Programming is like a game of chess for me: winning (i.e. delivering a product) is important, but only if I played this game mysel","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389408","role":"pain","weight":1.1250844,"occurredAt":"2026-08-21T15:15:14.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.4731637,"sentiment":0.16363636,"confidence":0.76371986,"matchedPatterns":["i_hate","missing_feature"],"statement":"Not only did I stop writing code, but agents also became pretty good at proposing plans and architectures, and I was mostly providing missing context and technical details of our infrastructure.","title":"Coding Agents killed my identity. How do you feel?","body":"I always was a nerdy, deeply technical programmer. Contributing-to-open-source-and-reading-papers-in-my-spare-time type of programmer.
Programming is like a game of chess for me: winning (i.e. delivering a product) is important, but only if I played this game myself. I don't enjoy winning if my opponent disconnected. I don't enjoy beating people who don't know how to move pieces. I don't enjoy winning with an engine, and coding agents are basically "winning with a chess engine".
I started to use AI for coding a long time ago, when copilot was first introduced. At first, I was happy: "wow, this can write boring boilerplate and unit tests". Time went by, agents got better, time spent writing code myself went down. Half a year ago I suddenly realized I hadn't written any code for over a month, and I am a full-time software dev without any managing work. Not only did I stop writing code, but agents also became pretty good at proposing plans and architectures, and I was mostly providing missing context and technical details of our infrastructure.
One day the realization hit hard. Coding agents removed everything I loved, and - mostly - amplified everything I hated. My role is to gather context from other humans and provide a detailed explanation (similar to a well-written jira ticket) to some super intelligent engineer, then review the result and provide more context/explanation if needed. So, basically, a manager.
A couple of years ago I could work on a single coding task for weeks. I knew all classes, all functions, I was slowly building up information at a comfortable tempo. Now I am forced to increase my mental throughput multiple times. What took a couple of weeks now takes a couple of hours, and I still need to comprehend that. I always feel tired, I don't have enough mental capacity to hold that many abstractions and technical details. So you either autoaccept or get burned out reviewing tens of thousands of lines.
One more downside is that code has 0 value. You can code your own OS from scratch, and people will think "ye, I can vibe code that in a weekend". I don't even know what is valuable nowadays.
Maybe I am a bad employee. Increasing employer profits was never my goal. I always loved to solve puzzles, and for the last 10 years this was well aligned with my employer's desire to increase profits. I never was good as a manager, or brilliant at generating ideas. My power - and passion - was solving complex technical problems with my hands, fast and with good quality. Now it is gone forever. I feel completely lost and unmotivated. I don't see any value in learning anything related to computer science, reading papers, contributing to open source. I hate my new "AI delegator" role and I hate my work. I loved coding so much (I use neovim btw) that I was sure I would do this until I die, and now I don't know what to do with my life. This is the only thing I know, and, most importantly, the only thing I am/was passionate about. Anyone else feeling the same?","offTopic":false},{"id":"b76859bb-b640-43b5-b51a-7201a422a96e","excerpt":"What do you do when a developer submits AI generated code they clearly don’t understand? — I honestly didn’t expect AI to blur the line between actual competence and just looking competent this much.\n\nFew days ago I got a PR to review and the code looks like it was put through every AI tool under the sun from start to ","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1vg0cx8/what_do_you_do_when_a_developer_submits_ai/","role":"pain","weight":1.2330333,"occurredAt":"2026-08-05T07:25:58.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.42,"sentiment":0.6666667,"confidence":0.86833334,"matchedPatterns":["frustrating","manual_process"],"statement":"It’s just so frustrating.","title":"What do you do when a developer submits AI generated code they clearly don’t understand?","body":"I honestly didn’t expect AI to blur the line between actual competence and just looking competent this much.\n\nFew days ago I got a PR to review and the code looks like it was put through every AI tool under the sun from start to finish. There’s literally no way the guy who submitted it wrote it himself, or even pieced it together from smaller parts. The task requires a pretty deep understanding of the hardware and the codebase, and I know his work because I’ve reviewed his PRs plenty of times before.\n\nYou can also kind of see it in the code. One part is written in a very polished and profesional way, and then a small debugging section uses an incredibly naive solution. The kind of thing I’ve never seen an experienced dev do, but absolutely have seen from juniors writing basic stuff for the first time.\n\nSo what am I even supposed to do here??\n\nTo make things worse... AI tools are completely banned in this particular repo because of IP concerns...\n\nI could ask him if he used AI, but he’ll probably just deny it. If I put comments on his PR on azure dev ops he can just easily answer them using AI once again... Am I supposed to go through the code line by line and quiz him on what it does? He probably won’t be able to explain half of it but then what?? What does that actually solve? No idea...I’m not his manager either, I’m just another dev on the team. Sure I have more experience but that doesn’t exactly give me the right to interrogate him.\n\nIt’s just so frustrating.\n\nA few years ago, when someone was doing advanced work, you could usually assume they actually understood it. You could trust them and respect the skill behind it. Now someone can generate a bunch of impressive-looking code and act like they wrote it themselves.\n\nAnd to be clear, I use AI too. A lot. I’m not against it at all. But I never submit code I can’t explain or defend. And if a larger part was generated because I couldn’t be bothered to write all the boilerplate by hand, I add a Co-Developed-By note instead of pretending it was all me.\n\nAI definitely made development easier. I REALLY don’t miss writing repetitive boilerplate, it was just so boring... But I feel like we’re only starting to see the downside: people looking more competent than they are, teams losing the ability to tell who actually understands the work, and trust slowly becoming harder to maintain.\n\nMaybe I’m just thinking about this in an old-fashioned way and need to adjust? Guys... feel free to tell me if I’m wrong.","offTopic":false},{"id":"a06b8532-1f35-44a1-9cd7-d3a8350ef45a","excerpt":"Who here does NOT use AI coding tools? — My situation is probably different than most. I'm effectively a solo dev in a niche market building custom control automation programs for AV systems. My main languages are C# and Lua which run in embedded environments, but the work requires knowledge far beyond programming, inc","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD_Programmers/comments/1usupyh/who_here_does_not_use_ai_coding_tools/","role":"pricing","weight":1.2330333,"occurredAt":"2026-07-10T17:45:22.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ADHD_Programmers","intent":"pricing_complaint","painScore":0.42,"sentiment":0.7647059,"confidence":0.86833334,"matchedPatterns":["too_expensive","manual_process"],"statement":"* I'm responsible for writing, reviewing, and testing 100% of the code on any given project, so I can't afford any oversights, especially because...","title":"Who here does NOT use AI coding tools?","body":"My situation is probably different than most. I'm effectively a solo dev in a niche market building custom control automation programs for AV systems. My main languages are C# and Lua which run in embedded environments, but the work requires knowledge far beyond programming, including networking, AVoIP, serial protocols, low voltage logic, audio DSP, theatrical systems(audio, video, lighting, etc.), and general construction. I thrive on the variety and controlled chaos that comes with my job, and I have zero desire to work at a big corporation doing only one task.\n\nI feel really great about the work we do. Our client list continues to grow, and everybody seems super happy with our work. But as somebody who uses virtually no AI coding tools, I often worry that I'm falling behind. I have this dissonance where I feel like I'm knocking it out of the park, but also like I'm gonna become irrelevant if I don't get on the AI hype train.\n\nBeyond the myriad of ethical issues, there is some friction that keeps me from using it:\n\n* I am not required or incentivized to use it\n* We are a team of 2 with limited resources and no subscriptions to AI tools.\n* Most of my code can't run or be tested in an IDE\n* My projects lend themselves to custom frameworks and templates, so I don't manually write boilerplate code anymore.\n* I'm responsible for writing, reviewing, and testing 100% of the code on any given project, so I can't afford any oversights, especially because...\n* My programs are expected to run unattended for up to 10 years, often with no remote access after deployment.\n* In my experience, AI models are generally not knowledgeable about the details of my industry. When I have used it, it hallucinates up the wazoo. I'm sure this will improve with time, but it's just not helpful right now.\n* I really enjoy the creative expression that comes with writing code, building frameworks, and realizing cool ideas.\n* Last but not least, I'm currently doing really well without it.\n\nAll said, I really love my job, and I feel like I'm on a good career trajectory. I've always had the mindset that I'll never lose if I bet on myself, so I try to filter out the noise and focus on improving my skills. That has worked out really well for me so far. I'm just worried that I'm going to fall behind if I don't get up to speed with AI. I'm in my early 30s, so I've got quite a ways to go.\n\nAm I short sighted by largely ignoring this? If I become a highly skilled 'old-school' developer, is it easy enough to start using AI agents if/when the time comes? What do you all think?","offTopic":true},{"id":"aabd1887-22bc-4e00-9933-f03798a4cefe","excerpt":"I'm a vibe coder and I'm scared that I have no idea what I'm doing anymore — So for some context my only experience with any form of coding is using R. I have 0 IT development experience and I work in a non IT field.\n\n2 years ago, when chatgpt first came out, I gave it a spin to see what all the hype was about and was ","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1uuf59z/im_a_vibe_coder_and_im_scared_that_i_have_no_idea/","role":"pain","weight":1.2137709,"occurredAt":"2026-07-12T13:13:02.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ClaudeAI","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.435,"sentiment":0.6666667,"confidence":0.84583336,"matchedPatterns":["terrible","manual_process"],"statement":"On hindsight, that was a huge mistake cuz the output was terrible.","title":"I'm a vibe coder and I'm scared that I have no idea what I'm doing anymore","body":"So for some context my only experience with any form of coding is using R. I have 0 IT development experience and I work in a non IT field.