Programming

That's the job now. If you need a job you're going to have to get with the program. If not just quit!

In terms of maintaining skills, I have ~4 hours on a train each week that has shitty WiFi so I can't use AI there - I spend some of that time doing manual coding on a side project.

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!

I'm lucky enough to work somewhere that doesn't dictate what tools I have to use. I don't use it for code, because that's just not fun for me. But I will use it once in a while when web search just totally fails me, but I know the answer is Out There (in the weights of scraped corpus).

I'm fighting back, I guess, mostly just by showing that it's easy and enjoyable to do things without checking in with Sam Altman first. ;p

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

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.

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

Where I work we can still push back to big PRs. Our guideline is unchanged that it shouldn’t be more than 700 lines of change. The less the better. With agents it’s even simpler to deny a big PR. A manually written big PR would have meant lots of manual effort in reworking it. With agents I basically just demand the author to tell their agent to split their fucking PR up.

At work? Do what they want you to do I guess. If they are mandating you mass produce slop, do exactly that. I've tried fighting against it. There's nothing you can do when your coworker opens a 785 file PR (not an exaggeration) and it needs to be reviewed today. Your carefully crafted code can never keep up with the constant waterfall of whatever the fuck Claude/ChatGPT/whatever calls acceptable these days.

Your best bet at work is to direct the agents others will use. Use a strict linter. Mandate a strict formatter. Add to the instructions that tests must be written and must pass. Do what you can to force it to emit semi-acceptable code (or fail if it can't).

Outside of work? What's a coding agent?

I mostly design and architect the systems, don't write the code myself anymore.

I believe the important part is to keep working your critical thinking, don't just blindly accept the output. Understand, scrutinize, consider, criticize.

Writing bad syntax and not remembering func signatures are obvious problems that will auto-resolve as you personally re-familiarize yourself with the tech you're working with.

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.

Malicious compliance, to some extent. The only people I can complain to are 3 levels down the AI train. Never let the AI update the git repo, review all changes it makes. I end up removing like 90% of any comments added as useless or too confusing to live; especially comments that have DO NOT REMOVE in them. Ends up taking about the same amount of time as if I just did the work myself. Quality is better, because the tool is good at what it does best.

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

Which skill are you worried about atrophying? Writing code, reading code, or something else?

I find agents very useful for exploring, and understanding existing code bases I am not very familiar with, or if there are time constraints. One thing I have been thinking about, is using agents to assist with creating a plan, but instead of getting an agent to implement that plan, I'd rather make the code changes myself.

Another way could be regularly doing exercises at Exercism.

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.

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

I'm lead in my team and AI is being used to varying degrees. One colleague is a problem, but was a problem before AI as well. Me and my other three colleagues have a common understanding of you have to take ownership, understand what you're doing, and document it.

As a reviewer, I ask for the information it lacks.

We (our company) has another project started with "AI first" too, and now still works mainly through "document features and behavior and stuff in md files and AI generates it" - so mostly about spec writing and AI generating. I don't know how well that works, but I've heard bad more than good things (which may be common anyway) and it certainly hasn't lead to meeting timelines (now more than half a year behind the original planned release).

Personally, I'm still skeptical about AI use, but do use it occasionally. Our project is simply too complex (and legacy and long history of changed dotnet technology as well). It's more feasible on newer projects, but Blazor isn't a straight forward framework either, mixing razor, html, css, component isolation, SAP lifecycle, render modes and whatnot.

I haven't used AI to a degree where I feel it significantly [negatively] impacts my capabilities. Thankfully, my team hasn't pivoted into that completely, either. I see the risk and hope pushes though. The promise of AI speeding things up. The customer saying "a bit more risk is fine"; but it's on us to communicate the difference between risks (the bug fix missed one additional unknown place vs long term maintainability and its associated risks).

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.

Greetings, stopping by as an engineer, but I hear yah. The engineering firm I work at went full AI first with Ai being mandated at every step. Nobody thinks anymore and just types questions into a prompt at every chance. It’s just nauseating to witness at the senior level.

What has helped me is my hobbies, and trying to find ways to learn new skill sets by looking at fun ways to expand into spaces adjacent to my hobbies and interests. I can’t recommend anything specific but the best advice I can offer is to try exploring new hobbies or things that interest you for fun. You will likely stumble onto something by accident this way. Best of luck and you’re not alone in this struggle.

Simple. My job currently being full-time unemployment.

I thought everybody had personal coding projects.

Easy!

Get fired from A CTO position because everyone gets replaced by AI, like me, and then be unable to get any IT job for 6 months straight until you're so desperate and that you'll take a call center job.

Oh wait, that isn't honing IT skills, that is honing depression skills. Sorry bout that.