No, it's not the same work I was doing a year ago, but neither was that the same work I was doing a few years prior, and so forth, all the way back to the beginning of my career.
Now, no one seems to care anymore about quality, it's all about speed speed speed, churning out feature after feature. Code has turned into an unintelligible mush that only other agents can understand, and no one bats an eye. If it runs, it's push to main and deploy, and pick up the next feature. We're back at the rat wheel era, where the more PRs and the more slop you churn, the more "productive" you are
Mind you, I'm trying to be as diligent as I can with agentic coding. I ask for reviews, I have very thorough and looong conversations with the agents, trying to scrutinize every crevice of its investigation and context-acquiring process, in hopes to improve the outcome of what it's going to build, but never reaching the same levels of control and also understanding that we had before.
and I don't even have a choice, as I'm not a heir and I definitely don't have FIRE money yet. I must follow the current and prompt the day away, becoming more and more like a glorified meat proxy.
What a pitiful state of affairs compared to the golden days of software engineering.
/rant
Mostly I just work to live. If I didn't have to worry about that sort of thing, I'd pour my hours into volunteer work. Search and Rescue is the volunteer "work" I enjoy most at the time being. I'm limited in my ability to do it as much as I'd like because it doesn't pay.
Whatever you do, enjoy the process not the outcome.
Yet here we are with tons of coders now admitting they never liked coding to begin with. Insanity.
Coding was the fun part to me. It was sitting down with a nice coffee and some music, and tackling hard problems. Writing by hand the lines of code that came together to produce something magical. That process of typing on a nice keyboard, and seeing a solution take shape, is what this job was all about.
It's not that I never liked coding to begin with. I enjoy it, but at the same time I also enjoy solving problems. Coding is and was a means to an end: solving a problem. The argument/statement can also be extended to say "Why did you go into coding if you didn't enjoy binary?" (substitute "binary" with any appropriate level of complexity: OOP, C, Java, Python, Waterfall, Agile, etc).
Not only that but so much of my work is and always was not coding. Meetings, stakeholders, PMs, roadmaps, estimates, etc.
My volunteer work is also solving problems, they just happen to be very human-focused in the real world.
Also, "coding" (solving problems with tech) is a fairly low-risk way to make a living that I happened to be good at. I also spent time on a drilling rig. Could have probably made significantly more doing that than I was at the start of my tech career, however, it wasn't worth the risk. We all gotta eat and in our capitalist society, can't reasonably do that without having a job.
Actually using AI I think is a net positive. It frees up the drudgery and let's me think high level. I can try different ideas and throw out ones that don't work without expending much effort.
There's some loss with not being as hands on. But I feel like my impact is higher so I like the trade.
This is at least true for me
Now, not so much.
That being said I greatly miss collaboration with colleagues. We don’t talk shop like we used to and a lot of times when we do talk it involves someone pasting something into Claude.
I miss feeling accomplished by building things.
The pace of code change is both dizzying (generation) and slow (review). it seems like most are just rubber stamping PRs sometimes after ignoring them for days (because who wants to review 2000 lines of slop and ridiculous unit tests).
I don’t know where this ends.
And I've spent 14 years handcrafting https://www.acpul.org/
Both are fun projects!
But I know that if I want to find employment again, I’ll have to eat dirt and get on with the times, or abandon my 20 years old career as a software engineer.
It’s too difficult of a choice for me to make still. Back to hiding my head in the sand, and enjoying my personal projects while savings last.
There are a great many people who write in that language for work while struggling to do more than populate text on the screen using React. The mere presence of someone who can actually program is like kryptonite for the permanently insecure imposter. It gets old.
think about all the othet shit jobs you could have. i worked really dreadful stuff in factories before i made that hobby my job and i often reflect back on that time to realise it is not so bad even if i now just type a few lines and press 1 and 2.
no more 90 degrees ambient temperature nexto a steel oven
no more freezin -21 in some meat freezer 'de icing'
no more 5 years rotted catfood to clean up while colleague is vomiting nexto me in a bin...
things can be much worse dude.
its a state of mind. hone it
If it's easy there is probably no moat.
Don't get stuck cuckcoding.
The ZIRP era was better for us than we deserved, which has made the recent “creative destruction” caused by AI feel so much worse.