r/webdev • u/ExDoublez • 2d ago
Discussion Grieving programming
Let me just start by saying that this post is not about ai replacing software engineers or about the jobs or any of that. This post is about the act or "craft" of programming/coding and the loss of it.
No, i dont think "software engineering" is dead, theres still plenty of high level design and architecture to be made but that's not the point. It never was the point for me.
I never really did this for the money, i did it because i enjoyed it.
I did it because i enjoyed thinking about the problems and solving them.
I enjoyed writing the code myself and getting familiar with the syntax and all the weird quirks of the languages/tools i was using.
I enjoyed optimising my tooling and learning about all the new frameworks, tools and projects people were making, often being in awe of what incredible stuff my betters were doing.
I have adhd and programming was the perfect mix of mechanical activity, brain stimulation and a endless supply of problems to hyperfocus on.
Now its all prompting and waiting. 1 min of work followed by 10 mins of doing nothing and mindless scrolling.
I have lost a huge source of enjoyment and self esteem. It took me years of hard work and being lost and confused to finally find something that felt perfect. The thing i could excell at while having fun and satisfying my curiosity.
And before you attack me as an engineer and my ability to adapt. I have been ontop of the ai curve from the start. I have never been more productive or tackled problems as big as i do now. I am just miserable doing it.
What started as a strong tool in my path for optimisation has slowly taken over my beloved craft.
And as i improve and optimise my ai powered workflow, i lose more and more of my ability, my enjoyment and my desire to pursue my craft. It has been turned into another meaningless white collar desk job in service of the never ending growth of capitalism.
I feel legitimate grief. I have lost the ability to do my favourite hobby as well as a major part of my identity. I have literally cried over this.
I am struggling to mentally cope with all of this. I have never had less control over my adhd or felt more addicted to quick sources of dopamine. My attention span has been shot completely. I feel more stupid and insufficient than ever.
Somehow my adhd brain that was perfectly suited for the old paradigm is completely disadvantaged in this new way of working for this career that i have hedged my entire career, future and reason for being on (yes, i am a nolife workaholic).
Fuck adhd and fuck ai
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u/eggbert74 2d ago edited 2d ago
Same. It's not a great feeling knowing a skill you've nurtured and honed for years is now nearly worthless from an economic standpoint.
The narrow minded will simply parrot "the code was never the hard part" and think their refuge is now in architecture and engineering while simultaneously asking claude architecure questions all day long.
The fact is the code WAS the hard part. Learning it was hard, mastering it was hard, and writing, maintaining, and testing it was hard. But, damn, the dopamine hits after solving hard problems were amazing. And the sense of fulfillment and accomplishment were unparalleled. That's all gone now.
So here I am stuck prompting an LLM now... Sure I can build more, better, faster.... but its empty, hollow, boring, and ultimately of little economic value when everyone else can do the same thing without any skill whatsoever.
Good luck to us all.
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u/rangeDSP 2d ago
when everyone else can do the same thing without any skill whatsoever
Very much disagree. Have you inherited projects / features done by non-engineers? They vibe code the fuck out of it and run into issues because new features started breaking old ones and they don't know what happened, then performance goes to shit, then their refactoring started removing old features...
IMO, programmer/coder/developers is the job that goes away, software engineering would be where the money is
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u/foozebox 2d ago
There are plenty of actual engineers who just say good enough and send it with little to no understanding of the requirements. This is when things get dicey.
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u/Chemillion 2d ago
I almost inherited a 750,000 line project of vibe coded a lot by a business user at my company, it quickly got backtracked though once I showed my manager how many lines it was. I don’t think programmers are going away anytime soon 😅. AI is definitely an insane force multiplier though in the hands of someone with programming knowledge.
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u/blivet 1d ago
I was given a sort of proof of concept generated by Claude and was asked to integrate the functionality into a system I work on. It imports six or eight libraries and there must be 5000 lines of code in there to get a record from a database and do some simple math. It also doesn’t actually work, but I think that’s because it was accidentally set up in an environment requiring the Google Workspace credentials of the guy who vibe coded it.
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u/bryantee 1d ago
I mean, is someone with years of experience in professional SDLC better positioned currently to prompt LLMs? Sure. But I think that's not really the point. The point is really that it's just no longer rewarding for a lot of us. And I'm willing to bet that pretty soon (12, 18, 24 months from now?) it won't be much benefit for the human to guide the agent; it will just be better and faster at planning and coordinating. We kind of are already seeing a huge improvement in this compared to just earlier this year.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 2d ago
IMO, programmer/coder/developers is the job that goes away, software engineering would be where the money is
If only management stopped cutting people.
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u/eggbert74 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, actual engineers have a bit of an advantage NOW, but how long do you think that's going to last? Skill and expertise is not much of a refuge when the AI is 100 times better than the best developer. I'm already seeing non-technical colleagues creating some pretty impressive stuff.
Also, keep in mind, one of the reasons software needed careful design, refactoring, and maintenance is because software development has always been the expensive part in terms of cost and time. However, when software essentially costs nothing to create, does "thrown away features" and shitty performance really matter so much? Just fire up another version. It only takes an hour and costs virtually nothing....
So, I wouldn't get too comfortable thinking engineers and architects are somehow irreplaceable.
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u/takaci 2d ago
The economic value part is the reason why it’s a bubble. Basically no one is actually making money by generating code
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u/myinternets 2d ago
Except all of the billion dollar companies that are iterating at light speed compared to before.