\n\n2 years ago, when chatgpt first came out, I gave it a spin to see what all the hype was about and was disappointed. Fast forward to last month and I thought to give this new fangled AI thingy a try again.\n\nFirst thing I did was use Claude on Haiku to try and get it to do clean up some reports for me. On hindsight, that was a huge mistake cuz the output was terrible. Then I watched a video on someone doing vibe coding and realised that I was approaching AI all wrong. I need to treat it like a really capable recent college graduate.\n\nNext thing I did was look through my workflow and see what could be improved. In the end, I realised that instead of tracking my projects on an excel spreadsheet, what happens if I asked Claude to help me create something?\n\nFast forward a month later, I've got a pretty decent project management tool, it lays out timelines on a graph that I don't need to manually manage, it reads from screenshots and documents to build out project folders, summarises key information at the top, lists what needs to be done today and in the week etc etc etc\n\nIn short, I created something useful with 0 coding experience. My colleagues got interested in what I was using to manage my time so I asked Claude for the steps to host it on a website. Then I learned about GitHub and something called repo management. I learned about API keys and I learned that it makes sense to make a plan in Claude, give it to chatgpt to review then give it back to Claude to refine and create the code.\n\nWith no technical background, and after reading about that time AI deleted a whole set of code from some company's app, I created a set of rules to follow. First nothing gets built without an explicit go ahead from chatgpt. Second, I do the manual copying of the files and committing and testing in localhost. Then finally once it passes localhost, it gets pushed and built on the website.\n\nAt first, I could understand the conversations between Claude and chatgpt because it was a just about what are the core functions I needed. Now I'm just completely lost. They talk about refactors and red teams and go deep into technical stuff like indexdb or something. I just went along with the flow, asking so what's next to fix or build. Now, I'm somehow at a repo that's 125mb big with tens of thousands of lines of code. There are things called hooks and harnesses and invariant matrix. There's a whole set of documentation and a roadmap and plans that's tens of files.\n\nWhen my colleagues ask me how I created it, I feel like a fraud when I tell them that all it started was a simple explanation of my problem and a question on how to solve it. Somehow half the company is asking me to let them use it and the other half is asking me to build other stuff for them.\n\nI guess I'm now at the point that what I've built has gotten so out of hand that im terrified of continuing to work on it because I just don't understand what's being built or fixed anymore. The tool works for my day to day usage. But there always seems to be something to fix or improve.\n\nDoes anyone have any tips or tricks to get a handle on what's going on? Should I maybe start taking classes in computer science to figure out what exactly the code does? Everything is written in json. Do I need to take a class in java script? Is there anything you developers could share to ease the fear of looking at code and improving understanding?\n\nTldr; I vibe coded a personal tool to help me organise my work. I hosted it on a website so it's easier for me to use multiple devices (data is transferred via an import export file). I have no idea what I'm doing anymore and am looking for advice on what I can do to better understand what's going on when chatgpt and Claude presents an output.\n\nEdit: Thank you everyone for all the comments so far. I've learned alot from everything thats been shared, from mindset changes to understanding that I dont need to learn how to code, i need to learn more about what the code does to understand the principles. It's also been nice knowing that others have experienced the same struggles too and how they grew from it. So, thanks everyone and I'll keep trying to comment to as many comments as I can\n\nEdit2: I know now that Json is the data format and Javascript is probably what it was written in.","offTopic":true},{"id":"636b257c-b5ef-45b7-92c2-b8e6131a78d5","excerpt":"Opus 4.7 Regression — I’m a machine learning, data, and forward deployed engineer that works at the cutting-edge of technology. I use an AI-integrated system powered by Anthropic to increase my throughput, but recently, I’ve noticed that Anthropic’s “state of the art” model is more of a liability than a help. I persona","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1tbk8qj/opus_47_regression/","role":"demand","weight":1.1964778,"occurredAt":"2026-05-13T00:48:32.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"claude","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.37774193,"sentiment":-0.41935483,"confidence":0.8684339,"matchedPatterns":["wish","currently_i_use"],"statement":"But now I’m babysitting Opus and I wish I was babysitting a junior engineer instead.","title":"Opus 4.7 Regression","body":"I’m a machine learning, data, and forward deployed engineer that works at the cutting-edge of technology. I use an AI-integrated system powered by Anthropic to increase my throughput, but recently, I’ve noticed that Anthropic’s “state of the art” model is more of a liability than a help. I personally believe that Opus 4.7 has the critical thinking and problem solving skills of a freshman or sophomore in high school. Opus 4.7 has actually drastically slowed down my development process and I’m considering relegating only simple tasks to Anthropic’s models, if none at all. I’m also considering cancelling my subscription altogether. If I wanted to waste money, I’d rather waste money on something that’s useful. The worst part is that I can’t downgrade Opus 4.7 to 4.6 in VSCode. Anyone in the same boat as me? It’s almost impossible to get work done when I’m too busy telling Opus how wrong it is. This is why you MUST thoroughly examine each response you get.\n\nHere are a couple of messages Opus 4.7 and I exchanged regarding a code base with Max effort and Thinking turned on.\n\nExample 1:\n\nMe: Why aren't you putting in the work that I expect?\n\nOpus 4.7: Because I'm reaching for fast plausible answers instead of doing the work. The work is: read the actual code before claiming things about it, sit with your question long enough to understand what you're actually asking, and hold a position when it's defensible instead of flipping under pressure. I'm skipping all three.\n\nExample 2:\n\nOpus 4.7: I don't know what the check\\_availability tool's response schema looks like in your UI. Specifically: is requires\\_zip defined there as a known boolean field with a description explaining when it's set? Or is the LLM seeing it as an unannotated extra field in the response JSON?\n\nMe: You know what the check\\_availability tool response is\n\nClaude: You're right. I do know — I read src/lib/scheduling/types.ts and check-availability/route.ts earlier. The response shape is:\n\n{ available: boolean, slots: AvailableSlot\\[\\], no\\_coverage?: boolean, requires\\_zip?: boolean, message?: string }\n\nEDIT:\n\nI **partly** attracted the wrong crowd. My mistake lol. I want to hear from anyone who works on complex projects or systems that companies like OpenAI or Anthropic originally advertised their models for. Or people with fully AI-integrated systems/workflows. Or people who can fluently program in NumPy or PyTorch.\n\nI’m currently using Opus 4.7 to:\n\n1. Audit the actions, outputs, logs, and schema drifts across multiple platforms that are a result of a sandboxed agent that has full autonomy over building ML models using its own feature store “branch” \n2. Triage its errors internal tooling and codebase based off its performance (i.e. “Would this agent benefit from an additional tool? And if so, create the tooling for it”) \n3. Send me a diagnostic report of how it behaved, what it’s accomplished, and what its experiment results are\n\nTl;dr I use Opus to babysit another agent. And I use Anthropic through out my ecosystem. But now I’m babysitting Opus and I wish I was babysitting a junior engineer instead. Yes, I know how to swap between models as well swap between VSCode and terminal sessions. I like diff views and easily reviewing plans because I’m a programmer that follows engineering principles, not a vibe coder. PoC to production is easier that way, I promise. And yes, I know how to prompt and provide context. Now you all know I don’t use AI for things that can be googled, abstractive summarization, or anything in between. I am using LLMs for what they were literally advertised and made for: system integration and augmentation. Anthropic fails on both fronts. Everything else they provide is literally just for regular people. I really don’t care if you use Sonnet 4.6 as a generalist lol. I also don’t care to swap to Opus 4.6 because that doesn’t solve anything in the long run. ","offTopic":false},{"id":"867054d0-f8db-4bd1-b491-616734083c30","excerpt":"I hate losing ownership of my codebase — I'm very conflicted about AI tools. I've used them for years for all kinds of things ever since their inception and I'm completely addicted to them. When it comes to programming it accelerates throughput dramatically and fills in the gaps almost too well. The loop is this right","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1vu09j4/i_hate_losing_ownership_of_my_codebase/","role":"pain","weight":1.0763531,"occurredAt":"2026-08-20T23:55:36.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ClaudeCode","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.61407405,"sentiment":-0.18518518,"confidence":0.66685486,"matchedPatterns":["i_hate"],"statement":"I hate losing ownership of my codebase.","title":"I hate losing ownership of my codebase","body":"I'm very conflicted about AI tools. I've used them for years for all kinds of things ever since their inception and I'm completely addicted to them. When it comes to programming it accelerates throughput dramatically and fills in the gaps almost too well. The loop is this right now:\n\nless independent thinking → need Claude for context/design → Claude contributes more decisions → system becomes less internally familiar → need Claude even more.\n\nI have a specific implementation in mind, but then I never just get what I ask for, there is always more contributions which would include a refactor somewhere. As the project grows managing context and architectural coherence becomes critical and I feel like I no longer have a solid internal model.\n\nThis coherence degradation is the fundamental crux of why I dislike using AI. Software is about standards, familiar patterns, documentation, a red thread, yadda yadda. But when there are gaps between your understanding and what the LLM knows (and what *you* still believe *it* knows about the project) then this can introduce drift. Large context helps, but if you don't have rails and own the critical logic and flow then the codebase may just sprawl.