Is this thing on? Taps the laptop How do you even use this?
Just kidding, I still know how to write, just haven’t had the time/motivation to do so. Life is… lifeing.
For over a year now I have been instructed (this is an obvious euphemism) to use AI in my day to day work. And I am conflicted.
On one hand, it did make me faster in producing more visually appealing solutions, and it helps in debugging some issues. On the other hand, I have very little in depth understanding of the code it produced. Does it work? Yes. Are the stakeholders happy about the features I’ve added and deployed happy? Yes.
So… case closed?
No.
Why do I dislike it in principle?
I know, AI is a tool. And I treat it as a tool. It’s a really interesting, and at times scary tool, but tool nonetheless.
But I do have several issues with this tool of ours. Besides obvious harm it’s been doing to the planet (but the closed loop cooling systems aren’t as wasteful, this is anti-AI propaganda – yeah, tell that to the forests in Finland), and basically stealing other peoples work as training data, destroying books… hmmm, yeah, that should be enough to stop using it.
Ok, besides all that, the thing I don’t really like about it (from an engineer’s point of view), is this thing I’ve seen of just having tons of code slop, over engineered code that nobody reads or checks, people writing code just because they can (nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s not producing anything helpful, useful or meaningful). It just feels like our value as senior engineers is drastically dropping.
Look at me, I’m the captain now
I’m not going to go into details of why we should be weary about the things I’ve mentioned above. I’ll write about a feeling I had recently when I was reviewing a code a colleague wrote (well, colleague prompted and Claude wrote).
And the feeling was: I’m no longer the ‘smartest person in the room’. It’s definitely an ego thing. But it was also this unnerving feeling of no longer being relevant. To an extent.
In the olden days (little over a year ago lol), whenever colleagues had a weird problem they couldn’t solve, or when we were discussing a new feature, they’d turn to me. I was the person who knew all the weird edge cases of the app I’m working in. I’ve lived those edge cases. Reviewing wasn’t a boring chore. It was satisfying because I could ‘sense’ that the code is wrong. Even if I didn’t know fully what the feature was doing, I could spot certain patterns in the code that felt off. It’s like having a spidey sense. It is because I’ve done the mistakes, seen the solutions and tested them myself, and wrote the code. I knew what was going on.
These days you basically don’t need to ask a senior. You have your AI agent with all the knowledge at its grasp.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have those skills. I can smell a bad code when I see it. When I see a bunch of static methods crammed in a class, or 5 extra classes abstracting away something that could probably be contained in a one class. Over abstracting early is usually not a good idea.
Even when I ‘write’ code I feel like I just accept all it produces, because I am just fatigued. I’ve relinquished control to it. There is no joy in doing what I do (and we all know what Marie Kondo said about things that don’t bring joy to you).
Is there a way out?
I did think of one use case where my seniority stands out.
I write better prompts, and I’m usually faster and more efficient than my junior colleagues. I know what I want as a result, I know what guardrails to set, what expectations to write.
I waste less time and produce code that will generally require less turnarounds than my junior colleagues.
When they get stuck they ask me for guidance, and then we can sit together, see the issue and even work on improving their prompting skills.
But other than those small moments of helping people out, the art of programming kinda lost its allure (at least to me).
When we all fall asleep, where do we go?
I wish I had a solution for this. At the moment, I am still waiting to see what will happen when the bubble pops. Will I lose my job? My apartment? Will I be spared because I do know how to work even with minimal AI help? I don’t know.
The insecurity is what scares us. The inability to plan for all the outcomes.
And the ethical dilemma is still present. I know using it is bad (for the planet, for my skills and mental health), but when you get told that you must use it, and you know it pays the bills…
I guess time will tell. Just hope we’ll all be here to tell the story.