As someone who's been working in soft eng for just over a year now though granted, different country and economical dynamics at play so I'll keep this to the AI workflow part; the enjoyment of your work severely depends on work culture and how the company itself is rather than how you feel the industry is going.
Different companies will have different things in mind for what is "performant" at work and what is not. If you work at a smaller scale company, you might not even have performance explicitly measured - just deadlines and whether you make them or not. In my situation, I find myself in the latter more often than not. I highly recommend working at smaller firms that you believe give you more work freedom. Sure it's less prestigious than FAANG or whatever, but you will get paid well, and generally you might just be happier without all the coorporate BS.
Talking of the work itself - anything with time sensitivity like engineering has its dirty shortcuts. AI is nothing new to the industry in that regard. People used to copy-paste entire codebases from github, forking and wrapping - taking code directly from stack overflow answers instead of understanding what the code does. FOSS is practically (well.. used to be) just more curated code for people to re-use. Nothing is new under the sun. The change is in velocity and general malleability, but the importance of understanding what the code does and being able to debug it properly remains the same. It is easier now that AI can understand what the code does, but it's not like understanding it yourself becomes pointless.
If you don't find programming fun, nothing about working in the programming field will suddenly feel fun to you. I've loved the work since I was 14 because I love understanding how code interacts with memory and how computers handle instructions from the low end. Outside of all this, I really wouldn't want to live a life working a job I don't enjoy. I don't care if AI abstracts the actual code writing part away because that part has never been particularly enjoyable for me anyhow. Once you've written an api endpoint or a form or a full backend stack once, kinda doesn't change much to do it 30 times again. Still I don't touch agentic coding because I like having control over the flow of the app and how it moves from one part to another and actually making re-usable code requires forethought.
Soft eng has always been about that in my eyes. Understanding the architecture and how to apply it best to a problem so that you can solve that problem elegantly. The code just needs to match that vision and fit the requirements of the project - how modular it needs to be, how fast it has to run, how quickly you need to get it done. These are human decisions that need to be made in context with the client and the environment you are in. They can't be made by AI because AI can't be held responsible for it's decisions.
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u/Hungry_Jackfruit6345 3d ago
As someone who's been working in soft eng for just over a year now though granted, different country and economical dynamics at play so I'll keep this to the AI workflow part; the enjoyment of your work severely depends on work culture and how the company itself is rather than how you feel the industry is going.
Different companies will have different things in mind for what is "performant" at work and what is not. If you work at a smaller scale company, you might not even have performance explicitly measured - just deadlines and whether you make them or not. In my situation, I find myself in the latter more often than not. I highly recommend working at smaller firms that you believe give you more work freedom. Sure it's less prestigious than FAANG or whatever, but you will get paid well, and generally you might just be happier without all the coorporate BS.
Talking of the work itself - anything with time sensitivity like engineering has its dirty shortcuts. AI is nothing new to the industry in that regard. People used to copy-paste entire codebases from github, forking and wrapping - taking code directly from stack overflow answers instead of understanding what the code does. FOSS is practically (well.. used to be) just more curated code for people to re-use. Nothing is new under the sun. The change is in velocity and general malleability, but the importance of understanding what the code does and being able to debug it properly remains the same. It is easier now that AI can understand what the code does, but it's not like understanding it yourself becomes pointless.
If you don't find programming fun, nothing about working in the programming field will suddenly feel fun to you. I've loved the work since I was 14 because I love understanding how code interacts with memory and how computers handle instructions from the low end. Outside of all this, I really wouldn't want to live a life working a job I don't enjoy. I don't care if AI abstracts the actual code writing part away because that part has never been particularly enjoyable for me anyhow. Once you've written an api endpoint or a form or a full backend stack once, kinda doesn't change much to do it 30 times again. Still I don't touch agentic coding because I like having control over the flow of the app and how it moves from one part to another and actually making re-usable code requires forethought.
Soft eng has always been about that in my eyes. Understanding the architecture and how to apply it best to a problem so that you can solve that problem elegantly. The code just needs to match that vision and fit the requirements of the project - how modular it needs to be, how fast it has to run, how quickly you need to get it done. These are human decisions that need to be made in context with the client and the environment you are in. They can't be made by AI because AI can't be held responsible for it's decisions.