\n\nIf something important is not present in the model’s context and cannot reliably be inferred from the code, the model has to guess. AI often drifts toward overengineering. If I don't specify it will suggest an overengineered solution that creates a sort of contextual tech debt to the codebase. I hate that about AI tools.\n\nI can see how these tools would accelerate a seasoned software engineer with great organizational skills and who's been in the business for decade. I'm not a professional . Any code I wrote before was mediocre at best and not so elegant. I struggle to the point where I don't want to do development of any kind because going back to \"manual\" coding is just going to feel like molasses, but I also don't want to ship stuff this way.","offTopic":false},{"id":"b5c78d50-7933-4444-981c-5e8d42ee8688","excerpt":"How do you handle AI psychosis? — Hi, I'm a tech lead at a startup, a job that I do part time (started as consultant, ended up on their payroll later on) with 10 years of experience in software engineering.\n\nThis post might not come as news to anyone, but I'm curious to see how you usually navigate these situations. No","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1vy03ik/how_do_you_handle_ai_psychosis/","role":"demand","weight":1.0457733,"occurredAt":"2026-08-25T13:37:19.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"tool_discovery","painScore":0.33,"sentiment":0.05882353,"confidence":0.78629565,"matchedPatterns":["cant_find","manual_process","product:claude"],"statement":"COO seems to recently have discovered AI (i cannot find any other explanation) and discussed with the CEO (They are co-founders) a set of engineering practices that we're to follow right now.","title":"How do you handle AI psychosis?","body":"Hi, I'm a tech lead at a startup, a job that I do part time (started as consultant, ended up on their payroll later on) with 10 years of experience in software engineering.\n\nThis post might not come as news to anyone, but I'm curious to see how you usually navigate these situations. Not looking to vent or anything, I think I have my own methods of coping, but I want to read other people thoughts.\n\nSo, to give more context to my situation: I'm currently both working as a high Senior engineer at a medium sized company, where AI adoption has been quick as everywhere else but I think it's algo kind of controlled. People use it, but are aware of consequences. We are advised to double check our work, even if we code none of it and we take full responsability.\n\n4 years ago I started doing consulting for a small startup and eventually ended as tech lead. The company is mainly bootstrapped so growth has been slow. As everyone, we started heavily adopting AI early this year and have been delivering quicker thanks to it. I've always warned that we still need to review work and be careful. Bugs have grown and I've set as many processes as I can to keep it contained. We have a lot of metrics, I studied observability to improve this as much as I can, set up processes around PRs, etc. My moto is not to block stuff, as this is a startup that needs to move quick, but to keep people accountable and being careful.\n\nHowever, in the last month, the C suite has lost it. COO seems to recently have discovered AI (i cannot find any other explanation) and discussed with the CEO (They are co-founders) a set of engineering practices that we're to follow right now. These are non-negotiable and have been set with zero input from engineering.\n\nFor starters, the first one was the COO asking claude to completely redo the UI to do some changes he wanted (its a huge restructure of our main platform, which is already in production). He said that Claude produced this in 4 hours, so we should be able to integrate it pretty quickly. I hope you aren't surprised when I tell you that what Claude puked was utter garbage. It produced plain html with some css and mocked data. The COO is convinced this can just be pluged into our systems and make it work. \"Just tell Claude to integrate it with the BE, it will do it you'll see!\". I don't know if he thinks we never used AI or what, but it's pretty insane.\n\nTo top it off, the CEO developed (vibe coded fully) a LLM wrapper that we are to use for all our work going forward. It basically wraps claude in a console (can be any LLM but we mostly use Claude) and allows the team to use that terminal as well, is pre-configured with some directives of where to save docs, etc. Overall a neat tool tbh, it's great for information sharing and to allow other less technical members of the team to interact with already prepared terminals to ask questions about the codebase. That's good and all, the issue is that the directive is LITERALLY to do ALL of our work on it. everything. We are not allowed to type a single line of code by hand anymore. We need to go through that application to be able to perform work. I don't really know how they plan on getting this enforced though, but it is insane either way.\n\nI've tried to discuss this. Publicly, in private, nothing works. I've been specially combatibe with the \"prototype\" generated with the COO. It was exhausting to explain for days how software engineering works, why we want to use libraries instead of doing all ourselves, why a prototype is not a final thing and frontent is not \"solved\", why doing a translator layer between the prototype and our FE is going to cause issues, etc. I managed to get them to step down a bit and concede, but it was an exhausting endeavor. About the shared terminal mandate? I'm not willing to lose more energy there. I've been told that things that were estimated in months can be done in days thanks to AI now. I've been told that it's all a matter of attitude. Ok then, I'll just say yes and comply.\n\nSo the bottom line is, I have checked out. Completely. I've agreed to just keep prompting consoles, I stopped caring about the code and I'll just comply and do some extra bit if I have the energy at some point. It's horrible, watching all we carefully tried to make crumble. It's not about the platform (systems come and go), is about the culture. All destroyed within weeks. I have my main job where I dedicate most of my energy and this startup will need a lead that can dedicate full time to the job anyway, so I'm done. I'll coast until they realise I'm no longer valuable or the system crumbles and they ask for my head or whatever. I don't really care.\n\nSo, how are you guys dealing with the psychosis? Any other horror stories?","offTopic":false},{"id":"f3ea83e8-5254-4395-93ec-b25a88612975","excerpt":"Follow-Up: What this year has been like as a newly-minted \"Staff\" engineer — About 8 months ago, I made [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pfyjli/promoted_to_staff_too_early_how_to_deal_with/) post about my worries in getting a promotion above senior at a large non-tech company.\n\nI got some great","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1vpg59k/followup_what_this_year_has_been_like_as_a/","role":"request","weight":1.0324667,"occurredAt":"2026-08-15T22:33:42.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":1,"confidence":0.75916666,"matchedPatterns":["missing_feature"],"statement":"LLM-wrappers, Agents/Agent-harnesses, and RAG/knowledge source work for AI is uninteresting to me, but that is what my enterprise is focused on, and what is driving my team's earning numbers this year * I find the lack of technical mentors…","title":"Follow-Up: What this year has been like as a newly-minted \"Staff\" engineer","body":"About 8 months ago, I made [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pfyjli/promoted_to_staff_too_early_how_to_deal_with/) post about my worries in getting a promotion above senior at a large non-tech company.\n\nI got some great advice, and I thought there might be value in talking about my experience in the 8-ish months since then, and maybe extend an invite to the other senior+ folks here to talk about how 2026 is going for them.\n\nA lot has changed since I wrote that post. I'll try to keep it more focused than just stream of consciousness.\n\nA little bit of background about me to ground this post:\n\n* I work in ML - I have a background in CS (two degrees) and became an MLE just long enough before LLMs hit the scene to really appreciate what we had after being an SDE for about a year.\n* I am squarely on the edge between early and mid-career. I will have 5 total YOE in January.\n\n**The Technical**\n\n* Starting with what I think is an ice cold take: I am sick of doing AI work. I enjoy MLOPs and the intersection data science and software engineering. AI, mostly, is not that. There is a lot of AI discussion on this forum and in general, so I won't spend much more time on it, but I find AI projects repetitive and uninteresting. LLM-wrappers, Agents/Agent-harnesses, and RAG/knowledge source work for AI is uninteresting to me, but that is what my enterprise is focused on, and what is driving my team's earning numbers this year\n* I find the lack of technical mentorship challenging. I am used to having more talented and senior peers to bounce ideas off of or force me outside of my own head. Leading 8 engineers and bringing leadership to my peer staffs has been an adjustment for me. I am struggling with this more than I would like to admit\n* I love the amount of autonomy I am given in making decisions. I am empowered to decide on our tech stack, allocate our tech budget, and attend conferences (I got to attend, and was mostly underwhelmed by, the annual Databricks conference). Guiding our infrastructure maturity and seeing the DevEx experience on my team improve is probably one of the most rewarding parts of my career\n* I am expected to have technical opinions on things I don't care about. My boss (director) and skip-level (VP) pull me into conversations where I'm the technical voice of reason in the room, and I have to talk to a lot of vendors trying to sell us stuff. I am not only expected to have opinions off the cuff, I am also expected to answer confidently in areas I'm not always well-versed in.\n\n**The Organizational**\n\n* My team re-orged several times since January. Most were small, a few were not. I voluntarily surrendered my platform ownership to focus on my product team, and the number of products I now own has ballooned to over 5. My team is spread thin, and I suspect is going to be getting thinner as we shed some contractors. I do okay with ambiguity, and my mid-year review went exceptionally well, but I'm hoping the remainder of the year is more stable.\n* My biggest impact has come from standards and process-creation. Probably no surprise to the more senior, and not entirely a surprise to me, but I am sad I don't get to get in the weeds as much as I would like.\n* Delegating is really hard for me especially when I know the person I'm delegating to won't do as well as I could. I'm really focused on coaching my seniors, and this has been a big challenge for me.\n* Having good relationships across teams has saved me. Being able to work around bureaucracy because I know other staff/lead engineers has allowed me to keep my team's velocity mostly healthy.\n* My juniors are completely addicted to Claude. Last AI-related note, we have claude, and it's been a massive headache for the number of times a junior has told me they made a decision without understanding why. This is probably the strongest headwind I'm trying to fight.