Yes, I am exhausted. Most of my company is obsessed with agents, because everyone wants to be seen as AI first. There is little thought going into usage. No care for long term maintainability and quality. Our product is actively worse by many metrics, but no one cares because we marketing can say “agents”.
The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).
Same here, I think the tool is fantastic, it has helped me in lots of way professionally and for hobby projects involving skills I'm not experienced with but I'm absolutely exhausted.
The worst part is that I'm not exhausted from my work, I've been through a heavy burnout before and had to adapt my ways of working to not fall into that kind of exhaustion again. This is different, it's not a pressure to deliver anything specifically, no stupid deadlines, it's so much more vague than any other kind of work pressure I've been through in the past 20+ years that it makes it much harder to find ways to keep my head straight.
It's exhausting to be reviewing boatloads of PRs of very varied quality. I have relegated myself to block merges at the first sign of a bad/weird design instead of trying to understand why it might have needed a compromise in the design, many times people couldn't even explain to me why something was written the way it was... After many "it was Claude that decided this way" it became so tiring that I don't even ask anymore, I just leave a comment on the first blocker I find and reject the PR. If people are not putting any effort to review it before throwing it at me I will just return the favour.
Reviewing AI slop is data labelling and it isn't very different from what people in 3rd world do labeling various images. Constant context switching is what causes the exhaustion. It's the equivalent of the 6pm stop and go traffic. You used to be an F1 driver. Now you're an instructor for bad drivers.
The journey was as important as the destination if not more because it gave confidence in oneself, it made us grow. I mean to suggest, coding for the sake of coding
If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it? I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.
It is my opinion that there's more hidden power in engineers that even we fail to realize and instead some of us like you are wanting to leave the industry, what a sad tail of tragic events, when the tech behind AI is good and could be helpful but oh holy, we are butchering it up so badly in some/so many regards perhaps even under the influence of AI companies and their messaging surrounding it.
> If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it?
We've tried it where I work at. People put effort to compile studies, to collect testimonials, catalog and organise the strengths and weaknesses based on engineers' experiences with the tooling.
The result was the person driving this effort getting asked by HR, their manager, and their skip manager to stop with the anti-AI rhetoric, that AI is the future of the industry and if not rolled out in this way we will be left behind.
> I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.
The C-level doesn't seem to care, they believe to be in an existential risk where any price paid to rollout these tools as wide and broadly as possible across the whole org is small compared to being left behind.
It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.
Was the effort just directed be a single developer though. I have written elsewhere on HN[0] about something I have witnessed but I have seen that if only a single developer is actively against AI, the management actively believes that it is only that single person who is the bottleneck/issue as nobody else is complaining so it must all be right.
Although I get the overall statement more now as well.
> It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.
This perhaps seems to be the greatest reason and I imagine that because all growth within economy is shown to be floating within AI related sector, they want piece of that pie. Do note that most of the issues with it is that the frothy evaluations and how much actual growth is happening downstream rather than just money shaking hands and the bubble nature of things.
but theoretically one can see that there is no winner in all of this no matter how deep one can fall down in layers of. Perhaps something at the layer of DRAM and chip production seem to be the one actually the most profitable at the moment and even they are just witnessing some temporary growth as nobody expects the prices to stay at this ceiling including said companies and yet they have incredibly floaty (but comparatively less so) valuations as compared to other AI things.
On one hand, I expect money to be rational yet on the other hand I am actively witnessing money to be irrational. Yet the whole industry is so muddled up now with so many people wanting the piece of cake of that investor's dollar that I imagine the market somewhat saturated.
Could something rationally not happen because if so, it seems that the thing might be that the burst of the bubble might make the only rational sense of adding realism in the market, but I imagine that it might spook the investors too much too and it might cost too much blood-shed in the markets.
Am I able to explain myself and do any of you believe that there is a rational course of action which can be taken to help stabilize the economy in some aspects?
> Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it
Because it’s being pushed by the c-suite and board, so most people aren’t in a position to push back. And it’s a quasi-religion now, so even pushing back at all can result in being branded as a “skeptic”.
People do raise concerns, though. And the responses aren’t very satisfactory. For example, the biggest concern that has been raised thus far is open PRs, and the answer has always been that all we need is AI code review.
I think that the problem basically arises due to the fact that the technology is recent and the opinions on it are hard to make and even if we do end up making opinions, then my opinion is of the fact that I am more than happy for AI to suddenly vanish but clearly that can't be the case and there have been some long term discussions that I can point out to.
