It's interesting to me, I have never once felt this. I have basically just been excited by using AI for coding. I've been a software engineer for 15 years and before that a physics PH.D. student (and 1 year professional scientist) who focused largely on computational work. I love programming and I've felt reinvigorated by the introduction of AI and developing systems around it.
I tend to think it's just different personality types. There are a lot of different type in engineering. There's a significant set of people that really love to just be given detailed, well described set of work and crank it out, they don't really want to be involved in much outside of just implementing the plan. That is not all engineers but certainly a chunk of them. I could see that group feeling a bit sidelined by AI. But that's not me, so I am just speculating.
I enjoy and use AI a lot both for personal projects, but also at work. I think that feeling of “we’ve become claude code babysitters” is a lot more prevalent in larger teams and/or in work environments where … most people have resorted to claude coding all the time.
You can’t not claude code if everyone else is pushing to main (or opening prs which get ai reviewed), and once your days become mostly prompting and ai code review, you start remembering the days (mere months ago) where work did not feel or look like this at all.
The condom image is both an exaggeration, but is also almost a too-accurate depiction of what work has become - very rapidly - for many people.
I’m sure people were also very excited to get their first cars after years of riding on horses. It doesn’t mean new kinds of pollution (and accidents) are not happening, or that we don’t miss horse riding haha
I’m noticing a big divide between engineers who work in computational/library work and product work. And maybe a lot of this is coming from how we have to interact with people and how requirements are formed.
I’m the latter, have been working in product my whole career. My role has been architecture/tech lead for a while. Managing teams has become significantly more difficult. A lot of the implicit forces that hold engineering orgs together are falling apart.
Well-described greenfield work has always been non-existent. Plans starts ambiguously, and then they evolve as the team’s understanding of the problem gets deeper. Now everyone I work with has no interest in the deeper understanding, I feel like I have to “force” people to think. This is a losing battle and I’ve mostly given up on building good product. Customer asks are just fed into Claude and a PR is born. Cohesiveness, maintenance, and complexity are an afterthought.
For example, a customer recently asked for more information on a data table in our product. An engineer fed the request into Claude and generated a stack of 3 PRs totaling 1,200 lines with new endpoints and UI components. All the table needed was a tooltip.
The easiness of getting to a “final product” has totally eroded team collaboration. Before, the engineer would probably ask someone with more understanding of the domain and learn _why_ the tooltip is all they needed. This creates two domain experts. Now, we are ensuring we have none.
I tend to think it's just different personality types. There are a lot of different type in engineering. There's a significant set of people that really love to just be given detailed, well described set of work and crank it out, they don't really want to be involved in much outside of just implementing the plan. That is not all engineers but certainly a chunk of them. I could see that group feeling a bit sidelined by AI. But that's not me, so I am just speculating.