Dev and AI fatigue
Lil bit of background: I’ve been in software dev for the past 5ish years - mostly Java and for 2 somewhat well known product based companies before the current one. Got placed right out of college and the first two years were such an enjoyable experience: independent living in a new city, meeting new people and genuinely enjoying the work I used to do back then. But it’s a far cry from what it looks like rn.
My managers are setting absolutely ABSURD deadlines because “AI se likhwa lo na” - 2 days for a task that previously required at least a week. Claude should write my ERD, write my code, write the testcases for my code, raise the PR - all in the name of efficiency.
I have product managers using claude code to raise PRs and asking me to review them?! And when they predictably get rejected - I’m asked to give detailed review comments on what to fix exactly so that they can fire off another prompt asking claude to fix it.
Stakeholders in business are reviewing ERDs (engineering requirement docs) (nobody asked them to do this btw) by feeding the entire document and the entire codebase to claude. And are asking surface level questions - which I answer - and they don’t have any counter points because obviously.
And don’t even get me started on the quality of interns we’re getting nowadays. I remember our batch of interns (when I joined) and being genuinely intimidated and impressed with how knowledgeable and like curious some of my peers were, and how quickly they picked up on stuff. Now everyone has the same 5 projects they did in college, the same AI generated resume. These people ace the online interview and absolutely shit the bed when it comes to in person interviews.
I yearn for the days when I actually had to walk over to a senior engineer’s desk and ask him a couple questions about what I was building - having a genuine discussion about multiple ways of building something. A conversation you could walk away from a lil bit smarter.
I understand using AI as a tool, and it is genuinely quite helpful sometimes and has improved my efficiency, but there’s a limit to this shit. This is just the tip of the iceberg btw but I feel that the post is long enough already.
Much needed post
Maybe what most humans wanted was not really knowledge, but the semblance of knowledge. Maybe what LLMs are really highlighting is that humans are actually okay having puddle deep insights about things, while having the breadth of an ocean
You might have had a better experience with your colleagues.
But I absolutely do not miss the days where I had to walk over to ask the senior engineers my doubt.
I won't say all , majority of them were rude , egoistic. I did have some good managers , but there were days when they weren't in a good mood and not so helping.
I love the fact that I don't have to go through all these troubles with AI. I can be as dumb as possible in front of it , I can keep asking the same questions again and again till I understand what needs to be done.
Yeah your points are valid about the quality of engineers that are now onboarding , I just wanted to put a different POV here
I kinda agree with your points tbh. I consider myself one of the lucky ones - the mentors i’ve had over the years, especially the ones at the start of my career were very good engineers, but more than that - they were good people. I’ve kept in touch with quite a few of them after leaving my old companies as well.
Now I’m at the stage where I’m a mentor to the junior engineers and I try my best to pay this kindness forward. Someone has to break the cycle of shitty managers/senior devs lmao.
Good mentorship can make or break your overall experience working at a company imo.
As a product manager. I have lost the essence of actual work. I hate my job because there is nothing that I am generating value. We are creating AI tools that will generate some AI slop that doesn’t add any value to a business. C-level use chat gpt and get some ideas and dump it on us and we need to use Ai to quickly get the PRD ready, no market research, no validation, no brainstorming, no thinking on how it will impact users…nothing…then I send this to my devs and they use AI to just build the features not thinking what, how and why it makes sense and downstream impact. Then the GTM team pitches it to customers without knowing anything about the underlying concept and vision, so its just a fugazi at this point. We are getting dumber and dumber tbh, AI is getting better in learning all our work. Everyone has a false sense of brilliance….every PM thinks he knows everything, every coder knows he is better than PM and doesn’t need them, designers tho leave, i feel sad for them. They don’t have bandwidth to ideate, everyone is sending them prototypes to mimic. I have lost the enthusiasm of being excited about AI.
Man, your perspective is as bleak as the ones devs have, if not more.
I remember joining my product and business teams for on ground research earlier in my career - was a requirement I had to complete as an intern. Was quite against it initially because of “I want to write code and features for these guys - why tf am I talking to users on ground”
But the experience overall was insane. Got to learn so much about the behind the scenes stuff - how a feature sometimes begins as an off hand comment from a user like “what if this app had xyz” and then the team gets an idea - market + on ground research is done, a shit ton of data is looked at and a month later I get a PRD written which has a glimpse of the hard work and effort that went into it.
To think that all this is replaced by some C suite guy who prompts an LLM - and copy pastes the response into a slack channel and pats himself on the back. Then goes on to layoff employees because of “AI enabled us to downsize” while taking increasing performance bonuses every year because on paper the company is growing.
Shit future man, this isn’t what I signed up for.
Any solution to this shit?🥲
Adapting seems like the only viable solution tbh. As AI and automation gets better, more companies will adopt this. Even if the models themselves reach a plateau in training - the tools around these have a lot of scope for improvement (think claude code vs talking to chat gpt in the browser)
But over-reliance on this is also a big problem man. I tried writing code the old fashioned way a month ago and it felt - off, and I hated the fact that I’ve become worse at a thing I was so good at before. Since then I’ve started writing personal projects the old fashioned way - using stackoverflow, coffee and AI free vscode 😭
Same, stupid leadership promoting AI Slop
Same here man, managers shoving AI down everyone’s throat. I just want to write some fing code.
This slopshit must stop!
Yeah man.. even I'm using copilot these days with opus 4.6 and I did lot of complex task but still I'm not feeling that I achieved something.. 2 year back when I was developing even a small system I felt like I'm the only one here.. but now that feeling is gone.
My product manager who is just joined .. for creating stories.. assigning task to developers.. etc.. now builds a small poc on python using ai and then poking us like he knew everything.. and somewhere pretend that we are not even working .. bruh really..
I'm also very tired of this ...
Well, need to adjust to changing times