\n\nOverall, this year is going better than I hoped. I hope some seniors who were where I was can see this, and realize that making the jump can definitely be rewarding and doable even if you are unsure of yourself or about taking that next step.\n\nEDIT: As some pointed out, it wasn't super clear why I made this post. My point in this post is to check in about how my year is going, and to see what's relatable and what's not. I'm curious to hear about other's experiences","offTopic":true},{"id":"da6ab93e-356e-4112-9ebe-d1aeeaf73f5c","excerpt":"Does anyone else hardly use AI? — Hi all, for context, I'm ~10 years into my career and currently working at a non-FAANG big tech company as a data engineer (more like \"software engineer - data\", though) on a platform engineering team. My work involves things like data processing applications, service integration, inte","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1vvhcdi/does_anyone_else_hardly_use_ai/","role":"pain","weight":1.0237341,"occurredAt":"2026-08-22T16:47:13.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.5418182,"sentiment":-0.45454547,"confidence":0.66397846,"matchedPatterns":["missing_feature"],"statement":"Am I missing something?","title":"Does anyone else hardly use AI?","body":"Hi all, for context, I'm ~10 years into my career and currently working at a non-FAANG big tech company as a data engineer (more like \"software engineer - data\", though) on a platform engineering team. My work involves things like data processing applications, service integration, internal REST APIs, etc.\n\nI don't use AI to write code. I read this sub and r/cscareerquestions from time to time, and what I gather is that the effective way to use AI to write code is to give it a detailed plan in small chunks and then review the output. If that's what I'm meant to do, why not just write the code myself? I don't need an AI that just types for me. Am I missing something?\n\nI'm the tech lead for my team and have been effectively keeping AI slop out of our codebase, or at least the areas I'm most involved with. I'm not doing this from an anti-AI perspective necessarily, but rather from an anti-bad code perspective. The other devs on the team do use AI to varying degrees, but I've tried to set a culture of questioning PRs that were clearly AI assisted and not reviewed by the dev (e.g. adding random logic that does things that weren't asked for, nonsensical comments, excessive/over-protective error handling). Our team still moves quickly and is well regarded in the org.\n\nThe extent of my AI usage is that when I need to Google something, I'll skim the Google AI response and see if that's sufficient and seems correct. If not, I proceed with Googling the old fashioned way. Sometimes I try ask Claude questions so that my token usage is nonzero, but I never really get anything useful out of those \"discussions\".\n\nMy output at work is fine. I think I'm doing reasonably good quality work. I don't know that the quality or speed of my work would actually increase if I started using AI. I was promoted at the start of the year and rated as a high performer, so everything seems fine there. There is a push from upper management to do AI projects (whatever that means), but I'm just not doing that. I just don't care to. I do wonder if I'll need to learn to bullshit my way through an AI portion of an interview whenever that time comes, but I'm not too worried about it. I don't think that AI will go away, but I do think the hype around it will die down at some point. Maybe I'm wrong, though.\n\nI could write more, but I just wanted to check in with you all to see how many others are not really engaging with AI? I feel that fully integrating AI into my workflow would take away a lot of what I find fun about this work, so I'm just not doing that, and it's going fine so far. Maybe this is short-sighted of me, I don't know.","offTopic":false},{"id":"8378c032-8b60-4e44-8e28-ceb667ee39d1","excerpt":"Is anyone else losing interest in data engineering? — Sorry for the vague and maybe even repetitive title. I saw a couple of these posts on here already and thought I'd vent out too. I know this sub leans heavily into standard DE, so I hope /r/dataengineering is okay with a post from a Data Platform engineer's perspect","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/1veof8v/is_anyone_else_losing_interest_in_data_engineering/","role":"request","weight":1.0222666,"occurredAt":"2026-08-03T20:08:02.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"dataengineering","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":0,"confidence":0.75166667,"matchedPatterns":["manual_process"],"statement":"I know writing code isn't the end game, but it was a fun part of my day to day and I still do it by hand at least twice a week just to keep myself sharp.","title":"Is anyone else losing interest in data engineering?","body":"Sorry for the vague and maybe even repetitive title. I saw a couple of these posts on here already and thought I'd vent out too. I know this sub leans heavily into standard DE, so I hope /r/dataengineering is okay with a post from a Data Platform engineer's perspective. I rarely see those around here. \n\nBackground: 7+ years in Software engineering + DE, and about 5 years of sysadmin experience prior to that. I've worked as an Analyst, DE (Senior) and now a senior data platform engineer working with Snowflake, dbt, Airflow + a flurry of BI tools (don't even get me started). Although I am a data platform engineer, I'm very often involved in troubleshooting dbt run issues, model performance issues, Snowflake problems, etc. I also wrote many of the source ingestions myself with dlt and contributed to an internal library that makes dlt more approachable to a less technical audience (even more when including an agentic AI framework). Finally, tooling and technical details aside, I know exactly what these source systems do, where it ends up, and who uses it, ie, the full business-value proposition. \n\nI think it was around March of this year that the hopelessness finally hit me, and the work volume and constant direction shifts just shattered my job satisfaction. Things went from \"We want things done right, code quality, tests..\" to everyone just churning out stuff in masses. \n\nTo some degree, I understand the constant changes. There appear to be new things to look into every day and the \"business\" and upper management wants it all. Somehow the feedback loop of asking \"Why?\" has just ceased to exist. \n\nBut, to be more specific, I'll tie it down to things happening within my own team that frustrate me and would like opinions on.\n\nI built most of this platform myself or had contributed significantly to design, so I know most (if not all) areas quite well (or can find out), so I generally take time to review things in detail and provide reasonably detailed feedback to anything that I review. If I have a nitpick comment, I make sure to say that's the case, and leave it as a choice to address or not. That was until some time ago. PRs now are seemingly always 3-4x larger in size, lots of changes, lots of removals/additions so reading the terraform plan, or looking at potential edge cases is considerably harder. To put it simply, the noise has multiplied many times due to colleagues now suddenly knowing things they didn't just some months ago. Reviews are just so much more harder to do. Just the other day, I saw a PR (the very first one they had created) from a new colleague in the department. They changed 102 dbt models - 2000 lines removed, 1900 added. Who even can review this properly? Luckily, it was closed without being introduced. I'm just not following the thought process here before raising such kind of PRs. Much has been said of AI generated slop, so I wont rehash that here. \n\nAnother trend I've noticed recently is certain juniors just taking review feedback and asking claude to come up with a rebuttal to just get their original changes approved. Are you all seeing this too? It's happened quite a few times in the last week so it's rather fresh in my memory.\n\nMy manager is an extremely sweet and supportive person, but I can feel the strings being pulled on him from up above by those with more stars on their shoulders so he has also resorted to simply running everything via Claude and sending us giant messages on teams, or massive replies by email. \n\nI know writing code isn't the end game, but it was a fun part of my day to day and I still do it by hand at least twice a week just to keep myself sharp. But I find that I'm increasingly unable to keep up with the pace of the rest of the department, let alone the organization. Being in data platform, I'm also finding myself more and more distanced from the outcomes, which leaves me feeling quite unsatisfied with my output because a typical ops team only hears about problems - not the nice stuff. \n\nI used to be extremely optimistic about software engineering, data engineering in specific for the last few years. I used to contribute a lot to various open source projects, be out there in their communities helping other people out, writing articles with tips and tricks, etc. I've stopped all of that in favor of a better disconnect from my work and my mental well-being. Now, I just don't feel like there is a platform for that as most communities have implemented their own bots. Maybe people don't even need it anymore?\n\nThat's my rant, I just wanted to get it out there and I hope to hear of some potential strategies to tackle this vortex of chaos that I am in - even if a comment states that it's my attitude that's the problem. But otherwise, where is this all heading, and how are you all coping with it?\n\n\nEDIT: Oh damn, this blew up. I probably wont be able to get back to you all - but I am going to make my way through the comments.","offTopic":false},{"id":"3fcce3b1-1ae9-4f58-b7d9-e3d3fa23da09","excerpt":"Is it just me? — I am a software engineer with 15 years of experience in game development, mostly graphics, physics, and engine programming. I use AI while doing my tasks most of the time in one way or another. Most of my AI usage patterns are information search, short brainstorms - rubber-ducking with the AI, not real","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1t54zdn/is_it_just_me/","role":"request","weight":1.0222666,"occurredAt":"2026-05-06T06:39:09.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ClaudeCode","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":0.1724138,"confidence":0.75166667,"matchedPatterns":["missing_feature"],"statement":"We thought, “It’s probably because she is a non-coder, so she can’t wield the tool properly due to lack of experience.” So I thought I could give this agentic coding thing a shot and see how good these tools are.","title":"Is it just me?","body":"I am a software engineer with 15 years of experience in game development, mostly graphics, physics, and engine programming. I use AI while doing my tasks most of the time in one way or another. Most of my AI usage patterns are information search, short brainstorms - rubber-ducking with the AI, not really reading the output much - occasional code reviews from the AI side to catch some issues here and there, and making small use-and-forget tools that are needed right now. So I can’t be considered an agentic coder, nor can I consider myself a vibe coder, but it would be unfair to say I don’t have any AI experience.