r/AITrailblazers

AI has reached the point that I no longer write code.

I used to work in shops where I was deep in the debugger without internet access; now I just drive intent and long term engineering decisions with Claude/Codex/Perplexity. I work at a mid-sized startup with a bit over one-hundred people.

I just don't see the point anymore. There are countless hours of stress and banging your head on the keyboard that goes into learning languages, frameworks, protocols, cloud, infra, security, etc that I can instead apply to system design, UX, or knowledge graphs. Some of the best lessons I learned were because I suffered, but now everything is so easy I finish a massive feature in 2 days and sure maybe I learned something new, but there isn't the same sense of accomplishment. It feels like I need to focus on other areas on the stack to utilize my time best.

Of course, this is also coming from years of experience doing exactly those things, but I think the amount that I have learned since the release of Gemini 2.0 has been astronomical.

Now, I'm not all doom and gloom about this, quite the opposite really. There isn't the same dopamine hit at the end of solving a bug or building out system software, but it does come later down the line when a whole system is operating perfectly. I actually really enjoy the systems-level design and thinking, much much more than being stuck in a bug for a week, but it just doesn't feel the same as before. Honestly I have way more fun now than I did.

Are these just standard feelings about maturing in my career? Maybe.

But I also think AI has changed the industry. I don't enjoy learning new languages beyond the basics/tradeoffs anymore, and even if I did I wouldn't feel like I was utilizing my time well. AI is just too good to make it worth my time. The only case where that isn't true is interviewing.

Which brings me to interviewing. Why would I hire a person who is good at xyz languages, but not at talking to me about which technology you would implement to solve a system design problem? Why would I care that you're a specialist in Rust and Azure when Claude is better than the majority of dev teams at writing and maintaining code? Sure, a seasoned software engineer developing a codebase lone-wolf from start to finish would probably do a better job, but that is obviously impractical in the industry.

This is coming from someone who is actively getting promoted and praised in my workplace by my peers and superiors, so clearly this works.

I just wanted to see of others might be experiencing this shift.

Like the title says, is there something that you believe that AI will never be able to do it. Think from technical perspective, do not come back with “thinking”. I am thinking purely from the technical perspective.