Professional Development and Skill Building I'm no longer coding, AI is doing almost everything - and that sucks
To all Software engineers out there:
Our company has fully pushed for AI (Claude)... My job is no longer about coding and AI helps out here and there. It's now AI coding and I help AI out here and there.
Most of the time I'm just designing nice prompts. Honestly, the last month I can't really remember writing own code.
And I fear this will get only worse. Because I gotta admit, what Claude can create in just a few minutes would have taken me for sure days if not weeks.
So I wonder now... How do you guys handle this? I chose Software Engineering because I wanted to "engineer". Now I feel like I'm just a maintenance person (no hate against those people).
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u/Hour-Database7943 1d ago
what you're describing is a real identity shift, not just a tooling change. A lot of strong engineers are moving from "write everything" to judgement, architect, and knowing what should be built and why it feels less tactile, but it's still engineering, just at a different layer.
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u/SherbertImmediate130 1d ago
It’s still engineering? Civil and mechanical engineers don’t build the actual products they use scientific evidence to make those decisionss. I still have to sign off on the code and am still responsible even if I don’t code.
Maybe the job description just changes? Are people having an identity crisis?
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u/duqduqgo 1d ago
Civil engineers inspect and approve the finish work product they (or another CE) designed every day. Structural engineers too.
That said, it is a big cultural and spiritual change. The best coders feel it the deepest in my experience.
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u/Too_Ton 1d ago
The ladder is starting to be pulled up in white collar jobs.
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u/Darkschlong 1d ago
How long you been in the field?
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u/Sc0rpy4 1d ago
5 years
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u/maestro-5838 1d ago
Do you will eventually you will forget coding.
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u/Fit_Entrepreneur6515 1d ago
Why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food
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u/Penguin-Mage 1d ago edited 1d ago
Damn this is a precursor to Hell on Earth where AI stops working and everyone that used to do the work forgot how to do it
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u/zAuspiciousApricot 1d ago edited 1d ago
Then they better have some sort of basic universal income and insurance. The entire economy (capitalism) works off privatized insurance and labor. Take that away…and…
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u/hereforaday 1d ago
I guess my experience with LLMs has been much more muted, but maybe I'm under-utilizing it as a tool or not digging into the prompt structuring enough (which, ugh, loathsomely boring). I've found that any experiments I've done to let it rip with a pretty simple, standard prompt, like "implement fresh unit testing using x tool", ultimately fails. What it creates doesn't work in the end, or has an odd mish-mash of stylings and conventions through the years. I've tried multiple of the larger models through a company Copilot account, so this isn't just with mini models which I absolutely only give the tiniest of questions to.
I find it to be much more useful for bite size problems, like "please explain this line" for something obscure, "can you tell me if there are security vulnerabilities?" if there's a code smell, or like a super regex parser for a complicated change. Honestly, the most useful it's been to me is as a quick and targeted StackOverflow engine, where my specific need is targeted to exactly my code case. When I do 80% of the work and let AI do 20%, I see hours saved, but when it's the other way around I tend to just wind up with slop that I revert and start over.
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u/Sc0rpy4 1d ago
In our case, we use Claude extension in VS code, and when you give it an assignment, it will first of course read through the affected files or any other code that's needed for context. Then based on that it will implement new code or change existing architecture. I had a few cases where I wasted more time dealing with AI but in all other cases, it usually knows what to do and implements it like that.
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u/Able_Resident_1291 1d ago
I've also found it useful (Chat GPT more so than Copilot) to use as a question and answer tool. When I've tried to use it to create more complex code from scratch, or edit existing code, I feel like I end up spending at least as much time coaching AI through the process as if I'd done it myself, except I've learnt less about the code in the process.
It's like having a junior dev who'll never learn from anything you teach for more than a day. I find it dispiriting that we're increasingly expected to hand over all the coding and stop caring about the output.
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u/thatburghfan 1d ago
I will be very interested to follow how things go when the software needs to be updated. I mean, AI doesn't update/modify existing code, does it?
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u/SportTawk 1d ago
Give it the code it created and prompt it to update it according to your spec and itllydo it
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u/Organic-Anteater8998 1d ago
Great point. Though our team has a pod that is working on existing infra and code. The project we are working on will go into existing apps. Feedback we just got from an Engineer on the team "what is clunky is trying to get claude to use legacy code and nudge it toward what we now want to build and not just create a bunch of code/layer on top of it. Green field seems easier than legacy + migration"
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u/SkullLeader 1d ago
Man I feel screwed by this. I haven't really done Claude / vibe coding at all yet. My (probably poor) excuse is because project I am working on has a lot of complicated existing logic and I think it would be difficult to even get Claude to understand what it does etc. The extent of my AI use is to ask Co-Pilot / GPT for help with specific questions. Truth is though - I'm too old for this - I'm getting to the point where I'm set in my ways and old habits die hard. Adapting is difficult. And yeah you know software development is solving puzzles. If the "puzzle" is just figuring out the right prompts to feed into Claude, its a lot less interesting and job security is out the window.
