u/Outside-Leg-7645

I have been using AI heavily for work, and at first it felt like a cheat code. I could get through tickets faster, automate annoying tasks, and spend more time on the actual engineering decisions. But now that the tools have gotten so good, a lot of my workflow has basically become "give Claude the docs, give it the ticket, hit enter." And because everyone has access to the same tools, the amount of work expected from us has gone way up too.

The weird part is that AI isn't just writing the code anymore. It's slowly taking over communication too. Requirements get turned into AI generated tickets, AI writes the implementation, automated tests check it, and then another AI summarizes what happened. Sometimes I’ll ask a coworker something and realize they just asked their AI, copied the answer, and sent it back. It’s efficient, sure, but somehow the whole process feels kinda soulless.

I never thought I'd miss sitting with another engineer trying to debug some cursed production issue or actually learning a system inside and out. Now I sometimes ship things that work perfectly fine but barely feel like I built them. I'm starting to wonder if we're optimizing software development so hard that we're accidentally removing the parts of the job that made people good at it. Is anyone else feeling this way?

Already coming in an hour early unpaid to pick up the company vehicle before every shift. Already driving 35 minutes home after a 7pm to 4am schedule which puts me through the door around 5:15am. Four months in, no complaints, just doing the job.

New guard starts and suddenly I'm required to drive him home after every shift because he doesn't have a car. No pay adjustment, no conversation, just "it's required." Now I'm getting home closer to 6am after dropping him off and returning the vehicle. That's an extra unpaid chunk on top of the unpaid chunk that already existed.

The job itself was already a grind. Night shifts, remote location, long commute. Adding mandatory unpaid transport duty for a coworker without even asking feels like a line that shouldn't have been crossed without at least a conversation about compensation. Not putting in two weeks over the guy himself, putting in two weeks because apparently my time outside of paid hours is just available on request. Anyone else had a job quietly expand your responsibilities without touching your pay and how did you handle it?