Comment by kklemon

I came close to burning out around two years ago. It wasn't even the workload so much as the uncertainty of being able to solve hard problems and feature requests on time. I was in a constant state of stress and fear, thinking about those problems in the evening, at night, and in the morning.

With AI—or coding agents, to be more specific—I'm perhaps working even more than before, yet I feel considerably more relaxed. It feels like the variance in task difficulty and uncertainty has flattened out. If I had a difficult network-related issue before, it might have taken me hours of research and debugging before even being able to tell what was even going on and how long it would take to fix. Now I can just spawn an agent with the right keywords, in the right environment, and with the right permissions, and get feedback within minutes while focusing on other stuff in the meantime.

While I was pessimistic about where software development was heading just a year ago, I now feel more optimistic and happy about how things are going. My only concern, however, is whether it will reduce the demand for software engineers in the long run.