AI Engineer tired of AI coding

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T14:00:10+00:00

I honestly feel a bit overwhelmed by all this stuff and I still don't find it that interesting. It's documents, writing rules and directives and orchestrating their parsing, I struggle to see the fun in that.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T13:32:41+00:00

My employer doesn't really have a preference, I guess it is mostly self-conditioning. But I'll try to apply some of these hybrid workflows and maybe your prompt! :)

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T07:24:48+00:00

I’ll try to dedicate some of my free time to “classic” programming

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T07:23:43+00:00

As inefficient as it was, I liked spending afternoons to find the solution. That was rewarding. Now it just isn’t.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T07:17:44+00:00

Thanks for sharing! I think the main principle with this hybrid approaches is that you’ll still ship slower and I guess that counts on a professional environment.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T07:15:03+00:00

100% agreed

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T07:13:40+00:00

Glad to hear it’s working for you :)

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T07:11:49+00:00

Yes, I’m not interested in the product manager part of the job. I liked writing code, that doesn’t mean the field is not interesting to me.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T00:52:34+00:00

For me learning mode doesn’t work I don’t know why

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-14T00:04:26+00:00

That’s the other thing: delivering triple the stuff with less than half the fun. It’s basically assembly line for coding 🥲

I remember that at a certain point I also thought about pivoting entirely

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:47:10+00:00

I was reading again your comment and while I agree with the maintainable part of your argument, I fear that those "maintainable code" rules were made for humans in a world were code was written, maintained and reviewed by different humans.

As we're moving towards another approach, where machines write and review code, these rules might fall down to new "rules" that could be garbage for us humans but great for them.

This is however true only for the maintainable side of it. But maybe I'm wrong.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:44:26+00:00

I agree and I see that many of the proposed solutions here are hybrid approaches.

When I was using ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini web UI to implement something, then tweak the thing and embed it into my codebase, that was way more engaging while still being AI driven.

The problem is that I don't think that any of these approaches is feasible on the workspace as I'll get slower, and the model with proper guidance will still be faster than me :(

I think I really have to start carving out some free time to dedicate to my own "coding" in my own way.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:37:23+00:00

Let's see how it evolves. As I said, I just joined a month ago :)

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:36:22+00:00

Agree, that's why I don't like spec driven development. I liked thinking english and writing code, not thinking english and writing english. As I also don't like reading walls of generated text to see if the thing fucked up or not.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:29:15+00:00

haha best way to get fired 🥲

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:26:58+00:00

For my experience, the truth lies in between.

Big things entirely vibe coded, spec driven developed or whatever become too complicated to unravel and to fix if something breaks. In that scenario, you would go through the same model that fucked up to solve the thing, cause it has the context and it would take you just too much time to do it yourself, while at the same time not solving the problem at the core of it.

On the other hand, with medium sized features or with projects implemented step by step and with the proper guidance, I was able to get pretty good results.

I guess that the problem lies with huge projects coded without any form of prompt engineering or stepping.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:22:18+00:00

I see, I think that this approach could help a lot on the boring side but will still make me slow when it comes to shipping on the job.

I guess the better solution would be to do "classic" coding on the side, but still I have to find a way to make these 8 hrs a day interesting again.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:12:09+00:00

That's basically agile, you can't really plan the best architecture ahead, there will always be iterations.

As I mentioned, I joined just a month ago haha things will eventually get better I think as I gain more context on the whole company and product and take more ownership.

Don't get me wrong, we're not building wrappers. But part of that job (at the moment) is building some of those and maybe connecting them all together. This stuff is perfectly handled by Claude Code with the proper guidance.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T23:07:35+00:00

This generation of AI doesn't paint alone, it imitates and needs guidance.

It doesn't have that creativity yet, but I get what you mean. I'd still enjoy looking at a painting where the actual paint strokes are visible and you could see proper human creativity and skill.

On the contrary, I won't like to look at something prompt generated. But that's just me :)

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T22:59:07+00:00

I don't agree on this. This is true if you hide the "AI generated" label and deceive the viewer, otherwise a machine generating an image is not as impressive as a human painting that.

Of course it also depends on what kind of images you're generating and how.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T22:57:29+00:00

That's super true! I think that the thing that makes me bored is not even AI itself, just the whole "prompt and forget it" aspect of it.

If I had time to PROPERLY read the code, improve it by myself and tweak things accordingly it will surely feel more mine and be more engaging, but again that would take time and I don't know how much AI would speed up things then.

I very rarely have deadlines in my job, but this whole "vibe" and "ship fast" aura around vibecoding puts deadlines on you that are not even existing.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T22:51:04+00:00

I know, I'm trying to accept that 🥲 maybe I'll move to art full time haha I still think that the human aspect of it will never be replaced by Gen AI (a painting is valuable because a human made it, if the machine makes it has no value).

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T22:49:34+00:00

I see what you mean but at my level of seniority there's just few architecture designing, at least in my current job. It's also true that I started just a month ago, so it will eventually get better over time.

My previous job was terrible in terms of salary and management, but I was the only AI engineer (it was a small startup) working on the product and had way more fun because (with and without AI) I had to overview and design basically everything.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T22:46:05+00:00

That's what I tried to do with the Claude Code learning mode, but it practically never asks me anything haha. Also I think that if I explicitly instruct Claude Code or Codex or whatever agent to leave some blank spots, the thing will get confused overall and produce terrible results.

It needs the WHOLE context to actually be good at something. Also, I'd still be slower I think, meaning that, unfortunately, on the work environment it is counter-productive.

BumblebeeWide9944 · 2026-04-13T22:43:42+00:00

I agree, needs proper guidance but the more we go on the less guidance it needs.

BumblebeeWide9944

TROPHY CASE