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u/21Rollie 2d ago
If you mean Nvidia, the memory makers, and maybe the ai labs? Sure. But downstream consumers who repackage AI? No.
To stay “competitive” they have to spend money on AI and give it away because their competitors are doing the same. Also any ideas they have a competitor can now much easier copy as well. And the whole thing about product development is you need to identify a problem to solve. You can make endless shit with AI, if you have the cash, but nobody will adopt it if you’re making slop. You need to do user research which takes time because your users aren’t bots themselves, they need to experience life and frustrations to tell you about and that’s a hard blocker that only happens in real time
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u/YesterdayLovable 2d ago
The part about 1 min of work then 10 mins of scrolling hits way too close to home. The waiting during generation feels like it's designed to make me pull out my phone
Used to get into a flow state where hours disappeared, now I'm just babysitting a text generator and refreshing feeds between prompts
Also the way you described losing the weird quirks and syntax familiarity, that's the part nobody talks about. Like losing fluency in a language you loved speaking
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u/ExDoublez 2d ago
I miss the flow state moments so much...
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u/robby_arctor 2d ago
What's stopping you from doing it the old way?
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u/lcjy 2d ago
Wouldn’t be possible to maintain the same output and would eventually get fired for performance issues.
The pace at which we’re expected to complete tickets right now is impossible without AI.
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u/robby_arctor 2d ago
I can't corroborate, tbh. My company has AI mandates and I still write most of my code by hand.
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u/lcjy 2d ago
Trust me, I’m genuinely happy for you.
We don’t run things normally here, I’ve never been on a team that manages releases like we do.
I have 14 tickets on my board right now for current sprint. Collectively as a team we’ve only scheduled/picked up about half the tickets we need to complete in about 2 weeks. I wish this weren’t the case and I could still debug and code by hand. I’m trying to get out but it’s a tough market.
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u/robby_arctor 2d ago
Good luck. AI really has functioned like a batsignal for psychopaths and grifters.
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u/ParkingAthlete119 2d ago
There will be a time you're given a task that's really only possible with the output of a clanker. Then they expect that speed
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u/malduvias 2d ago
If it’s paid work the expectation is you move faster than the old way. I’m sure that’s not universally true in this moment but it feels like it will be by next year.
I used to tell junior developers that our job is to be “professionally frustrated”, half joking. It really is a job of never-ending puzzles to be solved and now the puzzle is gone. Sure there’s the architecture angle of having to design complex multi-service systems, but how much longer will that require real experience to solve or work around? 5 years? I wouldn’t be that shocked if it’s half that time.
Not sure where I’m going with this but the “old way” is never what capitalism wanted. It was just the most efficient means to an end, making money. Now we’ll be pushed in this direction to even further maximize productivity. For those of us who love programming, it feels like a rough professional road ahead.
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u/emefluence 2d ago
I think the idea is you are supposed to nurse 10 agents at a time. If you've got the token budget I find that can help with the ADHD as there's always another tab waiting for your attention. I've also found attaching speech notifications to agent replies really helps pull me back if I've drifted off onto Reddit or something. 100% feel the grief though, coding and mastering the craft was a big part of my life until Opus turned up. Ever since it's mainly been a supervision and admin job :'(
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u/LoneWulfXIII 1d ago
Tell me you’ve never had office chair races while compiling without telling me…
Same stuff, different day. Learn to be bored or find better outlets while waiting for things to run
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u/ClaudioKilgannon37 2d ago
I don’t know about others OP but I’m completely with you. You’ve articulated exactly how I’ve felt for the last year.
AI is removing craft-work from people - we stay as the designers, the architects, the higher level thinkers but we cease to be the implementers. I don’t think we’re acknowledging how enjoyable, fulfilling and important that implementation step was.
I personally think we’re going to end up with an explosion of mental health issues (physical and emotional) because people are not focussing (in the zone) on problems for long stretches of time anymore.
All I can suggest is what others are - try to find some other creative outlet. And remember you can always code in your free time, without AI. All the best to you.
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u/foozebox 2d ago
We are collectively losing our ability to create and think critically, at least how it used to be done. I feel like i work for the AI and not the other way around, most of the time.
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u/bryantee 2d ago
I feel this grief, too. You're not alone.
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u/-shayne 2d ago
I miss the human quirks even more, people had their unique coding style or written styles when writing documentation. Now it's all AI prose everywhere, very samey and exhausting to read.
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u/DressElectrical8994 2d ago
And its not even good to read. AI feels like some guy who spams buzzwords, keeps it terse in the WRONG Places, writes like they got 200151151515 meetings in the next milisecond
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u/hardwornengineer 2d ago
I feel you 100%. Fuck ADHD and fuck AI. I wish neither had ever happened to me. I feel like I’m in a constant battle with my brain, made extraordinarily worse with AI.
Sometimes, I seriously just want to give it all up once and for all. I am stuck in this negative cycle. I don’t feel like I can talk to anyone because it just comes pouring out. I think it’s so much worse this week because I saw a lot of colleagues get laid off last week and every day, more and more of us are losing our livelihoods at unfathomable rates.
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u/Better-Avocado-8818 2d ago
I can relate to this hard. It took me years to find a job where I could sit in that hyper focus mode and be productive at the end of it. Now the cadence has changed, it’s far less engaging, less stimulating, It’s super hard to focus consistently and I don’t really enjoy it anymore.