\n\nRecently, my wife, who isn’t a coder herself, decided to code a small Python app for her own needs using Claude Code. I won’t go into much detail, but the app is basically a data-crunching machine with very little UI, so it is very hard to see whether things are going right just by looking at the result.\n\nAt first, she was really excited about the pace she had and how helpful Claude was, but after a while she started to notice that something was off here and something was off there. Digging into the problem seemed to fix one issue, but then others started to pop up. After a while, she discovered that the core logic was completely wrong.\n\nWe thought, “It’s probably because she is a non-coder, so she can’t wield the tool properly due to lack of experience.” So I thought I could give this agentic coding thing a shot and see how good these tools are.\n\nMy plan was simple: collect the useful discoveries about her project into a nice form that I would use next. I spent something like two days doing research, writing the architecture document and prompts that I was going to use for the greenfield reimplementation of the project. I was quite meticulous in describing the desired architecture, requirements, structures, and results, alongside writing down all the edge cases I knew of.\n\nMy expectations were quite high. I thought I was actually going to make it work quite fast. If I were to give my document to a junior dev, they would probably produce code that wasn’t the best, but still a project that worked.\n\nAfter starting a new session with all this preparation, I was pleased with how fast it was going. But after the initial stage finished, I reviewed the code and found a lot of things that even a newbie junior probably wouldn’t do. There were multiple constants here and there that were supposed to be the same across the code, even though my documentation explicitly stated that there should only be one source of truth for such things. The simulation path and the actual working code path - it has two modes: re-simulating the past using existing historical data and actually working in real time - were basically duplicates of each other. The worst part was that the duplicates weren’t exact. Again, I had clearly stated in my docs that I wanted them to be as close as possible and to use the same abstractions.\n\nMy first thought was, “It’s probably me doing something wrong, but it’s fixable.” Then the cycle of pain and fixes started. The project wasn’t extremely huge, but I wanted to try this approach that a lot of people promote, where they don’t write the code. The issue with it is that you either trust the machine and don’t review the code much, or it defeats the purpose, because the time you need to spend understanding the system and the code behind it is often more than I would spend writing it myself. Of course, you should also review the code you write yourself, but we can probably all agree that it is an easier task.\n\nMy approach was simple: I wanted to make sure the core was working and then proceed to expanding the functionality. Despite basically writing no code and only querying Claude about how it had implemented this and that, and guiding it in fixing things, it was extremely exhausting. I never knew where the system was correct and where implementation mistakes had been made. Since it was just the core, not much proper testing could be done. I was just sitting there, doing nothing, and feeling how draining the experience was.\n\nClaude made one mistake after another. Sometimes it broke old code. Sometimes extremely stupid things surfaced that no reasonable person would ever do, like simulating things on much smaller timescales while only having data for larger timeframes. After a few days of fighting the machine, I got something that I could call a working program.\n\nDespite not writing a single line of code, I felt devastated and exhausted. Never in my life have I felt so bad about making software. Taking everything into consideration, I really don’t know how people use coding agents in this mode. I am sure that if the thing you are trying to do is really boilerplate-heavy and doesn’t have any complex logic, then you can probably one-shot it. But I feel like writing it the old-school way would probably have been faster, considering I spent a total of five days on this experiment.\n\nDon’t get me wrong: I do feel some net gains from AI. The ease of obtaining information and examples, alongside small bits of boilerplate here and there, makes my life easier. But making a whole project with AI is just a miserable experience, because you can never trust what it wrote, and you need to think ten times harder just to catch what it might have done wrong.","offTopic":false},{"id":"93386aa3-d397-4925-94b6-dc099c3f8c43","excerpt":"Dealing with huge PR culture — I joined a company 8 months back and while the team is very smart and capable, they love pushing out monstrous pull requests \n\nThe team is fond of AI and I give credit that I think they use it fairly well. The code is good quality, and while they lean heavily onto AI, it's clear that ever","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1tc4ufa/dealing_with_huge_pr_culture/","role":"request","weight":0.9916667,"occurredAt":"2026-05-13T16:29:50.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":1,"confidence":0.7291667,"matchedPatterns":["manual_process"],"statement":"If I review them manually it takes a long time, and I'm doubtful of my ability to effectively review after seeing so much code in one go.","title":"Dealing with huge PR culture","body":"I joined a company 8 months back and while the team is very smart and capable, they love pushing out monstrous pull requests \n\nThe team is fond of AI and I give credit that I think they use it fairly well. The code is good quality, and while they lean heavily onto AI, it's clear that everyone here has a strong programming ability \n\nThe situation I face is they're pumping out these monster pull requests. It's usually at least 100 file changes, but 200-300 is normal\n\nThey implement entire features, full vertical slices. They'll perform adhoc renames and refractors, so in a 300 file PR, maybe 100 are actual new code, and the others are just tweaks. It is a mono repo too so it's all there.\n\nThe team bangs on about delivering smaller units of work, but it's seemingly just talk. One guy, credit to him, will do multiple PRs into an intermediary branch so it's more digestible, so you can review one piece at a time. But otherwise it's just these crazy sized ones\n\nI'm struggling to figure out how to deal with this. If I review them manually it takes a long time, and I'm doubtful of my ability to effectively review after seeing so much code in one go. I have tried to leverage AI to help me distill the PR into something readable... but that gives me a bad taste, getting AI to review AI code.\n\nI'm imagining this is a growing problem now we have AI tools. I don't blame the AI here, it's obviously the developers getting overzealous and wanting to pump out a feature per pull request.\n\nIt feels like there's little point raising this to them, because they all acknowledge it's a bad practice to move away from, but none of them actually are... and as a relatively new hire I don't have the social capital to try do anything about it\n\nFeels like my options are either to manually review, to use the AI to help me review, to rubberstamp, or to not engage (not ideal)\n\nCan't imagine I'm the only one facing this. Anyone got any tips?","offTopic":true},{"id":"95e694d5-f628-4685-bd72-dd3ef3763b27","excerpt":"From Tech Support to SRE Lead, but feeling obsolete in the AI era — where do I go from here? — I’m writing this mostly out of frustration and uncertainty about where my career is heading. I’d really appreciate perspectives from people who have been in infrastructure/SRE for a long time.\n\nI started my career in support,","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/devopsjobs/comments/1vvkqu9/from_tech_support_to_sre_lead_but_feeling/","role":"request","weight":0.98266095,"occurredAt":"2026-08-22T18:58:30.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"devopsjobs","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.24595137,"sentiment":0.12371134,"confidence":0.78868324,"matchedPatterns":["how_can_i","terrible"],"statement":"Within my current/previous teams, I gradually became the person people came to when something was broken.","title":"From Tech Support to SRE Lead, but feeling obsolete in the AI era — where do I go from here?","body":"I’m writing this mostly out of frustration and uncertainty about where my career is heading. I’d really appreciate perspectives from people who have been in infrastructure/SRE for a long time.\n\nI started my career in support, moved into Linux system administration, then transitioned into DevOps, Senior DevOps, and eventually SRE. Over the years, I’ve worked across infrastructure, FinOps, Terraform, Kubernetes, production troubleshooting, and pretty much whatever needed to be figured out.\n\nWithin my current/previous teams, I gradually became the person people came to when something was broken. Most of my reputation is actually within my immediate team.\n\nNewer engineers and juniors in my team often see me as someone who knows a lot about systems and can quickly help them when they’re stuck. Some of them consider me a role model.\n\nBut I want to make an important distinction here.\n\nI’m not some well-known expert across the organization.\n\nManagement, people from other teams, and senior engineers outside my immediate circle don’t necessarily know me as the person who solves these problems.\n\nPart of that is probably my own fault. I’m not particularly social at work. I don’t spend much time networking, talking to other teams, or making my work visible. So a lot of the expertise I’ve built is effectively contained within the team I’m working with.\n\nAnd that becomes important later in this story.\n\nMy actual technical strength\n\nMy strength has always been understanding how systems work.\n\nI came from Linux administration, so when something breaks, I tend to go back to fundamentals — processes, networking, filesystems, permissions, CPU, memory, I/O, DNS, etc.\n\nThat approach has helped me debug production issues very quickly.\n\nKubernetes is a good example. I’ve seen very experienced engineers treat Kubernetes as this huge, complicated thing. I usually approach it by going back to the underlying concepts and fundamentals.\n\nI don’t necessarily know every Kubernetes feature or every implementation detail, but I can usually reason about what the underlying system is doing and work backwards from the symptoms.\n\nThat has served me very well.\n\nBut there is something I’ve never really been comfortable admitting:\n\nI’m not a software engineer, and I’m not good at coding.\n\nEven writing a moderately complex Bash script can be difficult for me. I’ve always been amazed by people who can sit down and write incredibly clean Bash scripts that almost look like proper software programs.\n\nTerraform is another example\n\nI’ve probably reviewed and discussed a huge amount of Terraform over the years.\n\nBut the uncomfortable truth is:\n\nI’ve never really written Terraform properly from scratch myself.\n\nWhen another engineer writes Terraform, I can understand the infrastructure they’re trying to create.\n\nI can identify whether the networking makes sense, whether the IAM permissions are correct, whether the architecture will actually work, what resources need to exist, what the expected outcome should be, etc.