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.
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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.
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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.
I switched from IT to manual labor. Working there for 3 month now. If I wouldn't have kept my fitness regiment while working in IT, I'd have no chance to stand my current job. Walking kilometers through 2 big halls overseeing and operating up to 5 machines using multiple of chemical agents in parallel and sometimes having to do manual labor that amounts to some solid workout sessions.
I still got my private Rust/Vue project and selfhosting stuff which won't see any slop till it's done. I do envy people working an office job a bit though. Even if they are bombarded with slop PRs. They don't know how good they have it if they haven't worked a job demanding full body commitment and getting up VERY early.
The work I do won't see any AI in the foreseeable future and they won't get a replacement for me without lots of investments as my predecessor estimated I'd need a year to learn all the stuff my job demands. I learned it in 2½ months. So a safe bank and good payment. But I yearn for a comfy office chair staring on code the whole day already.