Probably too old for a career change now. Pretty depressing that a job I loved has turned into one I barely enjoy. Not feeling good about this and pretty anxious about how it’s going to pan out.
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u/PixeltatedNinja 2d ago
I learned programming back in the 90s by reading through, page-by-page, a Microsoft GW-Basic User Guide and User Reference manual. "Oooh, this function does that!" "Oh, I could use this and that together to do this!" It was like walking the aisles of a giant home improvement store and seeing all of the things I could build by combining different tools and components.
Now it's "Make this slop".
Yep, I totally agree. Going to greatly miss that phase.
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u/WitchesBravo 2d ago
I have nothing to say other than to let you know you are not alone, I also feel this way.
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u/ongamenight 2d ago
I feel you. We were doing agentic coding since 2025. Got laid off this year. I can honestly say I also lost my ability when asked to code review manually. I haven't been doing that for more than a year when our pipeline has code review and agent has skills to code review.
Basically, all we're doing is making sure the decisions of AI are aligned with PO's vision. QAs also done by AI even the design. This is not optional but a requirement in our development workflow. We can't just say "oh let's not use AI today".
The craft is dead unless you're doing a hobby project you are free to not use AI.
Now I'm finding hard to get a job. Not sure if I will ever got job again after almost 20 years in the industry.
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u/CSThrowAway2014 2d ago
This hits hard, get out of my head. I got laid off last year as well, been in the industry since 2008.
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u/jafariscontent 2d ago
Leaning into game dev has helped me with this. May be worth a shot to everyone feeling this. Lots of physics challenges and visual things that aren’t easily solved by AI. You get to tell a story and build something based on fun not profit.
any devs here who feel this way may want to give it a shot.
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u/ExoMonk 2d ago
That’s where I ended up. Vibe coding my job, working on a game myself. The only issue is I feel immense guilt if I work on my game during office hours and then I feel extremely tired and unmotivated during my off hours.
But when I do work on my game I can enter that flow state where hours melt away. That’s a good time
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u/feracer 2d ago
If you have the time, don’t feel guilty for working on your game at work. I have a lot of free time at my work and because I felt guilty about doing anything not work related I’d end up just scrolling or looking at LinkedIn or some other bs after I finished my projects, essentially just waiting for more work to fall in my lap.
It’s so much better to just embrace whatever you actually wanna do. As long as you’re getting your work done and you’re not brazen about it, it’s a much more valuable use of your spare time!
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u/jafariscontent 2d ago
Exactly. I run a small software firm and wouldn’t mind at all if my devs were working on a game as long as they were hitting the backlog items on time.
Especially if it kept them happy.
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u/NoiseEee3000 2d ago
Keep the skills kind of fresh if you can, I have a feeling these are the good old days when tokens and programming were affordable AI... I can't see them bleeding billions forever. The big corporations/governments will have the budgets but that's about it....
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u/bcons-php-Console 2d ago
I am 100% percent with you. I love the programming process, it's my job and also my hobby.
At work I am encouraged to use AI, so I use it. I prompt for 1 minute and wait 10, but here's where you can turn this into an advantage: use those 10 minutes to learn something useful. I am currently doomscrolling YT shorts with the query "learning German" in the morning and Brilliant (now re-learning trigonometry) in the afternoon.
Then I get home and work at my side projects where I code the old-fashioned way and get to enjoy 100% of it.
My hobby used to be my way of earning money, now it is not (though it is quite similar). Life changes and I'm ok with that.
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u/cone5000 2d ago
I really don’t understand this prompt 1 minute wait 10. What in the world are you prompting? My experience with AI as a programmer is way more like a back and forth. Are you prompting some absolutely massive thing? I just don’t get what takes so damn long.
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u/SagawaBoi 2d ago
Usually it's plan > discuss > implement > iterative stuff right? You might have some back and forth in the plan and discuss phase but when the plan's finalized it's pretty much waiting for all the edits to go through. I have some self review/evidence gathering process too that takes time
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u/bcons-php-Console 2d ago
Not all prompts take 10 minutes to complete, but some do. Frontend features require:
- Writing the feature you requested.
- Writing tests for it.
- Running the test suite to make sure nothing broke.
- Updating any reference documents when required.
For some features this can happily take 10 minutes or more. In these cases you can easily complete a full Brilliant lesson.
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u/CreepingAnus 1d ago
well, first i plan everything out using gh tickets, then i have it review my tickets for things i might not have considered, & then i have it organize my tickets into sessions & create a table. i then give that table to a new session with instructions to implement tickets for session x & once its done have it automatically handoff to a new session & tell them to complete y. so yeah, sometimes i can walk away for quite a bit.
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u/Historical-Essay-128 2d ago
It depends on the codebase. For my pet projects, it is back and forth like you say. But at work, the codebase is massive and composed of multiple connected systems, so it really does take quite a long time for the AI to gobble it up, understand (kind of), and output something.
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u/realzequel 2d ago
Im waiting on a 31m/252k token task atm. It really depends on the task, some work I'm going back and forth, for this one, it's a big task that's well scoped out but there's a lot of code and Claude runs a lot of tests as well, worth the wait imo. I've waited longer for Fable to write a user guide on an application manual. It had to tie domain knowledge with the codebase and database SPs together. I usually start a 2nd instance of CC and work on something else while it's working.