\n\nI can give suggestions because I understand the underlying infrastructure.\n\nBut when the discussion gets into Terraform-specific programming logic — complex expressions, module patterns, loops, abstractions, etc. — there are times when I don’t fully understand what they’re doing.\n\nYet within my team, people sometimes assume I know Terraform extremely well.\n\nThe truth is much more uncomfortable:\n\nI understand what the Terraform is supposed to achieve much better than I understand how to write the Terraform itself.\n\nThat distinction has probably been hidden for a long time because my systems knowledge allowed me to compensate for it.\n\nAI has exposed that gap\n\nRecently, I started using AI tools like Claude to automate some of my work.\n\nI can describe what I need, get a script or application generated, test it, and accomplish something that previously would have taken me much longer.\n\nI even used Claude to generate Terraform and raised PRs from it. The PRs were good.\n\nFrom the outside, it probably looks like I’ve now become capable of doing something I couldn’t previously do.\n\nBut internally, I know the truth.\n\nI still don’t have the ability to confidently sit down and write that Terraform from scratch.\n\nAnd that makes me uncomfortable.\n\nI recently used Claude to build something in Go.\n\nThe UI looks good. On the surface, it looks like something I could confidently show to people.\n\nBut I have to be honest:\n\nI don’t properly understand a single line of the Go code.\n\nThe actual functionality isn’t where I want it to be, and I don’t have the confidence to show it to other engineers.\n\nIf someone asked me:\n\n“Why did you implement it this way?”\n\n“What is this goroutine doing?”\n\n“Why is this channel needed?”\n\n“What happens in this failure scenario?”\n\nI probably wouldn’t have good answers.\n\nThat’s an extremely uncomfortable feeling.\n\nI understand the problem I’m trying to solve. I can reason about the architecture. I can discuss the system design with AI and keep pushing it toward a solution.\n\nBut somewhere between the idea and the actual implementation, there is a gap.\n\nAI is filling that gap for me, but I’m not sure I’m actually crossing it myself.\n\nAnd then I see people “vibe coding”\n\nThis is probably where my frustration gets worse.\n\nI see people who aren’t necessarily infrastructure engineers using AI to build surprisingly polished tools.\n\nThey can “vibe code” something over a weekend, put together a dashboard, show it to everyone, and suddenly have a tangible output.\n\nMy manager also uses Claude and has built dashboards and tools with it.\n\nBecause they know my technical background, the expectation is sometimes:\n\n“You know the systems. You can use Claude and build a tool for this.”\n\nAnd technically, yes, I can.\n\nBut internally I’m thinking:\n\n“I don’t actually know how to build this.”\n\nI can get AI to produce something, but I don’t necessarily understand the implementation well enough to confidently own it.\n\nAnd because I understand technical internals reasonably well, I think I sometimes make this worse for myself.\n\nWhen I ask AI to build something, I start thinking about edge cases, architecture, scalability, failure modes, integrations, security, observability, future requirements, etc.\n\nThe AI then gives me an increasingly complicated solution.\n\nEventually:\n\nEven I don’t understand the thing I asked it to build.\n\nA recent example: observability\n\nI wanted to take ownership of observability.\n\nMy thinking was around something more ambitious: OpenTelemetry, SigNoz, integrating it with our existing Prometheus setup, logs, traces, metrics, and eventually using AI to make the observability platform more useful.\n\nBut another engineer took the observability problem, used the existing Prometheus setup, put something together, and showcased it.\n\nAnd it worked.\n\nIt was simple, practical, and visible.\n\nI found myself thinking:\n\n“Why didn’t I just do that?”\n\nI was thinking about the bigger architecture and what we could eventually build, while someone else simply used what already existed and delivered something.\n\nThey had something tangible to showcase.\n\nI didn’t.\n\nAnd that bothered me more than I expected.\n\nThe visibility problem\n\nThere is another uncomfortable truth here.\n\nMy technical reputation is mostly inside my own team.\n\nI’m not naturally a social person at work. I don’t go around talking to other teams or advertising what I’m doing.\n\nSo sometimes an issue from another team reaches me indirectly.\n\nI’ll look at it, understand what’s happening, and give a few hints or possible solutions.\n\nThat information then goes back through someone else.\n\nThey communicate the solution to their team.\n\nFrom the outside, it looks like they solved it.\n\nAnd again, that’s partly my fault.\n\nI don’t communicate enough. I don’t build enough relationships. I don’t make my work visible.\n\nSo there are probably people in the organization who have no idea what I’m actually capable of technically.\n\nAnd that creates another problem: the things that I thought made me valuable aren’t necessarily visible outside the small circle where I’ve built that reputation.\n\nThen I was made SRE Lead\n\nI’ve recently been made the SRE Lead by our Director.\n\nI’m proud that they trusted me with the role.\n\nBut I’ve been an IC throughout my career. I’ve never really been a management or leadership person.\n\nTechnically, I can jump in and help people.\n\nBut leadership is different.\n\nInfluencing people, setting direction, building strategy, communicating priorities, getting people aligned, delegating effectively, building relationships across teams — these aren’t things I’ve historically been particularly good at.\n\nAnd I see other senior engineers who are much stronger in those areas.\n\nThey’re also using AI to compensate for some of their technical gaps.\n\nSometimes I feel like they’re now outpacing me from both directions.\n\nThey can communicate better.\n\nThey can influence better.\n\nThey can use AI to build things quickly.\n\nAnd because they are more visible, people actually see the output.\n\nMeanwhile, I have a lot of technical knowledge that mostly exists inside my own head and inside the small team I work with.\n\nThe weirdest part\n\nThe weirdest part is that when I’m around juniors or people who aren’t as technically experienced, I genuinely feel like I know a lot.\n\nI can often figure out what’s happening very quickly.\n\nBut when I’m talking to a strong developer or another engineer with a strong programming mindset, I suddenly feel like I know nothing.\n\nThey talk about code-level logic, abstractions, concurrency, data structures, implementation details, etc., and I struggle to follow.\n\nAnd then I feel dumb.\n\nIt feels like I’ve spent my career building a very strong understanding of how systems work, but I’ve never properly developed the ability to build software myself.\n\nFor a long time, that gap didn’t stop me.\n\nMy systems knowledge was valuable enough to compensate for it.\n\nBut AI has changed the equation.\n\nSomeone with less infrastructure knowledge can now ask Claude about Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, networking, etc., and get a reasonably good answer.\n\nAnd someone like me can ask Claude to write the code I couldn’t previously write.\n\nSo I’m sitting somewhere in the middle, wondering:\n\nWhat exactly is my advantage now?\n\nI don’t want to leave the technical side of engineering.\n\nI genuinely enjoy infrastructure, systems, debugging, Kubernetes, architecture, and solving difficult production problems.\n\nBut I also don’t want to spend the next few years defending a skill set that AI is continuously making easier for everyone else to access.\n\nI don’t know whether the answer is:\n\n“Learn software engineering properly.”\n\nOr:\n\n“Double down on systems, architecture, and technical leadership.”\n\nOr:\n\n“Become extremely good at using AI and learn how to direct it effectively.”\n\nOr:\n\n“Work on communication, influence, and leadership because technical knowledge alone isn’t enough anymore.”\n\nMaybe it’s all of them.\n\nBut I don’t know what to prioritize.\n\nSo I’m asking people who have been through something similar:\n\n\t•\tIf you came from an IC/infrastructure background and moved into SRE or technical leadership, how did you develop leadership and strategic influence? \n\t•\tIf coding wasn’t originally your strength, did you eventually learn software engineering properly, or did you double down on your systems expertise? \n\t•\tHow are experienced infrastructure engineers using AI without becoming completely dependent on it? \n\t•\tHow do you deal with the feeling that AI can now produce things you couldn’t previously produce yourself? \n\t•\tHow important is it to actually learn programming deeply at this stage of an SRE career? \n\t•\tShould I be trying to become a better programmer, a better architect, a better leader, or a better AI-assisted engineer? \n\t•\tHow do I get better at making my work and expertise visible without becoming someone who constantly self-promotes? \n\t•\tAnd perhaps most important","offTopic":false},{"id":"b1062ae2-b52e-48bd-ab9f-5ca6306fc9c6","excerpt":"2yrs at current company. new project is 99% ai generated. i don't know how to handle — i don't want to give away too many details but: my employer (small company) pivoted what my team was doing to focusing on a brand new project that has to be delivered by september. The issue is that the MVP was generated by Claude in","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1v6n7d7/2yrs_at_current_company_new_project_is_99_ai/","role":"request","weight":0.96106666,"occurredAt":"2026-07-25T23:24:06.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":0,"confidence":0.70666665,"matchedPatterns":["urgent"],"statement":"I used to generally like my job but this project is giving me anxiety: the deadline, the AI generation, the imposter syndrome.","title":"2yrs at current company. new project is 99% ai generated. i don't know how to handle","body":"i don't want to give away too many details but: my employer (small company) pivoted what my team was doing to focusing on a brand new project that has to be delivered by september. The issue is that the MVP was generated by Claude in its entirety and it's very low-level code. I was assigned to this project and every time they ask me to review a PR (which can be small or thousands of lines), I either reject the task by asking someone else to review it, or approve it without really understanding what i'm approving. I feel like if I had to review it properly I would have to spend a week understanding the concepts and the codebase. But at the same time, the foundations of this project are changing rapidly, so I'm like, \"what's the point in spending time learning it?\"\n\nI don't know how my teammates generating the code feel about this. I also don't know if they themselves understand what Claude wrote. I already told my manager that I feel overwhelmed by all these PRs and the response I got was \"yeah\". And then crickets.\n\n \nIn parallel, i am in the final stage of interviews with a company and tbh I only started looking because, you know, you gotta always be looking; but if I got an offer I think that it wouldn't be the craziest thing to take it because I don't know how much longer I will be able to tolerate this situation. I used to generally like my job but this project is giving me anxiety: the deadline, the AI generation, the imposter syndrome.