My company will now fully embrace slop "agentic coding". Thinking about resigning.
I work for one of the major brands in logistics. Since IT and data is not really our core business, it has for the most part been viewed as a necessary evil just to keep the ship afloat and therefore we've been somewhat spared from the worst of the AI pushes. Coding and IT is something we do to help the main business. My team consists of a small number of people (and this is very simplified) mostly shuffling data from one place to another, making reports and building stuff in Microsoft tools like Power BI, Power Apps etc due to strict governance - more on that later.
At a yearly conference last week, a somewhat non-technical person from management demoed "agentic coding" with Claude Code. It contained all of the usual talking points, how he had trained this "agent" and whatnot which from my understanding is more or less just promt-engineering. There is this one specific tool in the company he used as an example. We were divided into 5 groups and were then tasked to find a new feature for this tool. He then input the idea into Claude Code and his "agent" had in like 15 minutes implemented these 5 ideas in the test env for the tool. I think he also mentioned that he had given it access to do whatever, change files however, etc. It had generated a couple of thousand lines (!) for each feature, which was just a few sentences that each team had cobbled up in like 10 minutes. He then demoed the tool and showed that the "agent" had sure indeed created new tabs for these features. Did the features really work? No idea, we never checked any of that, we just saw that "here is a new page with a bunch of buttons added". At one point he also mentions that he "doesn't understand any of the code" - which I found to be alarming. He also said "don't use your brain too much, let the tool do the thinking for you"... I mean just WTF....
Now, the rest of the management were completely sold on this. My manager, who basically stopped learning anything new 15 years ago, loved the idea of now being able to "understand" things that the rest of the team is doing . ie he really dislikes that other people in the team are doing the cool stuff and he has been left behind. Now he is able to "contribute" at an acceptable level. Also, and this frustrated me quite a lot, he mentioned that now we can scrap everything we've done in Power Apps and instead just build our own slop webpages for these tools instead. This idea was raised by me two years ago (before we went all in on Power Apps), but that was shot down due to Power Apps having a lot of governance and security out of the box that the org requires. Now apparently we don't anymore?
I raised some concerns about this - specifically how agentic coding quickly makes the entire codebase unmanageable (for example creating new functions instead of just using existing ones) and can do a lot of crap that are unintended. Also, since no one has truly built anything, no one knows WHY certain things were done in this way and can explain it. I can look back on code I made a year ago and after a few minutes remember why I did something in a certain way. Also, by typing out code, you figure out edge cases and issues along the way and you can quickly account for that. Coding with an agent (as a user who doesn't understand the code language) removes all of that, and you have to ask it for new implementations whenever something goes wrong and hope for the best. I also raised the concerns about increasing AI costs and that would make us completely reliant on more AI spending to fix ANYTHING - but the answer was just that support we pay for today cost a lot as well, so that's that.
People were also talking about dropping financial Excel files into it and asking it to do summaries and whatnot - which is also completely insane.
All of this was apparently something that we just NEED to get onboard or be left in the dust. Ok sure, but if everyone are doing this - what exactly is our edge over the competition? What are we brining to the table that no one else has? The same AI apps that everyone else are doing? What will the customers think when we show up with AI generated Power Points, people can no longer answer technical questions because they have stopped using their brain and are now "letting the tools do the thinking"?
I just got an awful feeling about this whole thing. Not really that I care about my job, feel threatened or anything like that. I just KNOW how much effort that goes into making something really good and though-out, and that no we are instead pursuing this "let AI slop it out and ship it before lunch". It just doesn't feel... interesting to me at all anymore. I used to spend a lot of time learning new tools and whatnot - but why bother anymore? Whats the point? No one seems to care about doing their JOB anymore.
Can anyone relate? Can anyone share similar stories and how that turned out, especially in organizations that aren't in big tech? Seriously thinking about resigning and doing something else. I feel that this is a very strong bet they are making - AI will more or less replace technical skill and decades worth of intricate knowledge about our core business to a fraction of the cost. Ok, and what if it doesn't?