Forced AI Usage & Agentic Developemtn at Work
hello
Ive been a developer for 2 years interning, 3 years full time, and recently have become a tech lead. it was a very fast & unexpected but I was excited because I love(d) my job!!
now we are being forced to use AI for everything. i mean everything. agentic teams are a requirement by end of year. im extremely frustrated and my entire team is burnt out. I try to bring up many reasons not to be so heavily reliant on AI to higher ups, but it just is brushed to the side. Now they are also tracking our AI usage and we can see how much money our ai usage costs, and we are supposed to be working on not only adopting it, but trying to use as little credits as possible with our workflows.
i really enjoy programming! even as a tech lead with more interaction vs actual code writing, ive always enjoyed researching and solving complex problems. I am good at it when given the time to do research and thinking, im kinda good at talking to people, in my own way (that doesnt always jive with the corporate world). since becoming a tech lead ive been working on my intense audhd masking and trying to find the balance.
what im NOT good at is people forcing me to work a certain way in my own time, and just continue to give me anecdotes of how much better it is with nothing to back it up. even the thought of it makes me want to throw up. ive been working my hardest to find ways that work for ME as to not suffer from burnout, now this?? also, no guidelines or standards. just "do it" and "do it right". the amount of money spent on something we can't really seem to show how its helping makes me so mad !! totally ignoring the environment consequences, which im supposed to just set to the side at work. i cant !!
this is maybe more of a rant coming out a meltdown of frustration with what feels like the inability for anyone to understand me, but im also curious if anyone else feels the same way or is in a similar situation and has any words of wisdom. I feel like ive been scouring but havent seen a ton of people who are in a company that is totally "you must use ai for everything" -- ive been thinking about how ive literally been in love with programming my entire life but if you told me this was the future of it i wouldve taken a different career path in an instant. Maybe need some more senior devs to tell me this is all gonna blow over lol. or maybe just commiserate. ugh!