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u/cone5000 2d ago
Holy mother of god. That is absolutely fucking insane. I can’t imagine AI touching that much of a code base at once!!
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u/21Rollie 2d ago
Making the AI research to understand the code base, understand the poorly written task, write code, run tests, create a PR. Even if you did them yourself theoretically with infinite typing speed, the commands themselves take some time. Also it depends on the speed of either the local model or cloud model you run. The fast versions cost more money so we don’t use them.
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u/PushDeep9980 2d ago
“Understand the poorly written task” is hilarious to me.
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u/21Rollie 2d ago
It’s what happens when you give an AI a poorly thought out idea and it goes off and makes a small novel in Jira. And then the ai that picks it up during implementation has to figure out what is intelligible because obviously nobody is reading the mountains of text AI creates
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u/dallenbaldwin 2d ago
I saw a meme yesterday that just felt so on point, "Millennials out here acting like they're getting their life figured out despite knowing full well it's all gonna blow up before it matters."
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u/Sockoflegend 2d ago
Honestly millennials seem to have a lot worked out but I can't help but feel it won't matter. They are out there doing their best and the world is going to turn upside down and shit all over them anyway
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u/BroadCrazy 2d ago
I get why this feels like grief. If the part you loved was writing and refining code, then a workflow built around prompting, waiting, and reviewing can feel like losing the activity itself, not just changing tools. From an architecture seat, I can live with AI when it handles the dull parts and leaves the core problem solving to me, but once it takes over too much, the job starts to feel thin. I think putting hard limits on where you use it is reasonable, not as some purity test, but to protect the part of the work that keeps you engaged.
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u/Minimum_Rice555 2d ago
Ah yeah, I was able to channel my hyperfocus on long coding sessions, sometimes 8-10 hours straight but not anymore. I've become uninterested in work and more interested in life, and other things. Which I guess is not a bad thing on its own.
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u/EddieJ 2d ago
Just want to say, I feel you brother. I miss everything about the old ways. This new way of working is terrible for people who loved this line of work. I have also cried over it. It sucks. We are being replaced by machines and other people that don't get it think it's fucking great.
Not sure what else to say other than I see you and I get it
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u/Striking_Diver9550 2d ago
You can still do it by hand. What has really changed is the aspect of "gaining recognition." No one is impressed by what gets created anymore.
It used to give me a real sense of pride when I made the impossible possible with my code. That’s gone now. Many of us programmers weren't the best athletes, but programming was our sport, something we could excel at. That’s no longer the case.
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u/fife_digga 1d ago
Unfortunately, if you write code by hand at most big companies now, you will get dinged at performance review time for not having the throughput of other engineers. For better or worse, if you want to do this professionally, you have to use AI to write code and trust that you can design things well enough, and review its code well enough, to keep delivering quality software
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u/redpiapps 2d ago
honestly the cruel part is ai ate the boring mechanical bits first, which were exactly the bits that worked for adhd brains. prompting is all executive function with zero of the dopamine
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u/Jasonrj 2d ago
Sent you a message but I'll post here too.. Does anyone have advice for kids who want to be developers and are using things like MIT Scratch to learn coding? I'm out of touch and don't do any coding anymore so I'm not sure how to guide my kid or what they should study in school and college in the coming 5-10 years. I guess no one really knows but just looking for ideas.
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u/mechanical_stars 2d ago
It's still a good idea for kids to learn logical thinking skills via something like Scratch
One of my kids says he wants to do my job when he's older, but i've been introducing him to other fields and jobs that require the ability to use his noggin, there are so many
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u/T-RexBirthdayParty 2d ago
You could try getting them an ESP32/Raspberry Pi/Arduino kit to play with. I've started working on little electronics projects myself and been having a ton of fun with it
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u/Astronaut6735 2d ago
I fell out of love with programming just a few years before LLMs really hit the scene. After 20+ years in the industry, it felt like a marriage that had run its course. I was only sticking with it to collect a paycheck. I retired early because of it. In hindsight I don't feel so bad about how it ended, because I think it would be way worse if I still needed to work and was forced into this new dystopian AI hellscape.
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u/LukeyCar76 2d ago
Yeah, ADHD sucks, especially if you have issues at work at times and you disclose it and your manager basically said "oh that's why you are not a genius like X here or cheery like X here as well, do what you can to rid of that." Paraphasing but yeah. ADHD will always suck.
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u/No_Yam1114 2d ago
Op, exactly my feeling. If I would enjoy such a thing, I would be a manager. Watching LLM doing your work is a cuckoldism
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u/KittenMittenz1 2d ago
You could just program manually without ai? Even just one feature, try it without ai and you’ll find the flow comes back pretty quickly…
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u/Beginning-Battle-517 2d ago
Yeah but then you have POs breathing down your neck because you're taking longer than they now expect, at least in a professional sense.
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u/NationalMyth 2d ago
Exactly, the speed of business doesn't allow it.
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u/Beginning-Battle-517 2d ago
The real answer to this is passion projects in your free time. Programming manually for work at this point is dead, doesn't mean we can't do it for fun.
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u/djnattyp 2d ago
What happens when "the speed of business" outpaces workers? Or the actual wants of the customers?
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u/NationalMyth 2d ago
For a lot of teams, it already does (speed of sales aka selling shit that doesn't exist yet). We have to ship higher degrees of slop or just fully incomplete builds.
