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AI has made my job much easier and that worries me, a lot

2 months ago

I'm a senior level FE-Engineer at a large e-commerce company with a complex mono-repo codebase. Ever since our company handed out Claude accounts most of my co-workers and I have been using Opus pretty much every day. It often feels like I don't code anymore so much as manage a very talented junior engineer.

For patterns in the code that have already been established, I'd say it has a about a 95% success rate on a given task, with occasional follow-up prompts to cover anything it's missed.

For new features it maybe gets 70% of the way there and I have to go in and fix or add the rest. It's still terrible at CSS.

All of this still requires a senior level engineer like myself to write intelligent prompts, answer AI questions, and review. So, to that extent I don't believe a PM is going to vibe code my job away.

What I'm concerned with is how much faster I'm now getting my work done. AI isn't perfect for all tasks, but for the mundane and predictable ones, it makes my job a breeze and I would say it has cut my overall workload almost in half. It's also let me extend past my expertise and make changes to codebases in languages I'm not as familiar with with great success.

Our CTO has already noticed this and closed our open reqs for new engineers since we're now ahead of schedule on our roadmap. It's only a matter of time, in my opinion, before the industry as a whole catches on that they need half the engineers to do the same amount of work. I know it's already brutal out there for developers looking for employment and I can't imagine what will be like in another 5 years.

Comments (5)

sanqi2 months ago

The amount of work where software engineers are needed is about to go insane. Software is entering the real world instead of just moving bits around on a screen. Robotics is coming in a big way. Building general use robots was always seen as a fools errand because the software was always assumed to be decades away. Now it is here but the hardware doesn't exist yet. It is coming.

I bought a Unitree Go2 robot dog and set up a powerful brain for it that lives on the GPU of my gaming pc. It will jump up on the couch and watch TV with me. We like to discuss the plot of old episodes of Baywatch. Every human I know is going to want something like this.

The people who set up the software for these devices will be in big demand. But they will have to be highly skilled because now bad code can injure or kill people. After that happens a few times licensing will come in and software engineer will become a true skilled profession like medical doctor or lawyer.

meisan2 months ago

The good news is, if you are like people at my company it will take a WHILE. At my level, I'm doing mostly design and architecture and some small amounts of coding (typically for POC or MVP creation). All of my co-workers on my direct team refuse to learn how to use AI effectively, so I can literally work like 3-4 hours a day and kill it comparatively.

And they aren't going to learn, they don't want to, they aren't technical enough to know what to ask and how to prompt effectively. Meanwhile I suck at powerpoint but guess what, not anymore, heres my requirements, heres the themeing, build it.

You are right, eventually it will be 2x-3x the work for half the engineers, and that depend quite a bit on your company. I did work in Big Tech for a few years and I"m sure they are already loading the work on the engineers but I since moved to a large F100 company with near big-tech pay and I can tell you it will be years before AI can be truly useful for anything here becuase people refuse to adopt it (or can't learn it).

zhezhe2 months ago

Thats reassuring. I also have the privilege of working with new developers and I can promise you that AI is absolutely ruining their education. Many of them are not learning how to properly understand and write code and I can see them getting extremely dependent on AI.

So maybe by the time this becomes a problem, there won't be nearly as competent engineers to compete with in the field

Emma Tcherkezian2 months ago

Hear ya. You need to be good at the requirements part. Its easy for me. Spot shit data, fix shit data. Often get client to fix it in the source with my help. Also get to build some AI and handle more infra than ever. Once I established the code patterns for ingestion and sql, the error rate has been low enough that a junior de is not worth the hassle. Just need to diversify a bit. Playing politics is becoming annoyingly important. In my area, thankfully, the bugs and anger keep my technical skills sharp. One bad field and everyone hates your guts.

yantao2 months ago

Don't you have any tech debt? your entire code following best practices?

Before AI our code had tons of debt and not enough time because new features kept coming.

But now it's actually doable, after i finish new feature i just improve stuff.

Sometimes refactor unreadable pages, installing popular packages and removing bad ones.

I also try to build skill files to enforce rules, so every page follows the same structure.

Either your code is perfect or you guys just don't care enough... if new features and bugs aren't coming fast enough try to improve dev experience, user experience, be creative