this is so accurate it hurts. the amount of my coworkers who just outright have handed any and all thinking over to the computer is staggering. its not just senior either, plenty of devs at the lead and staff level are producing complete garbage that has to be rolled back within an hour of deploy because it is extremely broken, no one verified, and it passed automated checks.
there are several features over the last few months that were obviously made and deployed and no one even launched the dev server and tried a single thing to verify if it was right. just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."
Managers can be even worse. I’ve seen an entire roadmap mostly AI generated. Director+ across the company approving based on it having the right keywords, without nuance or detail.
I’ve seen monthly and quarterly executing results AI generated with plainly wrong factual information.
Yeah, it's not actually really about coding, it's about thinking. Anyone with any software experience knows the job is 90% thinking and 10% typing. At first I thought AI agents were just a faster keyboard, but no, they think for you too. For many people it's going to be very difficult to force themselves to think when they have a magic thinking machine that makes it look they thought it through.
That and the shear volume. Since you're not writing it yourself you have to figure out what it's doing if you want to be able to review it, internalize and follow how it's changing the model that the software defines. This is doable but it takes time.
Time unfortunately that you are simply not given because the whole point is to work faster so expectations of velocity have of course increased.
So you end up having to get a fuzzy idea of a given changeset, look at it a bit and evaluate quickly if it's a good change or a bad one and click it through, and on to the next thing.
At the size of PRs being whole features and doing this 5x faster than before, all you've got left as a senior is your Spidey sense. As a junior.. no idea how they cope.
We'd all love to still spend that 90% thinking time, but it used to be justified by necessity of getting the job done. Now, it's just not a luxury that is afforded.
What can ya do.. I'm slowly learning to be the best bot herder I can be, but it certainly feels like a change in skillsets. I definitely only feel like I'm able to do a good job due to enough experience and building and growing software projects over time to have an idea of what kind of decisions might bite us down the road, as well as to know what maybe can't be known but is just worth a risk. Without that kind of intuition I think I'd feel like I was really shooting blind.
several people on my team cannot even reason with decisions their code made, why architecture is a certain way, etc. without consulting their agent. its the thinking that is falling off, i dont care about the code nearly as much as the critical thinking part.
In general, it's bizarre that people look at problems this systemic and conclude that they are primarily a failing happening at the level of individual contributors. This organizational rot didn't even start with LLMs, though it's certainly been accelerated by them
myopic systems are one thing. developers and product leaders outright refusing to even click on pages and test features before they go to production is worse than their orgs simply being bad. many developers i work with can barely even reason with decisions anymore without consulting the agent. it is worse than simply saying the orgs are bad.
It's a feedback loop. I've fallen into something close to it (Thought not on the level of just not testing things before I ship them) myself once or twice under pressure. If there are deadlines that get tighter and tighter and execs and managers make credible threats about them and every checkpoint takes days, and every time you look for feedback people are doing PR reviews with AI and saying "IDK ask claude" and giving you LLM output in response to your questions then you're going against the grain by having standards in a way that could threaten your job security. If you happen to have the kind of power that lets you push back successfully in your organization, or the kind of organization that will actually take pushback seriously and not just label you a problem for it, I encourage you to be the change you want to see in the world. I think a lot of people don't meaningfully have that option. I have already found that out the hard way once. This tech is not unique in having modes of usage that are lazy, addictive, or sloppy. The difference here is that the culture from the top down in a staggering number of organizations is creating active pressure to use it that way
there are several features over the last few months that were obviously made and deployed and no one even launched the dev server and tried a single thing to verify if it was right. just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."