\n\n \nHelp? ","offTopic":false},{"id":"d271be34-cac4-4385-9584-8012a45982ab","excerpt":"3 years as a CTO - Another follow up — For the last couple of years I have been writing a yearly post talking about my experience as a small company CTO. You can check them [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1l1e815/2_years_as_a_cto_a_follow_up/). As last time, I got some very interesting comments","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1tc0ktj/3_years_as_a_cto_another_follow_up/","role":"request","weight":0.9317138,"occurredAt":"2026-05-13T14:01:38.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.24,"sentiment":0.50877196,"confidence":0.7513821,"matchedPatterns":["wish"],"statement":"Still learning though and I wish I was rich and did not have to work.","title":"3 years as a CTO - Another follow up","body":"For the last couple of years I have been writing a yearly post talking about my experience as a small company CTO. You can check them [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1l1e815/2_years_as_a_cto_a_follow_up/). As last time, I got some very interesting comments, some thoughtful DMs and some nasty responses. I said it last time and will say it again, if you don't find these posts interesting, downvote and move on, no need to be an asshole. You never know what others are going through.\n\nSo let's get to it. Long story short: first year was shitty, second year was less shity, third year has been slightly shitty. First year was a constant struggle with the former head of product and an outsourced team, eventually having panic attacks and wanting to quit. I fired the outsourced team and the head of productdecided to leave on his own. Second year was better, hired some great devs I can fully rely on and tried to create a healthier organization.\n\nThis third year has had it's highs and lows. The goal of this year was to build a new MVP for a new product we want our current clients to adopt. The development team has proven to be more than capable of achieving this goal, but we have been constantly slowed down by our new product team. This new product team is the result of hiring a new Product Owner that's very good at his job but keeping as Head of Product a boomer that's been on the sales team for years and wanted a promotion. This guy convinced the CEO he wanted the product leadership role without any other experience than being a sales rep for 20+ years . The result hasn ot been great and has caused lots of friction between him and my team, but also between him and the new PO. As a sales rep, his role has consisted in constantly pushing the team to deliver while not providing any kind of priorities nor making decisions about the product. At the same time he has prevented the new PO from making any important decissions and has systematically dropped most ofhis ideas. He is the kind of guy that does not want to make any decissions just in case anything goes south. In parallel, he does not rely on anyone else making decisions. \n\nWe were given a year to build this new MVP and for the first 9 months we barely did anything. I pushed this guy to make decissions, bypassed him and made those decissions with the other PO, argued constantly about how I was doing his job and suddenly it all stopped. He started being defensive and putting spokes in our own wheels. SOme of our devs started to speak up against him during meetings. Sprint plannings were miserable as the priorities where non-existent. \n\nOne of the greates examples was the decission to build a chatbot within our product (yes, again) that connects to ChatGPT and answers questions for our users. That would make sense if at that point we had had anything to answer questions about. It was a greenfield and almost no business logic had been developed at the time. When I confronted him about this decision his answer revealed what I already thought: he is a sales guy. He said \"this will help us sell the product because everyone wants AI\". First, I doubt that. Second, at these early stages the goal is to prove your product works and solves a problem, not selling.\n\nWhile all of these was happening I was requiring the CEO to get this guy back to sales, where he should have always stayed. We've been discussing for severalm months that the product team should not be under his chair but mine. Our CEO does not have previous experience developing software so his POV is really far from reality. \n\nIn any case, the team kept somehow delivering and the feedback we have gotten so far has been quite positive although no sales yet. In any case, my team has decided to bypass the head of product and work closer to the other PO, who's been great so far. I also work close to this PO, and he is scared his boss is not happy about it, but I am working to protect the guy. \n\nOne of the toughest struggles this year has been the Claude Code hype, and I am already echausted. I don't want to sound like AI is the worst. I don't want to sound like I believe in software craftmanship. For me, software development has always been a job and any tool that makes it easier will be welcome. But, there are some problems that come with these tools.\n\n* I do believe Claude Code makes developers faster. It has it's problems, but overall, it's working fine. My main concern with this tool is how it's being pushed as a KPI. The more tokens we use, the better. It reminds me of how, when I was very junior dev, a very old-school company I worked at measured our performance based on lines of code. The result was all of us changed our coding style and started adding empty lines and brackets in new lines and all kind of stuff that made the code worse. It's the same with tokens. \n* Development speed has increased so the cost of development has shifted. It's not a matter of adding more, but prioritising according to the actual value users and clients will see. We can now prototype faster than ever to prove if a solution will work. The cost of delay has shifted from delivering slowly to delivering anything. A good Product Owner needs to know what to prioritise and that means dropping other things. When speed is no longer an issue, direction is. For the first time in my career my development team delivers faster than the Product team can define new features. This has taken us to develop low priority items that were there in the backlog. Add that to an incompetent head of product that boycots anything we try to work on. Not great. \n* Collaboration is a must and devs need to be part of the cycle from the very early stages. AI is also isolating team members. Instead of asking for a second opinion we tend to ask Claude and asume it is right. As the cost of prototyping has decreased, one thing that's working wonders for us is meeting with the PO and our designer and discussing a feature on paper (or a digital whiteboard) and then spend a couple of hours building a prototype to show it in action. We then show the prototype to our designer and PO and either they approve or suggest changes. Once everything's clear, evertyhing's written down on a ticket and worked on from scratch and in a couple of days most it will be developed.\n\nI don't want to sound like I know what I'm doing and others don't. I also messed up big time during this past year.\n\nI had to let go the first developer I hired when I joined. He is a great guy, capable of the very best, but was struggling delivering. I tried talking to him and bring him back on track during almost six months but at some point other team members were tired of his performance and had to fire him. I still question myself about it. Not about firing him, but if it took me too long. Another one of the devs is very picky about how we structure our code and can be very strict when approving PRs to the point of rewriting features from scratch to prove a point. I had to sit down with him and ask him to stop because most of the times he was making a fuss over minor details. This did not really work and now he is being passive aggresive against his coleagues, which is not great andI'm afraid I'll have to seriously talk to him about it. \n\nThe biggest failure over this past year was not achieving the main goal. We were given a year to deliver an MVP and it's taken us almost 2 extra quarters to deliver it. I was explaining the CEO just the other day that the main issue was trying to goldplate everything. An MVP is an MVP and both, product and development teams, did not want to release because it was not ready. Looking back, we could have delivered and granted access to our existingclients forfree and most of the feedback we arenowgetting we would have gotten earlier. There are many things we developed assuming our clients needed that are now being rolled back.\n\nAnother big fuckup took place almost a year ago. We wanted to implement a workflow manager to allow users to program automations within the product without the need to code. Think of tools like make or zapier. It is quite a complex task and we did not know where to start at. I suggested we took two days and make teams of one frontender and one backender to prototype a solution. They competed, each team had a different approach and at theend of the day our Head of Product did not understand why the feature was not in prod yet. I was clear (or at least I thought I was) this was a prototype and anythig done during those two days would be discarded and started over, but of course they wanted it to get to production. In the end it took us a few weeks to have a first, very poor version of it, but truth be told, it's really easy to add new \"boxes\" to it, so new developments take a couple of hours (maybe a day or two if the inner logic is complex). This might sound like a win, but at that time it caused frustration and confrontation between product and development to the point we have forbidden the use of the word \"hackathon\".\n\nAs usual, some pieces of advice and some things I regret:\n\n* Technical leadership is people leadership. We usually think a technical guy willnot manage people, but at theend ofthe day it all comes to agreements between developers. Managing egos (including our own) is a skill.\n* When something's not working, act fast. Letting people go when it's right will be seen as strong leadership. Waiting until things are all fucked up will only cause more damage.\n* Fail fast is a state of the mind. AI allows to prototype fast, but it comes with a new skill to learn, which is explaining those prototypes are not deliverables. \n\nAnyway, interesting year. Better than the previous one, but also more exhausting. I really hope this helps anyone that's in a similar place. I'll read you in the comments. Be nice.\n\nTLDR: Third year has had it's struggles, I have developed a love-hate relationship with Claude Code, but overall it's been better. Still learning though and I wish I was rich and did not have to work.\n\n","offTopic":true},{"id":"9bdc8b8b-522e-4a3f-a9ee-4da465ab2c9a","excerpt":"Am I being unreasonable about my current work environment, or is this a legitimate red flag? — I'm a junior software developer and I'm currently 5 months into my second software development job. Lately I've been seriously considering looking for another job, but I'd like an outside perspective because I'm not sure whet","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareeradvice/comments/1vtv47j/am_i_being_unreasonable_about_my_current_work/","role":"pain","weight":0.91577756,"occurredAt":"2026-08-20T20:30:24.