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.
People are 100% valid in hating "AI" at present because currently it is causing a LOT of negatives and not many positives for the average person.
Think whatever you want about "AI" (machine learning/LLMs/chat bots) it is a tech that isn't going away. Pandora's box is wide open, no going back.
Wanting it to be used ethically and responsibly is good common sense.
I like the parallel of nuclear energy. We unlocked the secrets of the atoms and fission. We can either make nukes or we can make clean energy. People, rightfully, protested and "freaked out" because everything at the time was trending towards nukes, and look at that, they were right, however we did finally learn and now use fission as a power source and not for destruction. Yes the capability still exists to drop nukes, but we haven't in a long time because of all the downsides.
I feel like LLMs and this wave of tech is going to be similar.
We will still have data centers, duh, but they won't be in everyone's damn back yard. We will still have LLMs, but we will train them responsibly and have guardrails and what constitutes fair use. We can have neat AI tools that assist us or speed up tedious tasks or automate boring things, that's fine, but we can do that in healthy ways.
At least, that's what we all hope for, so let's help push for that to happen.
I agree with the sensible approach you're talking about, but not with getting angry at every mention of AI as if it's leprosy in Middle Ages Europe.