We can however change our opinions on AI and the culture surrounding it but as witnessed from my comment and other people replying to it, the question is becoming as of if we engineers even have the necessary power capable to bring so the change within how or if we use AI.
That is why, I believe that we might need some nuance rather than a complete acceptation or complete rejection of it.
AI is like a double edged sword, something which is fundamentally both good and bad[0] It is my opinion that currently, the bad outweighs the good and I have been vocal about it, but the control of the matter is strictly beyond one or even one good/bad binary.
The primary issue of the matter is the fact that some people (mainly the C-suite/investor class) believe in so much of the goodness of AI that they are willing to think that anyone pointing out anything bad of AI is the one who hasn't used it and how there are all these anecdotal evidences of people being impressed by model's quality and its evolvement, so surely, if AI must have grown so much and is so good as everyone says online it is (within an internet thought bubble), the fault must be lying on the engineer and he must be one of those luddites who has failed to accept technology and must be replaced.
I suppose some people genuinely believe the above paragraph that I wrote. I have heard some of such sentiments on Hackernews itself...
My point is probably that AI should be treated as a double-edged sword really, that's about it. We can go into the details of it if you so prefer and I think that you are right that its within the nitty gritty details that there is ambiguity and how this discussion leads to that ambiguity, so in that sense I concede but that there should be a better more skeptical discussion regarding the use of AI and it should be up to the organization at first for them to decide how they use AI and be flexible with it but not at the sake of the sanctity of code and coding practices.
I feel like it would be hard to gain a worldwide consensus on the use of AI within software development, we can certainly try but it would be more effective to do so at an organizational level and to slowly level up and I do hope that the world eventually figures out a somewhat consensus of it.
Hope I am able to explain some parts of the severe personality split, this did get long but that's probably because I have just watched some somewhat thought provoking media which used some great vocabulary and I am somewhat copying it as my brain thinks about your comment.
But yea, in all honesty, that's about it. got a bit long so sorry about it but have a nice day and thanks for reading if you did and if not, thats fine as well and I hope you and everyone else including me navigating this somewhat shit hole that has become internet discussion about AI and AI in general, things are getting exhausting and there is some negativity in life at times but I hope that we overcome it and I am optimistic in some sense and I wish nothing but good for all of you within your future as we all navigate the uncertainties of future together :-D
Thanks for the detailed answer, which pretty contrasts with harsh brevity of my comment (sorry if it offended you), I wish you well too of course, me myself being a half-techie/half-artist torn about this double-edgedness of things, I know why there's that split, we all adore the figurative hammer that helps driving nails into walls, but hate it when someone starts using it to drive nails into their or their neighbor’s heads.
But I think everyone, sooner or later, must draw one's personal red line in the way of a hammer that is set to replace humans or turn them into reverse centaurs who forget how to use their own brains - be it by its nature or by the pressure of someone's trillions of dollars.
I, for one, have already drawn one and refused a promotion (which would mean a 2x higher salary) at my work from testing to backend development, because everyone in our development team rushed into using AI agents, which is something I don't want to touch with a 10' pole. That wasn't even the team's decision, it was the company owner's, who decided it's the way of future.
The results were not long in coming, I already hear their complaints about getting lost in the codebase they themselves created, and getting dumber.
> we all adore the figurative hammer that helps driving nails into walls, but hate it when someone starts using it to drive nails into their or their neighbor’s heads. But I think everyone, sooner or later, must draw one's personal red line in the way of a hammer that is set to replace humans or turn them into reverse centaurs who forget how to use their own brains - be it by its nature or by the pressure of someone's trillions of dollars.
This analogy is quite beautiful.
> The results were not long in coming, I already hear their complaints about getting lost in the codebase they themselves created, and getting dumber.
I think that there are some ways that people are trying to create an AI-use policy, here is one that I found on hackernews which I found interesting: https://libls.org/ai-use
Basically, I think that if its a personal thing then sure all bets are off and you can use vibe-coding or whatever on personal projects or prototypes
BUT, you can't really let AI do your job and somehow justify it and its costs (both in terms of tokens and the cost of tearing down the codebase with slop) and there should be a strict code of conduct regarding AI-use.
I feel like we are going to see more attempts at trying to solidify a procedure regarding AI-use and for me, the libls.org/ai-use makes somewhat sense and I'd be curious to think about your opinion.
That being said, it might not still be used within the structures of large companies because of the C-suite/investors issues that I mentioned but I am hopeful that eventually the mania regarding completely unfiltered AI-use slows down.
The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).
I want to leave the industry as soon as I can.