AI is killing my drive and passion as an engineer.
Just venting here. Feel free to remove if this kind of post isn't allowed.
I've been working as an engineer for years after pivoting out of a very toxic and harmful industry. I fell in love with building software when I made the switch and for the first time in my life I thoroughly enjoyed my job. Using creativity and intellect to solve new and unique problems every day. Afforded time and independence to validate and implement an approach. Feeling immense satisfaction when people used features I built in production. It felt like a craft. That's all gone now.
To be clear I'm definitely not anti-AI. I think it's an incredible tool and for a long time in the beginning I was very much an advocate of utilizing it as much as possible to help unlock new knowledge that would have otherwise taken real time to learn, automate repetitive boilerplate, ideate with towards finding new solutions for complex problems, etc. But now it feels like we've finally crossed the threshold from tool to replacement.
I just left a startup where leadership - slowly over time - became wracked with AI psychosis. Mandates across all departments in the company, CEO vibe coding slop into production, all the stories I'm sure you've heard before. The company I joined is more stable, and I very much went into the job with an understanding from the interviews that they are very "AI forward". My hope was that maybe coming into a role where the AI expectation was clear from the start and the company had put real time and effort into fine tuning their AI workflows would somehow change the experience for me, but it hasn't. Here we receive a product brief document and feed it to an agent, which uses the Atlassian MCP to create stories in Jira. Then we spin up agents to implement the tickets. Once we validate the work, an agent drafts a PR and pushes it to Github, which is then reviewed by CoPilot. Engineers shovel the comments back into Cursor, feedback gets addressed, PR gets merged in. It's more transactional than ever.
I'm not really sure what my goal is posting this. I know I sound like a dinosaur but it just feels like what I loved about this work is completely gone. I don't know if this is for me anymore. Anyway, that's it I guess.