I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've made of agents I can see the potential but also the dangers in wrong + eager hands.
I'm confused—can you expand on this? What's "the work" that you've "grown to hate?" Is it "coding," or is it your "responsibilities?"
We need a new feature. Ok add this controller, add some if statements for this business logic, make some api calls, add this to the db, write some models. Ok done, same thing over and over again.
Id certainly love to be able to do the architecting part and have someone do the work
Basically you get to a point in your life and career where you have to decide whether you want to be the absolute best engineer, or whether you want to be building the best environment for building and retaining the best engineers. I kicked the can down the line but it was eventually having three kids which made me realise that the latter was my path. That and it was becoming increasingly harder to actually do #1 when you seem to be surrounded by incompetents taking the second path who, as they often never became competent engineers but seem to have a large influence on decisions as a group.
It's not that I like writing code exactly it's that the domain of the code I can write to a professional level doesn't overlap with the code I find interesting to write. Or in the case of web frameworks, worth spending two days understanding the new dialect of whatever the latest fad framework is so that I know what I'm doing and not copy/pasting or otherwise working from example.
What might make it hard to understand is that the vast majority of people who call themselves engineers don't do so to the level I consider professional; especially in the app / web development / start-up world.
There are plenty of people on this site who must be able to relate to that (and who are much better than I am - I was a Championship player playing for a League Two club and there are Galactico's active here).
That's long gone and now I'm turning into Eddy Howe (a football manager) not Steve Bull (who was an excellent striker who played for Wolves his entire career in the lower leagues but really should have moved to a good club because he was too good for them).
I wonder sometimes if that's the hump that top class sports stars have to go through when they retire from playing, it took me a few years to understand and accept.
Already did management tasks occasionally, and I rather be stuck on the last step of the career laddder with a job that makes me happy, than one I have to drag myself to office (physical or virtual one).
Eventually if healthy enough close to retirement age, I might as well do something completly different than computing related.
I spent the pandemic being one of the key players in the pandemic response, writing a lot of code but also helping a load of teams over different countries collaborate, and anything else I could do to make everything work. Oh and bringing up kids at the same time.
Now I'm at a startup, finally, and getting the engineering team off of the ground. Still trying to code (it's really hard to give up chasing the highs) a bit but there's less time for it and no time for the really hard deep dives (and I'm not willing to ignore my family to no-life it as others can do).
With that context, yeah, it's not as enjoyable. Sure I could try and transition back to a full-time coding roll and yeah, I'd be working on fun puzzles and enjoying it, but that means my impact is more limited. It's a better use of my skills + experience to be doing what I'm doing. Pays more too but both pay well :-)
So not far off from the comment you replied to.
I'm using Claude Code to push my development efforts along and it works like crazy, but I can't help but feel like it's a Faustian Bargain and 80% of this industry is going to evaporate over the next decade.
If work wants me to use it for the job, then sure why not? That too is something new to learn how to do well, will possibly be important for future career growth, and is exciting in a different way. If anything, I’ve got spare mental compute by the end of the week and might even have energy to do my hobbyist stuff.
Win win for me.
I can't enter a flow state since the workflow boils down to waiting and then getting interrupted, and then waiting again. Often the LLM does the wrong thing and then instead of moving to implement another feature, I'm stuck in a loop where I'm trying to get it to fix poor decisions or errors.
It's possible I get a feature implemented faster thanks to agentic LLM, but the experience of overseeing and directing it is dreadful and pretty much invariably I end up with some sort of tech debt slop.
I much prefer the chat interfaces for incorporating LLMs into my workflow.