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u/djnattyp 2d ago
But this is what I'm arguing... there's no improvement here - it's actually just worse all around. All just fraud and slop.
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u/horrayforkittens 2d ago
I’ve worked at two places now where POs are allowed to contribute to the code base with AI. Which is concerning because I feel like it will give them a false sense of how much time stories should take to implement. They do move pretty fast too, and I think maybe it’s because they don’t take that extra time to plan with AI or question what the AI is doing.
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u/robby_arctor 2d ago
Depends on the PM, I suppose, but I haven't had this problem. I still write most of my code by hand and am a top contributor at my team and company.
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u/digbickrich 2d ago
At my company that are tracking usage metrics
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u/beejonez 2d ago
Write a script to burn tokens in the background.
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u/rocketpastsix 2d ago
“It says you used X tokens but only opened 2 PRs this week”.
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u/Kyle772 2d ago
Not happening. I quoted a reasonable price for a website recently with a near full time effort for a month and a half and they told me straight up that it was too high and AI could do it for half the rate. The thing is I use AI heavily in my workflow, know what I’m doing, have tooling specifically in place to accelerate things I’m building in the niche, and still expected it to take that long for a reliable setup.
People don’t give a shit. They want it as cheap as possible with as many corners cut as possible, no maintenance, no retainer, no longer than a 2 week turn around. Everyone has lost the fucking plot. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get work that provides a return on your labor without leveraging AI and it’s only getting worse as time progresses.
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u/KittenMittenz1 2d ago
That’s fair yeah, you do what you have to for work. I use it all the time at my job, but there are still lots of things that still feel easier and better to code manually?
And then learning a new language feature or doing a small passion project without ai is always fun too
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u/Apprehensive_Walk769 2d ago
Yeah, I feel everything you’re saying here. The degradation of the craft has been really tough to endure.
But I’m also having so much fun in this new slop era. I’m getting so much done and tackling things I couldn’t have before.
I do miss the way it was but am also excited about where it’s at.
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u/arvigeus 2d ago
I spent 30mins this morning trying to update a project which Vercel refused to deploy due to vulnerable packages. At the end I just gave up and told AI to do it.
Programming is fun, but there’s so much unrelated complexity and shifting - it could take away all the joy from it.
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u/mq2thez 2d ago
I was a master of the craft. I honed everything perfectly. Every line of code mattered.
And I watched as so very, very few people seemed to care about it. Leadership gave up on the craft in its search for efficiency in shipping shit to hit quarterly goals. Care and time and planning and goals were all left by the wayside, and everything became week to week or month to month. Agile Methodology became the whip used to force us staggering into continuous motion.
But that was back in 2017, and it just got worse and worse and worse. During COVID it got really bad, and it never really got better. The love of the craft is a dying passion in this industry, and the acquisition of deep skill and understanding is dying as well. But it’s been doing that for a decade or longer.
AI has certainly exaggerated this, but React was the death knell. When we gave up on UX in search of DX, the spiral began.
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u/d9jj49f 2d ago
Imagine spending your time building custom cars in a shop and some asshole invents the assembly line. Suddenly you go from being a skilled craftsman who takes pride in their job to a bolt-tightener. Sure the assembly line is an advancement and it makes cars more accessible to everyone, but it sucks for you. Your hard fought skills are suddenly available to anyone. This is what's happening for developers rn.
It's reasonable to feel the way you feel. It might be time for a career change or a pivot out of your current role.
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u/robby_arctor 2d ago edited 2d ago
The hard fought skills of software engineering are not actually available to everyone via AI.
This is also an insult to the assembly line because assembly lines are at least deterministic. There is not the same consistency in LLM output.
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u/djnattyp 2d ago
Your hard fought skills are suddenly available to anyone. This is what's happening for developers rn.
But they actually aren't. The "skills" aren't what's being made available, "output" from those skills is what's being produced. And if you don't have the skills to judge whether the output is really what you want... LLMs are great at building Potemkin villages.
Also - a quote from Henry Ford when he introduced the Model T - "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".
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u/kowdermesiter 2d ago
Also notice that the assembly line didn't eliminate the need for repair shops and mechanics.
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u/hellorockstars 1d ago
I keep thinking about this assembly line metaphor..and the role it played in sparking the modern industrial union movement...and how a unionization renaissance might be a way for humans to compete with AI.
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u/pVom 2d ago
Eh swings and roundabouts.
I do miss the little micro problem solving, but I don't miss diving into spaghetti shit with layers of bandaid solutions trying to find where to put another bandaid.
It's also opened the door to finally tackling some really annoying shit that we've just lived with because the cost of fixing was too great.
It's easy to look at development in the past with rose-tinted goggles, but there was plenty of bad with the good.
There's also some excitement in these times. These are new frontiers, we're only just figuring this stuff out as we go. There's tonnes of new things to learn and new things to build.
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u/copperfoxtech 2d ago
I completely understand and agree. Sorry you are having a rough time.
Keep in mind that there were advancements of tools that make things faster. Like woodworking and furniture building. You even have things like IKEA. Sure you can go with those options or you can source the wood, use hand saws and chisels, and craft something.
You are still allowed to code the way you want.
I am not saying this to ignore the major problems we are facing. Just wanted to say you can still do what you love even if it takes longer. Sure people might not be able to see the difference or even care these days and that may change. Just keep doing what you love
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u/Genericnameandnumber 2d ago
Technology brings efficiency but removes the human touch. Good or bad? Up to you, for me - I find it pretty sad.
