Comment by sph
9 hours ago
I don’t want to do twice my workload. I’m old enough to have learned that the faster and more efficient you are, the more demands they pile on you, and the net result is more stress, more expectations for the same pay. AI doesn’t solve unreasonable demands, shifting requirements and looming deadlines, does it?
And still, writing code is not even the bottleneck, the thinking, meeting stakeholders, figuring out technical problems is. What would I do with a machine that spits out bad code.
I guess I’m not cut out for a field where the only metric that counts is how many tickets and lines of code one can churn out in an hour any more.
In my 20+ years in the tech industry, the most important thing I have learned is that writing code is the least significant part of being a software engineer.
You write code once, but then it's modified endlessly. Supporting and using and improving the code is the majority of the work. LLMs are terrible for that. They tend to write code that isnt easy to read and modify. They don't plan for future use cases. They often paint themselves into a corner with successive modifications, and lose context as the project grows.
Don't worry about your job just yet. We are a long long way from replacing people.