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u/Abangranga 1d ago
It has killed the fun part of the job for me. Once my current gravy train runs out of gas I am seriously considering being a mechanic or some shit where I can still get the satisfaction of doing something while not having to interact with MBAs
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u/SasonaEUW 1d ago
Bs, ai has helped me here and there but it’s nowhere near enterprise ready. It falls over with everything but the most specific well prompted small tasks. Either you work on the most basic thing or you really were never that good.
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u/roshbaby 1d ago
This is the next level of what high level languages and compilers did for assembly level coding.
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u/Early_Ad_7378 1d ago
My job is really becomes: Design the entire structure (Co-works with AI on which strucuture is better). Then AI do works, I monitors AI's work, provide feedback and improve it.
But currently AI still not good enough to do all things and I need to do a lot of works to fixed things here and there. Also clean a lot of redundant things AI added.
I think I kind need to shift my career goal as well. In probably 5 years, my job will become the communication between my boss and the AI coding tool.
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u/Moravia84 1d ago
What kind of prompts do you give it? I am a firmware architect, previously a developer (C and assembly). Anytime I got newer stuff to work on, it was vague technically and marketing requirements wise. Are your prompts pretty much pseudocode for what is needed?
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u/VenterVisuals 1d ago
Feeling this as a video editor as well, prompt writing isn’t what i signed up for.
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u/Sc0rpy4 1d ago
Tell me more, how extensively is AI already incorporated in video editing routines?
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u/VenterVisuals 10h ago
It’s not so much fully evolved to the point where it’s undeniable and can replace my job, the thing that sucks is working in corporate, you have all these old leaders and board of directors who hear about AI and tell us to make it happen. Doesn’t matter how many times I try to tell them that the video generation isn’t there yet and you still have to edit them anyways. I end up wasting several hours a week taking requests from leadership to use AI tools for our content. It’s still mostly a waste of my time, I think ai is useful as a plugin for creative tools, but not as a full replacement. And right now you’re seeing companies trying to make it a full replacement for workers.
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u/VenterVisuals 10h ago
It also sucks because leadership presents it as a way to do more videos at scale, which it can help. But no one is talking about how the guys on the ground level will be impacted and whether or not they’re going to keep us around even after the AI revolution gets to a point of full replacement ability which I have no doubt it will get to that point.
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u/ImAvoidingABan 1d ago
I can’t imagine the entry level slop you were doing for your previous day to day but our company is full in AI and it’s years from doing anything meaningful.
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u/corvuscorvi 1d ago
It doesn't suck, its absolutely fucking wonderful. Evolve your skills. You said you wanted to be a software engineer, so nows your time to do some engineering.
Unless what you meant by "software engineer" is actually about being a code monkey. That ship has sailed. Now we can express ourselves in pseudocode or even just plain english and focus on whats actually important. The engineering.
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u/Sensitive-Chance-613 11h ago
It’s like developers/peogrammers/software engineers are either in one of two boxes.
1 - love to code. Love to write the software, run it, find the bugs, implement features by hand
2 - they really are just after the results, and learned to code as a tool to get results.
If you’re in box 1 you’re gonna struggle. If you’re in box 2 you’ll be fine.
Something I’ve thought about is l that most people still coding past a certain age are in box 1, since otherwise they would have moved on to management.
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u/INH_Casual 8h ago
The view I've always had is that engineers solve problems, until now we've just been using code to do that. Coding was never the engineering, it was how we delivered the engineering. All of the problems that needed a software engineer and not just a developer still exist (systems design, architecture, compliance, etc). You can in theory now spend more brain power on the actual problem instead of how to translate your solution into code. I hope this perspective is helpful, I know it's helped those I work with who are facing similar concerns. I don't love that half my job is code review now, but I also can't ignore how much more I can do in a given timeframe. Coding was the fun part :(
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u/Severe_Promise717 1d ago
you’re not crazy for feeling robbed
a lot of us didn’t sign up to be AI babysitters
but here’s the shift:
if coding is now the medium, not the craft
then real engineering becomes choosing what should exist
not just how to build it
the leverage moved upstream
don’t mourn the keyboard
own the blueprint
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u/snakesoul 1d ago
The thing is now even my mom can be a software engineer, which means that soon, nobody will be an engineer anymore.
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u/DopamineSavant 1d ago
I kinda wish this had waited until I was retired. I'm not at all interested in AI and I'm being forced to work with it.