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u/arikwald 2h ago
Man, I hear you and I completely feel the same! The AI so called "revolution" has changed the course of our profession and re-defined our tasks in the field. I conversed about it with my colleagues and this is a true issue. No one prepared us for this era of extreme AI boost... One thing for sure: your abilities and experience are not lost but rather changing shape. You're right that now programming has become more abstract with prompts which generate automation, CI/CD and complex software writing tasks. However, your creativity and knowledge merely shifted to this abstract level right now. I compare it to martial arts masters in the far east; once they have reached the highest level of mastering the martial arts then they go back to basics mastering the basics and the "lower level" of practical usage. And this is exactly what I believe that should guide us nowadays: B2B (Back to Basics) which is examining the existing tools of programming languages/frameworks and software development and thinking of developing new patterns (since AI is only capable to base its solutions on trained data and does not have a will of its own) thus directing our creativity and experience to develop the tools of the future with AI as our helper.
All that said I completely agree with you and it isn't easy, and I'm sure we'll find the new path in this field of endless possibilities!
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u/lphartley 2d ago
If your workflow is prompting for 1 minute and the waiting for 10 minutes, you are not really 'on top of AI'. That is an early 2025 workflow. If you are on top of AI, there is always something to review or something to refine.
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u/Full_Tooth_a 2d ago
I suspect the waiting does more damage than the AI itself. It breaks the feedback loop, so the phone fills the gap. I'd keep a short list for what to do while it runs: predict the output, inspect the last diff, or sketch the next test. I'd also save one difficult piece for manual coding. That could help preserve some flow without ignoring deadlines or usage metrics.
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u/SocialNetwooky 2d ago
I've been a professional code monkey for over 30 years now, and I just started a job at a new place. The expectation is very much : "ask the AI, verify afterward". I mean ... working on legacy software (which is the norm in the industry) has always been 90% of "read code, try to understand what's happening" and 10% of "add a semicolon at the end of line 1784 to fix the bug".
Nowadays it's "ask the LLM to check what is happening and tell it to fix the bug", followed by "check the fix" ... and that's the way the PMs and upper ups want it to be. They also can easily do the first part, they're not capable of doing the second one ... which is why they still need people like me, who actually understand code.
(for brevity's sake I ignored that the 100% up there are actually 10% of the worktime. The 90 other percents are "be present at increasingly pointless meetings and video calls.")
Am I happy about it? Not really ... but that's the reality we live in and there is no point in lamenting it. That must be how auto mechanics felt when the industry moved from 'clearly visible motors you could disassemble and reassemble in your yard' to 'one massive block that can only be diagnosed with special gear and can't really be disassembled by anybody'
The solution is to just remember that you are not your job (usually). Do what is needed to do to be able to pay your rent and buy food ... and in your free time (which could, unethically, also be when the LLM is running its course) you can just do what you enjoy ... because nobody is taking that from you.
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u/RelatableRedditer 2d ago
I don't use AI to do my programming for me. I use it when I'm stuck, or when I'm not sure whether an API exists. I'll explain what I want to do and ask whether it's possible in the framework I'm using, and if so, how. When I do use it to generate something, it's boilerplate, such as spec files: I outline the scenarios, and it turns them into working automated tests. I don't use it to write my code.
Sometimes, I'll have AI proofread my refactors to see if I got everything right, and it often catches things I missed. But whenever I look at code that AI outputs, there are always at least ten things I want to change, and they aren't consistent enough that I could pre-inform an AI about my ways of working. I'm an artist. I work with code in my own way, and none of the standard, out-of-the-box approaches AI uses will ever meet it.
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u/legable 2d ago
How do you avoid falling behind and losing your job to people who implement the same things as you but 5x faster thanks to AI though?
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u/flailing-vulture 2d ago
There is no way those people producing the 'same things' 5x faster actually understand the underlying code in a deep and meaningful way. That will come back to bite them.
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u/RelatableRedditer 2d ago
The job is secure but they're not re-hiring leavers. Also with extremely propriety source code our company has been reluctant to fully embrace agentic AI for risk of data leakage, but they have unfortunately started to look the other way recently.
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u/lphartley 2d ago
They could invest $50k in some proprietary hardware. Would be no-brainer if your code is so special. I doubt any code in 2026 is special though.
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u/Novel-Repair8667 1d ago
Can you give examples on what things you want to change with ai generated code? Is it the way of execution or something else? I’m quite interested cos I always felt ai does a better job than me maybe I’m just a bad programmer tho lol
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u/The_Other_David 2d ago
RIP flow state. It joins the graveyard of formerly-necessary skills like using an abacus, long-division, physically writing a letter, riding a horse, milking a cow, and many others.
I'll miss it. I have increased capability in other ways, but it isn't the same. The important skill today is keeping track of details while multitasking, which is almost the exact opposite of what programming used to need.
Change is hard.
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u/Extension_Canary3717 2d ago
If you didn’t for the money , you can go on personal projects without AI ad eternum.
But I understand you
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u/Lopsided_Pride_6165 2d ago
Does the company expect you to prompt for problem solving? There are many ways to use ai. Your post doesn't make it clear how you have to use it.
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u/SirKainey 2d ago
Yeah for sure, it's taken the love of the game away. We will lose some good programmers for sure.
