Post-AI Programming
Now that thinking about every detail of your application and writing it by hand is a thing associated with boomers and a time when people could still afford to buy a home, programming sure isn’t all that fun anymore.
The fulfillment I used to get from creating something is fleeting, and instead I spend my days yelling at the prompt machine, trying to manipulate it into being a passable software engineer, but just like yelling at your fridgerator doesn’t make it be a better fridgerator, neither does it have much of an effect here.
Reviewing code is the part of this job that most developers I know like the least, so it now becoming the main part of the job sure isn’t exciting. Not to mention that it’s even worse than that, because whenever I review the code and come to the conclusion that it’s an absolute abonimation, I often have to clean it up myself, because sometimes AI gets stuck in some scizo-loop of doom, and keeps producing the same exact result when I keep asking it to unfuck the thing it created.
I realize that I’m the sort-of guy who likes the process of creating things, not so much the end result, and because the process is now replaced with being a glorified self-checkout registry manager in a grocery store, I no longer really learn new things nearly as well as when I actually created things myself. Intelligence stagnation here I come!
Of course I keep working on my side projects without agentic programming, to avoid getting a full-blown brainworm that’ll make me be content and who knows, maybe even make me say that Microsoft ain’t all that bad, but I don’t even want to publish my projects anymore, because sure enough the AI will just steal them.
Sure is great I made it to a senior level before this became a thing because I don’t foresee any juniors or even mid-levels getting hired for much longer anymore, now that senior is the only level left. Heck, we might as well start calling ourselves AI managers at this point, and do away with the whole software engineering thing in its entirety.
This is of course great for the AI companies, because the programming I used to do was entirely free, and only required electricity and some text editor, now I have to pay for tokens to create things, so that the billionare psychopaths could build their cozy little doomsday bunkers, a day we’re all surely working towards making a reality.
But don’t listen to me, I’m just a AI-doomer. Surely this will all be for the better somehow, and I’m just too set in my ways to see it.