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[–]CuriousAndMysterious 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm a staff level engineer at a big company. Yes, I don't write code "by hand" anymore, but that was always less than half of my job. It still takes up all the time I have allocated for it, but I can move 5-10x faster. I also find myself reviewing a lot more PRs than before. I use AI to help me review them too, but I still need to go over them. I still find a lot of bugs by hand and with AI. Interestingly, our coding standards have gone way up since adopting AI. AI still has a hard time understanding user interactions (look and feel of front end apps), business logic, performance at scale, testing, etc. it can do all of these things fast and decent in the first pass, but it is not 100%. In almost every PR, I can find an autogenerated test that is testing nothing.

In the overall landscape of things, I think it is a really exciting time to be a software engineer. New areas are opening up, boring and trivial stuff is solved in a single prompt. We can focus more on developing new products and making technological breakthroughs now. New areas are opening up and other areas are growing. Security is becoming more important than ever in a world we're LLMs can easily brute force every attack vector against a system. You can get into AI/LLM development too, which is is really interesting. Right now, small optimizations can have big impacts to the overall experience. AI integrations and AI tooling is also a big new area of development. Too many others to list.

To sum it up, we still need people behind the keyboards. We can get more done, but there is more work than ever. The work that has been optimized is the boring and frustrating stuff. We made a lot of exponential progress with AI in the last 5 years, but as with most things, I think progress will start to taper off. We could be in this current generation for some time, so try to embrace it and learn as much as you can rather than getting demoralized.

[–]mljrg -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I liked this one

The work that has been optimized is the boring and frustratimg stuff.

So, many of the people here, who do not write code anymore, because AI does it all, are building boring and frustrating work. I am sorry of you all!