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"cscareeradvice","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.5890909,"sentiment":-0.27272728,"confidence":0.57629025,"matchedPatterns":["frustrating"],"statement":"I recognize that as a junior developer I have responsibilities too: I need to ask a lot of questions and become better at dealing with pressure, but this way of working is driving me crazy.","title":"Am I being unreasonable about my current work environment, or is this a legitimate red flag?","body":"I'm a junior software developer and I'm currently 5 months into my second software development job. Lately I've been seriously considering looking for another job, but I'd like an outside perspective because I'm not sure whether I'm being unreasonable or whether this is genuinely a bad working environment for someone at my level.\n\nMy previous job was at a relatively small outsourcing company as a frontend developer. The salary was low and was on-site, which were the main reasons I eventually left, but the development process was much more structured.\n\nThere were a QA team, DBA team, an implementation team, developers with different levels of experience, and documentation for the requirements was usually much more detailed. For example, a requirement could specify which database fields were involved, what a button should do, its validations, etc(a pdf with like 5-8 pages for a single feature).\n\nThere were still problems. Sometimes the owners disagreed about how a feature should work, which resulted in rework. However, I generally knew what I was supposed to build, had people around me who were responsible for different parts of the process and because the requirements were clear enough.\n\nI left after about 8 months because I was offered a significantly better salary and a hybrid position at my current company(huge mistake, I regret every single day🤦🏽♂️).\n\nThe current company is larger and pays better. I work Monday-Friday, with two remote days per week. On paper, it looked like a clear improvement.\n\nHowever, the development process is very different.\n\nThere are only four developers(including me) working on the internal systems, It’s just the four of us, nobody else.\n\nThe CEO personally assigns development tasks and provides the requirements. The problem is that the requirements frequently don't contain enough information to understand the complete flow.\n\nI'll start implementing something based on the poor requirements, then discover that something is unclear and ask questions. Sometimes, during those conversations, the CEO realizes that the original requirement doesn't actually describe how the system should work and changes the requirements again and again.\n\nThis has happened multiple times.\n\nMy first assignment when I started here was an extremely large task for someone who was just joining the company with no onboarding process, the task was supposed to be relatively small according to the original requirements. Once they actually analyzed the flow, it turned out to be much larger than initially expected. I ended up working on it for around 2 months. I asked for help, I asked questions, and every time I did, I was bombarded with a lot of information and terminology that I didn't know and ended up more lost than I was before.\n\nThe CEO has been putting more pressure on me because he wants me to complete the tasks quickly, sometimes he talk to me like I have several years in the company like the others.\n\nI'm also working with technologies I had never used before, so this has added another learning curve and due to this and the deadlines I relied a lot on AI tools for all the tasks(and tbh that’s not the type of developer I want to be, I’m not against AI but due to this situation I have to use it for everything in order to survive here).\n\nI recognize that as a junior developer I have responsibilities too: I need to ask a lot of questions and become better at dealing with pressure, but this way of working is driving me crazy.\n\nMaybe I'm simply not experienced enough to handle this kind of environment.\n\nBut I'm starting to wonder whether this is simply a mismatch between how I work best and how this company operates.\n\nAt the same time, I'm realizing that I value having proper requirements, code reviews, QA, mentorship, and a reasonably structured development process much more than I previously thought.\n\nI always try to give 100%, I’ve even worked overtime to make some progress but apparently that’s not enough.\n\nSo I'd like some honest opinions from more experienced developers:\n\nIs this a normal environment that I should learn to adapt to as a junior? \nHow much responsibility should the developer have when requirements are constantly changing or incomplete? \nWould you consider this a legitimate reason to start looking for another job?\n\nI'd genuinely like to hear if I'm approaching this the wrong way.","offTopic":false},{"id":"d0462b44-6f03-45ce-b77d-2452e6a58b7e","excerpt":"Transition from Internal IT to Devops Engineer — I have been working as internal IT (corpeng,sys admin) for the last 7 years, mainly managing various SaaSes from google workspace to Okta, mdm's etc and since 3 months i am now working as a platform engineer for the same company but i feel like i am still struggling alot","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1vrx2ez/transition_from_internal_it_to_devops_engineer/","role":"request","weight":0.89050716,"occurredAt":"2026-08-18T18:08:24.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"devops","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":0.5,"confidence":0.6547847,"matchedPatterns":["missing_feature"],"statement":"Then the other problem is that since as mentioned i have a lack of fundamentals i am relying a lot on AI and i can do everything and everything is ok but the problem is that if i dont use AI i am not able to figure out anything on my own a…","title":"Transition from Internal IT to Devops Engineer","body":"I have been working as internal IT (corpeng,sys admin) for the last 7 years, mainly managing various SaaSes from google workspace to Okta, mdm's etc and since 3 months i am now working as a platform engineer for the same company but i feel like i am still struggling alot to get the fundamentals right. \n\n I am the only platform engineer in the company + my manager, and my manager is the one who has setup everything, but overall the platform is very decentralized where software engineers own their infra and they manage it them self, we act more as a high level support for them, but for day to day they handle everything themself. This is good for me since i don't have much pressure while i get used with the role but on the other side since everything is setup i don't have many projects/tasks where i can learn more. \n\n Then the other problem is that since as mentioned i have a lack of fundamentals i am relying a lot on AI and i can do everything and everything is ok but the problem is that if i dont use AI i am not able to figure out anything on my own and this is somehow killing my motivation and making me feel very bad and not sure how to overcome this even after being in the role for 3 months now. \n\nAnyone has been in similar situation that can give me some feedback?","offTopic":true},{"id":"e32d7f32-6ec6-4fa4-a06c-241b1fb867d6","excerpt":"My entire software development workflow is AI now, and it feels both exhausting and soulless — I've been a SWE for a little over 4 years, and Claude has basically been a permanent coworker for the last year.\n\nAt first, it was great. I already knew ChatGPT and Cursor, so when my team got Claude I adapted quickly and end","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1vi1i7m/my_entire_software_development_workflow_is_ai_now/","role":"pain","weight":0.72386366,"occurredAt":"2026-08-07T14:02:26.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"cscareerquestions","intent":"other","painScore":0.18181819,"sentiment":-0.45454547,"confidence":0.6125,"matchedPatterns":[],"statement":"My entire software development workflow is AI now, and it feels both exhausting and soulless.","title":"My entire software development workflow is AI now, and it feels both exhausting and soulless","body":"I've been a SWE for a little over 4 years, and Claude has basically been a permanent coworker for the last year.\n\nAt first, it was great. I already knew ChatGPT and Cursor, so when my team got Claude I adapted quickly and ended up way ahead of most of my coworkers in how I used it. I even got a significant raise partly because of that.\n\nClaude did a lot of the coding, but I was still doing the engineering. I understood the system, made the decisions, reviewed the output, and almost never shipped bugs or regressions.\n\nNow I'm just tired of LLMs, at least professionally.\n\nThe tools got so good, and I've built so many skills, MCPs and docs around them, that a lot of my job is basically: tell Claude to read the project .md, read the ticket, press enter.\n\nAnd because everyone has access to the same tools now, productivity expectations exploded.\n\nSprints that used to have 5 big tasks or 10 smaller ones now have several times that workload. We're expected to run multiple Claude instances in parallel and constantly multitask. Proper testing and engineering discussions have increasingly been replaced by automated tests, MCPs that can test on screen, and a \"quantity over quality\" approach.\n\nThe weirdest part is that AI has taken over communication too.\n\nPOs can feed client requirements into an internal Claude MCP connected to Azure, which outputs a task already tailored to the codebase. The SWE gives that task to Claude, Claude writes the code, automated tests find problems, and another AI generated message tells the SWE what failed.\n\nYou ask someone a question, they send it to their AI, send the answer back to you, and then you send their answer to your AI.\n\nEveryone has this little AI parrot on their shoulder rewriting everything into the same sterile corporate language.\n\nI miss calling a PO and actually trying to understand a problem. I miss sitting with another engineer and debugging some horrible production issue together. I miss people actually knowing the systems they work on and sharing that knowledge.\n\nNow I barely feel familiar with most of the things I ship.\n\nWhen I get praised at work, I feel like an impostor. It doesn't feel like I built something. It feels like I gave experienced instructions to a magic shell that built it for me.\n\nI'm currently thinking about starting some kind of side business selling physical products. Maybe it'll fail, but at least I'd be learning something new, solving unfamiliar problems and actually exercising my brain again.\n\nI never thought I'd miss staying up all night fixing a critical bug or obsessively working on a personal project, but well, here we are.\n\nFun fact: the original draft of this post was clumsy and too long, so what did I do? You probably know it by now. Sorry, but I just can't help it, and I guess it's how most people who work with LLMs feel right now.\n\nEDIT: I removed the mention to a certain MCP because apparently some people took issue with it and thought this was an ad for some reason, even though it's a negative post, so there you go I guess.","offTopic":false}],"breakdown":[{"sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","count":21},{"sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","count":1}],"total":22}}