AI could end my job — Just not the way I expected

Publish Date: Jan 27

12 9

This is a 101% personal and opinionated post.

After the initial months of AI craziness, I feel we've reached the plateau of "let's actually use these generators for your actual, paid job."

Remember the first wave? All those tweets from influencers:

"🤯 It's so over 🤯"
"🤯 It's soooo f**** over 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯"
"NOW IT'S SO OVER GUYS 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯"

complete with fake-screaming-in-agony thumbnail.
The ones where they built Snake or a mobile game with just four hours of prompting? (Which, to be fair, is incredible.)

After that initial shock, it was time to introduce AI into my regular day-to-day work. And today, I stopped typing for a second and faced a hard truth:

The last 4 months of my job have been terrible.

Easily the most boring period of my entire career.

And I think it's because of g*enerative AI*.

I've been polishing AI-generated code, debugging AI-generated code, and reading logs from AI-generated executions about 90% of the time.

The precious part –where I would calmly write code— that’s gone.

It’s now maybe 1% of my daily work. I press TAB a couple of times per week. That’s it.

The rest of my week is crammed with:

Reading more PRs than ever generated by the Copilot from my co-workers
Polishing code. This was already the most tedious part of my job; it used to take up about 1/3 of my time. Now it’s at least 2/3s
Reading bug reports.
Reading execution logs.

I don’t write code anymore. The peace I used to find in that process is… gone.

That lost time is now filled with everything else. It’s like...

the joy of creation has been replaced by the monotony of maintenance.

For the last year, I’ve read again and again that programming was going to change. I just didn’t expect it would change for the worse.

Maybe it’s not about me getting fired? Maybe it’s about me walking in with a resignation letter. this isn't the job i used to love at all.

thanks for reading.

Comments 9 total

Pablo SJan 27, 2025
So sad to hear that
Tymek ZapałaJan 27, 2025
I understand your frustration, I also love just writing code and it's difficult saying goodbye to it.

On the other hand, what we gain is more freedom, we can focus on execution of high-level goals, research etc because we can delegate mundate tasks. Maybe it's possible to find some relief in this?
- Manuel Artero Anguita 🟨Jan 27, 2025
  for now, i've gained anything else than boring-ness. like my day to day is 100% more borrrring.
  
  for now, AI is the thief of joy (the joy of creation)
JoelBonetR 🥇Jan 27, 2025
But have you ever get it to actually write something good? Honest question.

Other than boilerplate and unit tests, I mean.

It can speed up the boring part (read the sentence above for reference to the boring part) but other than that...

So far I've been able to generate visual components that most of the time don't match with what has been told and way more than I'd like these aren't even responsive. The architecture of the generated stuff has no sense to a human and every now and then the AI ninja-adds dependencies to the project without being told to do so.

AI tools don't quite understand "above", "below", "next to" and other words we use to rationalize the space around us, which is frustrating.

If that wasn't enough, prompting an AI for these kind of tasks is extremely time-consuming, so much so that my conclusion is that... It's just not worthwhile.

Sure if you're starting your career it could appear that you can do so much more but let's be honest... It's a tool that helps, not a tool that substitutes (at least in software development) and the overuse of it by newcomers is a sure way to sink your career before it even starts and never reach a senior skillset IMHO.

On the other hand, checking PRs has never been on the list of "fun things" let's be real here 😂😂😂

I'd much rather have an AI checking PRs than having the AI coding.

To conclude my... Evaluation of "the current state of AI" or whatever this text is, i just want to add that if I were a customer who had been told that AI would spare me half of my software development team, I would be VERY angry at this point.

I also need to say that if the I in AI really has to mean intelligence, I should NOT require us to write the prompts specifically for it. It would understand things like a human does, but we're waaay far from that.
- Manuel Artero Anguita 🟨Jan 27, 2025
  thank you very much Joel for your comment! really appreciated as always!
  
  thing is , ok i DO agree with you. Thing is, this part:
  
  prompting an AI for these kind of tasks is extremely time-consuming
  
  lately im more... chatting and polishing and debugging rather than coding, and this is driving me insane.
  - JoelBonetR 🥇Jan 27, 2025
    Still, the choice of when, for what and where to use AI is yours. If you use AI for the funny things... You'll find the culprit in the mirror 😅 change the mindset and use it just for the things you don't like to do.
    
    On the other hand, if you're talking about how your responsibilities have shifted due to (engineering management/external forces) then communicate your frustration and try and find a middle ground where you can still enjoy your daily chores.
    
    Be it the former or the latter, I hope you get everything on rails pretty soon and live happier! 😄
    - Andrey RusevJan 28, 2025
      
      ...use it just for the things you don't like to do.
      
      My personal impression is that GenAI is only good for things ... you don't want to do. And even more - that people turn to it exactly when they couldn't care less :)
      
      A bit like - people know GenAI is not good for stuff that matters, but it is around... sooo... they end up giving it tasks where the output doesn't really matter - just something... :)
Andrey RusevJan 28, 2025
If it helps - I believe the need for ingenuity won't go away - despite what the internet would have you believe.

In fact it might actually go up in demand... Take a look at posts around here - it's not that difficult to spot what's AI-generated and what's not. Bots sound nice, but they never get into any sort of depth... So superficial... there's literally nothing in them...
david duymelinckJan 28, 2025
I don't know which language you are using. I'm using PHP which has a rather quick life cycle, an update every year. And most of the frameworks have six month life cycles.
So for fun I'm challenging AI to write the most up to date code.

I'm in a position where I do a lot of research, and a bit of toying, with new functionalities to improve code or the way of working. Maybe that is a path you could explore too?

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Manuel Artero Anguita 🟨 @manuartero

AI could end my job — Just not the way I expected

Comments 9 total