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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

There's definitely skill rot that happens -- but there are also new skills to learn. Dependency on tools is not a new problem, though, is it?

Agents definitely run amok on code bases, create bloat, needless complexity, etc. However, they enable many people to do so much more than they could without them, at least in the moment, that they're not going to go away.

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Yeah, I am also feeling the rot and do not like it one bit. However, the world does not revolve around my feelings, so I have adapted and fully embraced it. That being said, I think AI took away 90% of the enjoyment I got from the job of Software Engineer. It isn't just the code writing, it was the space to go deep and immerse myself fully to solve a problem. I think there is still a need to problem solve at different levels, but with AI the velocity has increased so much - the space to focus on one thing for any amount of time has also been drastically reduced (this could be because I work for a company and may be company specific. I also do freelance dev, and find much more enjoyment there, but still not the same as pre AI).

Yup. I have embraced LLM usage since it's obvious this genie is not going back in the bottle and they are objectively force-multipliers at certain tasks. But I didn't get into software engineering to be productive, I fell into this career because I loved building things and it just sort of evolved into a pretty lucrative hobby.

AI is completely sucking the enjoyment out of my work.

It's like they invented a robot that can build whatever you want out of Legos. You'll never have to touch your Legos again! /s

The problem I'm seeing is that most of that additional output is just increasing pressure on the real bottlenecks such as design, QA, operations, support, etc. Which is why we're seeing this dual phenomenon of programmer productivity increases at the same time as the productivity of the overall business crashes out.

At my last employer we were contending with real customer fatigue and attrition. The application was changing so rapidly that it was overwhelming both our ability to uphold quality standards, and customers' ability to keep up with the feature churn.

Or, to put it more succinctly: nobody actually wants all this slop.

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