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.