I currently work at an "AI First" 🤢 fintech company, and we're mandated to program agentically. I was fortunate enough to start working before the AI hype, but the environment right now is daunting.
There's too much unmaintainable code slop and throw away scripts committed that I can't keep track anymore. Each PR has so much diffs that it feels like someone had diarrhea and shat all over.
I try to manually review the code, but it feels like best effort at most. Like I may only understand 70% of the thing that I'm reviewing. What ends up happening usually is that I just ask the model and verify the output(which is horrifying I know)
I spend the whole day arguing with AI, reviewing, and pushing back against its output that sometimes I wonder if I am the one driving AI or is it driving me.
--
Recently, I noticed that I've becoming more reliant on the model and that my skills have been atrophying. What would've taken me an afternoon if I program it by hand, would take me a week now if I do it now. I also find my head hurting and myself glossing over the code in code reviews and prompting claude to do even the basic of commands.
I get that there's more to programming in software engineering (collaboration, dealing with people, etc etc), but I don't feel like I am in control of the systems I am building anymore with the engineering aspect being replaced with babysitting and self lobotomy.
--
Off work hours, I try to brush up by reading on system design and architecture books, typing by hand if I'm learning a new technology or stack, but I feel like it's not enough to prevent from skill atrophy.
How are y'all coping and how do you recover from this? I am afraid on what skills that I'll be able to bring at my next place of employment if I resign and that I'm becoming a jack of all trades master of none type of thing - having only shallow understanding.
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.
How do you push back if that PR comes from your boss or a more tenured eng
I am a Staff Engineer. So I am high enough in the chain to even close PRs at will.
Other engineers are encouraged to reach out to us staff engineers if they feel powerless on their own.
We can only do our best to not end up with a culture where people fear each other.
Here they just say "ohno so much effort, i already split it in 4, no use in split for the sake of splitting"