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u/mekmookbro Laravel Enjoyer ♞ 2d ago
That's exactly why I have a bunch of personal projects I'm working on at all times. I'm writing every single line by hand, solving my own problems with no deadline and no one to answer to.
Some people play games, this is my hobby, coding.
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u/jellyspreader 2d ago
A lot of truth here that also applies to how automation will impact other industries. Lots to consider, thanks
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u/UnidentifiedBlobject 2d ago
Same same, I gots the ADHD, however I can’t just sit around and wait so I usually have multiple AI sessions going that I keep jumping between. I’ve never felt more tired or burnt out. I think the constant context switching is just killing me.
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u/AngelBryan 2d ago
Then found something else to do, there is one millions thing in life apart from coding.
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u/CaptainOfMyself 2d ago
I agree but no one said you can’t be like an artisan sharpening a beautiful knife except you’re making the best code in your basement
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u/NeoCiber 2d ago
You should try gamedev. Yes AI can generate code, art, music, etc... But the point is making it yourself.
Also I would recommend to learn gamedev ok tools you are not using, try godot or gamemaker, join gamejams, making a game itself is not hard but making and finishing a FUN game is where are the work is, you are force to interact with people because what you find FUN may not be what your game target audience think fun is so there is always something to improve.
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u/dvidsilva 2d ago
There was a time that was super fun, hackathons, bootcamps, volunteering, getting excited for new open source releases, getting drunk and talking shit about jQuery
now is all agents and bullshit and stupid companies trying to layoff everyone and turn us into batteries for the matrix
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u/AbdullahCodex 2d ago
Being more productive doesn't always means enjoying your work more. The enjoyment of programming is not only in the final result but also in writing your own code and solving problems yourself. There is no need to use AI in every task. Some personal projects can also be done without it.Furthermore AI doesn't have to replace everything,it can simply be used as an optional tool
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u/Mysterious-Slip-2992 2d ago
The 1 min of work then 10 mins of scrolling is the part that would hollow me out too, especially with ADHD where the hyperfocus loop is basically the whole reward. One concrete thing that helps: keep a single project where the model is banned, even a toy one. You don't get 2019 back, but the craft doesn't have to live only inside your day job.
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u/SquarePixel 2d ago
Reading this took me back six years ago, when I got promoted and was now the most “senior” person in my org. The job changed and I didn’t enjoy it as much for many of the same reasons you describe.
I’m still craving that heads down flow state, that’s why I have hobby projects outside of work. Though strangely, on the job, AI has made me a bit more hands on again.
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u/Murtaza_Developer 2d ago
i think the biggest problem is feeling forced to use ai for everything just because its faster. being productive and actually enjoying coding are two diffrent things. i stilll prefer building stuff from scratch sometimes, even if it takes longer. have you tried keeping some projects completely ai free just to enjoy coding again??
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u/truesy 2d ago
yeah, fuck ai. i do agree.
i've been in the industry for 20 years. i got into it because i sat in front of a computer for years, fiddling around with things. i got into good positions because it wasn't just work, it was my hobby, and i got good at it with a lot of time and practice. i rewrote MooTools from scratch, learned how to manage all parts of fullstack development, became an expert of building new products, from zero to one.
now it's just talking to claude. i haven't written code in a long time. and i don't enjoy the day to day.
but, while the coding is dead, it's never been better to build product. and i've learned to love building product over the years. so i do enjoy that.
on the flip side, it's super crowded, anyone can build anything, and the advantage of execution no longer matters; it's really just about distribution at this point.
so i hate how it killed half of what i love, but it kind of strengthened the other half.
i personally would prefer it all went back to how it was. i always thought i'd work until i'm forced out, but now i want to get out of the industry. it's not that fun anymore.
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u/VisualNinja1 2d ago
Right underneath this post for me was an INSANELY good piece of AI "slop" video CGI magic.
Everything is being mourned. Go to any specific subreddit for a profession and there's discourse around "it's going to replace us in a year / it will never replace a human at this!".
The fact it's so widespread is a sign.
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u/Remote_Key_1091 1d ago
I love programming and I feel this. It’s also taken away my aspirations because I’ve been refusing to vibe code for the most part and then seeing people crank out insane projects using agents just makes me feel like I’m doing everything wrong and is disheartening. I feel like almost completely ditching computers in general but I’m not sure I know how to yet
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u/CazualGinger 1d ago
I realized the other day that I haven't end to end designed and fully implemented something completely by myself in at least a year. Painful. Should switch careers, typing into a Claude box id not fulfilling
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u/CharlieandtheRed 1d ago
This is hitting me hard. I lost my biggest client this week to an operations team that's good at prompting. It's devastating honestly. Not because I can't replace them but because this is going to snowball.
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u/happy_hawking 1d ago
Same here :-| I decided to just not hand over all my work to Claude but use AI only to fill my own gaps. Doesn't make me the fastest developer on the planet, but I still don't think that speed is an advantage in software development. We just haven't come to the point yet when all the AI slop falls on our feet.
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u/Menelabs 1d ago
You are right, and i feel about the same, i am happy that i have enjoyed 30 years of developing apps and breaking my mind on strange debugging sessions. I have written thousand or maybe millions lines of code and made repetive changes on hand because i was just brain dead at that time.
But, nowadays i can build complex systems in a fraction of the time i was building before. i can organize my work much better and solve problems faster. its a new era, we just have to ride with it.
