And the problem isn't even the Junior Zoomer devs running circles around seniors. It's the CTO or Engineering VP himself disappearing for a few months and single-handedly consolidating a handful of products into a full rewrite for the company, excluding most of their engineering team from the process, and then laying them off after.
The problem is the CEO pretending to be an engineer and thinking they know better because they can write English prompts and spit out a hideous prototype.
The problem is Product Owners using LLMs to "write code" while their engineering team does zero human review before merging it, because their AI tooling was made solely responsible for code quality. If something's broken, just prompt a sloppy fix full of hidden performance and security bugs that the automated code review step missed.
If you think this is hyperbole, I was recently laid off from a company that did exactly the above.
Then in 2027, it will be product owners replacing the entire engineering team, including the CTO, because they made their system too reliable to justify their employment, while the "thinkers" get to build the product, engineers be damned.
People with real skills they acquired over a lifetime are no longer shaping business. Reckless efficiency towards being average will rule the day.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, but you're right — being able to crank out ideas on our own is the "killer app" of AI so to speak.
Granted, you would learn a lot more if you had pieced your ideas together manually, but it all depends on your own priorities. The difference is, you're not stuck cleaning up after someone else's bad AI code. That's the side to the AI coin that I think a lot of tech workers are struggling with, eventually leading to rampant burnout.
What would I learn that I don’t already know? The exact syntax and property of Terraform and boto3 for every single one of the 150+ services that AWS offers? How to modify a React based front end written by another developer even though I haven’t and have actively stayed away from front end development for well over a decade?
Will a company pay me more for knowing those details? Will I be more affectively able to architect and design solutions that a company will pay my employer to contract me to do and my company pays me?
They pay me decently not because I “codez real gud”. They pay me because I can go from empty AWS account, empty repo and ambiguous customer requirements to a working solution (after spending time talking to a customer) to a full well thought out architecture + code on time on budget and that meets requirements.
I am not bragging, I’m old those are table stakes to being able to stay in this game for 3 decades
> I am not bragging, I’m old those are table stakes to being able to stay in this game for 3 decades
I'm not old. But slightly past where most would call "young". I see a decent career for the first 5-6 years and then a disruption that completely cuts down on the things you likely had your entire career. Enough time to get a taste of the good times,not enough time to get stable. Meanwhile you buult networks, accomplishments, a seal of trust, in times with overall lower standards.
I don't even use AI but AI has shaped the way I need to navigate the job market and verify knowledge. If you have plenty of pre-AI colleagues and projects to point to you skip all this. But it's a hellscape for people like me.
And I'm sure its an absolute wasteland for new grads
Agreed. I hate to say it, but if anyone thought this train of thought in management was bad now, it's going to get much worse, and unfortunately burnout is going to sweep the industry as tech workers feel evermore underappreciated and invisible to their leaders.
And worse: with few opportunities to grow their skills from rigorous thinking as this blog post describes. Tech workers will be relegated to cleaning up after sloppy AI codebases.
I greatly agree with that deep cynicism and I too am a cynic. I've spent a lot of my career in the legacy code mines. I've spent a lot of my career trying to climb my way out of them or at least find nicer, more lucrative mines. LLMs are the "gift" of legacy-code-as-a-service. They only magnify and amplify the worst parts of my career. The way the "activist shareholder" class like to over-hype and believe in Generative AI magic today only implies things have more room to keep getting worse before they get better (if they ever get better again).
I'm trying my best to adapt to being a "centaur" in this world. (In Chess it has become statistically evident that Human and Bot players of Chess are generally "worse" than the hybrid "Centaur" players.) But even "centaurs" are going to be increasingly taken for granted by companies, and at least for me the sense is growing that as WOPR declared about tic-tac-toe (and thermo-nuclear warfare) "a curious game, the only way to win is not to play". I don't know how I'd bootstrap an entirely new career at this point in my life, but I keep feeling like I need to try to figure that out. I don't want to just be a janitor of other people's messes for the rest of my life.
You touch on an aspect of AI-driven development that I don't think enough people realize: choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing.
The hard problems should be solved with our own brains, and it behooves us to take that route so we can not only benefit from the learnings, but assemble something novel so the business can differentiate itself better in the market.
For all the other tedium, AI seems perfectly acceptable to use.
Where the sticking point comes in is when CEOs, product teams, or engineering leadership put too much pressure on using AI for "everything", in that all solutions to a problem should be AI-first, even if it isn't appropriate—because velocity is too often prioritized over innovation.
That's how I have been using AI the entire time. I do not use Claude Code or Codex. I just use AI to ask questions instead of parsing the increasingly poor Google search results.
I just use the chat options in the web applications with manual copy/pasting back and forth if/when necessary. It's been wonderful because I feel quite productive, and I do not really have much of an AI dependency. I am still doing all of my work, but I can get a quicker answer to simple questions than parsing through a handful of outdated blogs and StackOverflow answers.
If I have learned one thing about programming computers in my career, it is that not all documentation (even official documentation) was created equally.
It's funny you say this because this is considered the "old" way to use LLMs since agents can write code so well, but I don't think enough people realize how much more efficient your preferred approach is compared to the era before LLMs were widely available at all.
Gone are the days of hopeless Googling where 20 minutes of research becomes 3 hours with the possibility of having zero solutions. The sheer efficiency of having reliable, immediate answers is a tremendous improvement, even if you're choosing to write everything by hand using it as a reference.
Same! I don't mind copy/pasting a code snippet or asking a question, and I also always ask it to show its sources for anything non-obvious. That alone cuts down on a lot of bullshit.
Some hope or dreams for what to do with your future, life after work, retirement.
You get to work with other people, overseas.
Talk to those contractors sometimes. They are under tremendous pressure. They are mistreated. One wrong move, they're gone. They undergo tremendous prejudices, and soft racism everyday especially by us FTEs.
You find out that they struggle with the drudgery as well, looking for solutions, better understanding, etc.
We all feel disposable by our corporate masters, but they feel it even more so.
Gladly! I think what I would choose is building on-shore teams exclusively. That's the change I'd like to see more of, while overseas teams build their own economies instead of ripping away jobs from domestic citizens in an already difficult job market.
If it was really America First they might not be so screwed for a free and fair election on November.
If it was really America first, their priorities wouldn't be to try and attack free and fair elections instead of reflecting and actually practicing what they preach.
Big shocker! Gotta love the collusion between government and big tech, it never ends, and our 4th amendment will ever be infringed through these loopholes -- and all will carry on not caring enough about it.
Speaking of which, is there a Tailwind CSS equivalent for React Native? I find passing `style` objects around (ala CSS Modules) to be a pain after using Tailwind for so long in web projects.
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