while you still can.

I recently lost my job because I didn’t want to use AI to write 50-100% of my code as my boss requested.

I technically can’t say I lost my job because of AI as they told me they were laying me off due to restructuring, but a week after I was laid off they were hiring for my exact same skillset with a different title and the caveat that the applicant must use AI to write code. So you do the math.

Writing code was never 100% of the job. The hard part of software engineering is understanding the problem and figuring out the most elegant path to solve it. If AI can do the code-writing part faster, then it's a good tool to use.

I still spend a third of my week in meetings. I put out on-call fires late at night.

I also spend a good chunk of my time interviewing potential hires. I pretty much expect them to use AI for their code assignments. Including prompt history is a plus if they do. What I do gauge is their ability to explain their code, defend the decisions and know how to adapt to changing circumstances.

I know how to get to this point by starting a couple of decades ago. I do recognise that I don't have the same grasp of our codebase as if I had written it by hand. I do review everything that gets deployed, but the volume is higher and it doesn't stick as well.

I don't know how to get in as a jr today. We'll know in a few years how it's done. It's a new landscape, but if you're passionate about the field you'll figure it out.

We don’t write code anymore. It’s all AI generated.

The job is figuring out the design, agreeing with other teams on that design and contracts between your components, and then telling AI to do all the work. Even if you have bugs or maintenance, you just prompt AI to fix it. You can also have AI write all your tests.

You wanted an honest answer, that’s it.

Others will be cranky about it and downvote me.

If you are a senior level dev you will spend less time writing your own code than ai and you will understand it better, and will not slowly lose your critical thinking skills in the process.

I am still more productive not using ai than anyone else on my team who uses it.

Just gonna leave this here.

AI is rotting programmers brains

I'm still writing 90% of my code by hand at work. I think if you have total or close to total mastery in your domain, you should probably work faster than AI.

It takes a while for AI to generate code (Opus is pretty slow) and then you have to go review it and do rounds and rounds of fixes. It might be faster to use AI if there were unknowns or if you werent quite sure how to write the code. Otherwise I just find it faster to write it myself.

That being said I do use AI under some soecific circumstances:

1. im working in a code base or area of code im unfamiliar with
2. Im working in a language in unfamiliar with
3. prototyping ideas
4. generating boilerplate heavy code

For 1. And 2. I dont usually have ai write code for me. I would just ask it questions like "how do I write X in an idiomatic way in language Y".

For 3, I have it generate code that I then toss and rewrite if the prototype works.

For 4, this is rare in a good code base. Most of the boiler plate heavy code at work is in unit tests.

AI does not have a foothold in my area, because it still takes far more time to understand what it did, and debug it. Faster to just do it ourselves.

However, there are some programming jobs where people can use what it makes without checking much, or understanding what it does. And while this probably has some cost to pay down the line, if it gets the job done today, then everyone wins.

I know some freelancers, and small shops, that make a lot of money untangling the code made by the above.

It's been creeping slowly into my workplace over the past year. I've gotten by without using it myself so far, but there's been a soft push by management for developers to use AI in their daily work. Experienced devs with a measured approach to AI ("it's not a silver bullet, but incredibly and increasingly useful") are given a platform, while AI skeptics are quietly ignored.

Management says they don't plan on replacing engineers with AI, but it's hard not to get that impression when a draft for an upcoming company AI meeting has a heading titled "A Bigger Department Without Hiring a Bigger Department".

From a lot of posts here I get that working as a dev in the US is now a total shitshow. But to give you my European perspective (I work in Germany): AI adoption hasn't been as rapid here. People and companies are more skeptical about it, compared to the US.

I work as a web developer for an employer that is cautious about AI. I can use it, but I am not forced to. Tried it excessively for a few months (agents writing my code, playing a glorified manager and all of that jazz), but I noticed my own skills atrophying and me losing the general grasp of what my code actually does. And even though everyone and their dog claim that the models get better with each new release, I still run into hallucinations way too often. If you are very experienced in a field and you've been doing it for over a decade, you notice all of the small inconsistencies and bullshit answers - much quicker than a junior dev who didn't have that experience yet.

So nowadays I only use Gemini for tool and library research or really simple boilerplate code. For everything else my own brain is the better solution. I am not actively against AI as a technology, but extremely opposed to paying a subscription to some techbro billionaire's company to keep doing my job. Fuck Altman, Elon, Jensen and the Zuck.

If Ed Zitron is correct in all of his calculations, the frontier models will get so expensive they'll become unprofitable for a lot of companies, so it would be a stupid decision to rely on them. I am looking forward to one day host good models on my own machine - though that day is not today, when capable GPU's still cost thousands of dollars.

Large corporate, some AI tools are available, some are optionally tacked onto PR reviews (Copilot on GitHub). No quotas or enforcement yet. Most vocal proponents of AI happen to be the most obnoxious developers or designers.

AI sucks in my domain. One of our competitors uses it and they say they get amazing results when senior people use the tools but can't give them to juniors because they keep messing up.

I'm glad it doesn't work in my niche to be honest. I'm in the frontlines debugging broken code and the last thing I need is bloat. This would actually slow me down a lot. I find it pretty shitty at diagnosing even small pieces of code, and I can't try stuff like Claude Code because I'm not allowed to transfer some of the code we use to the cloud because it's under NDAs. But if it can't get the simple stuff right, I can't trust it with the keys to our Lambo.

I stay informed about it all to know when/if I should quit software engineering and do something else, but it seems fine so far. It looks like I won't be able to take it easy in the future and go back to pissing webapp code, which means less opportunities, but oh well.

Oh and I do know two companies that mandate LLM usage. Somebody from my current company left for one of those and hates it.

I think what always has plagued software engineering jobs is the office politics. The constant meetings. The ridiculous standards. The monotonous routines. The zig-zagging logistics of upper management. The dead-end dread feeling.

I don't even work software engineering, but it's just something I always heard about and kinda seen a bit of.

Not there yet at my company, but management is starting to shove AI down the throats of the more senior engineers at first. I've definitely heard of companies where they strictly push for as much AI as possible which is just completely self destructive and delusional.

It sucks that we have to use this crap even if we don't want it or need it just because the suits see the line go up (even if the line is completely made up of garbage code that will explode one day), but that doesn't mean you should quit the field. There's still plenty work to be done, and that will probably go upwards as the symptoms of reckless AI usage start showing up.

The work is worse by all means, you are encouraged or forced to work in a way that strips all enjoyment away, you are forced to nitpick code made by others that you know vibe coded the entire thing, and fixing tons of stupid as hell bugs that a human would probably not make. But still, it takes an actual engineer that knows what they're doing to be able to clean up that mess and do some actual engineering.

What I fear the most is what comes after the pre-AI senior engineers start leaving or going to retirement, and you're left with engineers who finished their degrees without ever truly diving into details like one would before AI, starting jobs without learning properly and picking up all the domain knowledge.

I write C code for complex embedded products and systems in an industry where change is intentionally a long and drawn out process. Projects take years and support contracts last decades. AI isn't widely used but it's available. Most of those that I work with don't use it at all, and those that do use it use it for cursory tasks like generating reports for management - busy work stuff. There's talk of it eventually being used for writing and updating tests, the least favorite part of the job. Will it come for more aspects of my job? Probably, and probably sooner than I want.