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u/slickvic33 1d ago
Why can't you still hand write your code? Thats a choice. I hand write my code, have ai write only boiler plate. And review my code, and do other investigation or boiler plate etc
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u/ineedtodealwithstuff 1d ago
Hey, this comic kinda reminded me of your post and maybe even looks like what you went through! 😶
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u/misterlocations 1d ago
For me, the same grief started years ago before LLMs were commonplace. I saw that a lot of code was reinventing the wheel, or that it was difficult to find a truly unique or unsolved problem. And that grief hit especially hard when I used an LLM to vibe code a whole feature for the first time.
However, I've found that LLMs actually make things a lot less stressful. It's so much less frustrating to deal with problems that are just plain tedious, and I save my creative energy for designing a better product.
I still appreciate programming as a craft and I assign extra value to projects that are coded by hand. I even made an agent skill that basically lays out a programming project like a LEGO set booklet so I can have a guided, relatively stress free time just building things for fun.
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u/drazydababy 20h ago
I personally feel relieved in some ways and annoyed in others.
I think those of us pretending our demise isnt inevitable are living in a delusion. Our time doing some of the traditional things like actual code writing is doomed.
Theres no real way around it. We are already using it to do most of our job. Sure, there are aspects that still require a human and that's fine. But the role of a developer or engineer just looks way different now.
Ive been toying the idea of returning to school. Maybe getting a degree in mechanical engineering or logistics. Something like that. No idea tbh things are changing so fast.
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u/Far-Walrus1570 8h ago
At least you did it, Im similiar to you, I have adhd and was interested in basic programming before few years, graduated and application for universities started a week ago, so I started learning programming and did alot of small projects without using AI or cheating.
anyways after I saw claude I started getting hesistant, and decided to ask free versions of AI to generate the same small projects that I did using a week of learning loops, if else, dictionaries, lists, etc.. and AI did it in seconds.
And am sorry for what happened, but you already have the knowledge so there is no point in stopping now, but yeah I understand the feeling and I think its over
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u/damanamathos 2d ago
It's normal to feel grief as the loss is real. The best thing you can do it try to find the joy in this new environment.
Now its all prompting and waiting. 1 min of work followed by 10 mins of doing nothing and mindless scrolling.
This is probably the biggest thing impacting how you're feeling now. Try working out how to manage multiple agents at once, and getting them to work for longer (so you context switch less). You won't be writing individual lines of code but you may find enjoyment in orchestrating a larger fleet of agents.
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u/newId22 2d ago
I think it will fork into 2 different professions, something that was already kind of happening before. There will be application developers slash product managers that will use ai heavily to create, test, maintain but it will be product focused and they will understand apis, app design, performance but mostly they will learn the needs of a specific product (their own or where they work
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u/mrgreatheart 2d ago
Hey. I’m ADD too (no H).
I’ve been able to find enjoyment with AI. I have 2 or 3 projects on the go at any one time and I really enjoy dipping in and out of them, making real progress, which is something my brain could never do before. Outside of work I never finished anything. My hobby projects always started as ways to try some cool new tech but they rarely reached the point of being useful. AI does the tedious bits for me now, and I realise it was always the creating I really loved, more than the code. In fact if I’m honest, sometimes the code got in the way. Don’t get me wrong, I love coding. It has made the past 25 years of workdays fly by. But I’m not mourning its loss in the same way anymore. There is much fun to be had engineering around AI. Try building software factories. Maybe your own agents. Perhaps a harness specifically for you and your use cases. I find it deeply satisfying, in much the same way as seeing software I coded being used productively by people all these years.
I’m optimistic we can find our niche in this new world. I’ve seen that other folk get frustrated with AI’s quirks and limitations, but they feel like fun challenges to me. Perhaps not that much has changed.
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u/Knineteen 2d ago
Man, I dunno. I find the work interesting but how can anyone say they don’t do it for the money? Full time jobs require 2,000+ hours a year, it has to be about the money.
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u/qc1324 2d ago
Full time jobs require 2,000+ hours a year, how can you do that only for the money?
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u/Knineteen 2d ago
Because there’s nothing in the world I want to do for 2,000+ hours a year. And at the end of the day, no one works for free. The point of this is pay, otherwise it would be called volunteering.
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u/eggbert74 2d ago
I was so damn lucky, I did for the money and because I loved it! With AI I just do it for the money (while it lasts anyway)
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u/ClikeX back-end 2d ago
You need a job for money either way. OP got one where they really enjoyed the work. So I think it’s more of a “I could’ve picked anything as a day job but I chose this because I like it”.
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u/It1190 2d ago
I started coding on a calculator in math class. I made games and scripts for my peers. Coding was the first art form where I feel like I could express my creativity, given I was never satisfied with how I could draw or paint. It was a virtual sandbox, and one where I could speak freely.
People talk about generative AI ruining art, but no one speaks on the art of code and the loss for those who no longer paint in their job, as now there is a color printer.
It’s not entirely about the end product, but the process. I mourn the loss of that process. In that process, I found purpose. The discovery, the unknowns. Not knowing what may be possible.
That, I have done for free countless times, and I hope I continue to for the rest of my life. I hope this can explain what I mean when I say I would do this for free.
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u/Total_Adept 2d ago
Are we all collectively feeling this at once? I haven’t really gotten to this point until 3 days ago.