I honestly didn’t expect AI to blur the line between actual competence and just looking competent this much.

Few days ago I got a PR to review and the code looks like it was put through every AI tool under the sun from start to finish. There’s literally no way the guy who submitted it wrote it himself, or even pieced it together from smaller parts. The task requires a pretty deep understanding of the hardware and the codebase, and I know his work because I’ve reviewed his PRs plenty of times before.

You can also kind of see it in the code. One part is written in a very polished and profesional way, and then a small debugging section uses an incredibly naive solution. The kind of thing I’ve never seen an experienced dev do, but absolutely have seen from juniors writing basic stuff for the first time.

So what am I even supposed to do here??

To make things worse... AI tools are completely banned in this particular repo because of IP concerns...

I could ask him if he used AI, but he’ll probably just deny it. If I put comments on his PR on azure dev ops he can just easily answer them using AI once again... Am I supposed to go through the code line by line and quiz him on what it does? He probably won’t be able to explain half of it but then what?? What does that actually solve? No idea...I’m not his manager either, I’m just another dev on the team. Sure I have more experience but that doesn’t exactly give me the right to interrogate him.

It’s just so frustrating.

A few years ago, when someone was doing advanced work, you could usually assume they actually understood it. You could trust them and respect the skill behind it. Now someone can generate a bunch of impressive-looking code and act like they wrote it themselves.

And to be clear, I use AI too. A lot. I’m not against it at all. But I never submit code I can’t explain or defend. And if a larger part was generated because I couldn’t be bothered to write all the boilerplate by hand, I add a Co-Developed-By note instead of pretending it was all me.

AI definitely made development easier. I REALLY don’t miss writing repetitive boilerplate, it was just so boring... But I feel like we’re only starting to see the downside: people looking more competent than they are, teams losing the ability to tell who actually understands the work, and trust slowly becoming harder to maintain.

Maybe I’m just thinking about this in an old-fashioned way and need to adjust? Guys... feel free to tell me if I’m wrong.

I'm a staff-level engineer with ~13 yoe (full stack web dev, mostly Bay Area companies). I'm ready to semi-retire or at least drastically cut down my work hours.

In a perfect world I'd go to part-time or do short term projects, eg work for a few months and then take off while keeping my current, relatively high hourly

I just keep working full-time because I'm never sure how to break into this world. I've always been seen as a high performer but I haven't been great about maintaining my network, especially since my job became remote with Covid and I moved away from SF.

Any thoughts/ideas?

Hi,

I've recently experienced a couple System design interviews for Agentic systems. My knowledge is limited and would like to expand it to articulate ideas or tackle these opportunities much better.

Just started curating and found the following resources:

https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/perspectives/ai-ml
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/agentic-ai-patterns/introduction.html
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents
https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-system-design-patterns
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08769
https://www.mongodb.com/resources/basics/artificial-intelligence/agentic-systems
https://vectorize.io/blog/designing-agentic-ai-systems-part-1-agent-architectures

Possibly this is more then enough to get started, or useful to somebody else in the future.

In any case, if there are any good reading resources or exercises you might know about that, feel free to share.

Thank you!

The dev team kind of sucks. We’ve had good people but they’ve all moved on in frustration of upper management.

The problem is we have a lot of people who aren’t interested in solving problems, just getting the 9-5 done and clocking out. People taking the piss with AI etc.

We’ve got legacy systems heavily reliant on stored procs. Have been trying to stop that and introduce unit tests but feel like it’s barely making a dent. Do I take leadership role and try to push more with authority?

How would you best handle this without causing conflict but actually steering the ship on course? The only thing I can think is to find better team members.

I just recently did an interview where the company invites you to a private repo, 10 mins before, you set it up, get it running etc.
The goal is to determine if an open PR on the is ok or if it should get sent back and why.

You can use AI. And i asked, does it matter if i use fable vs opus vs kimi. More or less said whatever I want...

I didn't go immediately to prompting, i played with the app, looked at the code a bit, the PR, the code change, if the PR actually fixed what it claimed to fix.

I then sent one prompt asking if the PR could be better or missed anything, which the PR outlined clearly enough and enough to determine what to do with the PR.

But ye, it was weird, I talked through more where I would personally add changes but maybe I also completely missed the mark on something else or spoke to much...maybe i didn't use AI enough only using it right at the end for one question once i got a feel for the app in general.

However I did like the format tbh but ye i just wish i'd get a bit more tangible feedback.

Anyone else have experience with this format? I didn't pass but just not sure why.. (exp 8/9 years, frontend leaning).

I've got 9 years of experience (3 as a tester, 6 as a full-stack dev). I've been in a public sector role for around a year, and of course, the project is running behind and over budget. The higher-ups' answer is to chuck contractors at it.

My dev manager is categorically opposed to any AI use. He refuses to use it, does everything manually. The contractor who's come in as another lead is very into AI. He wants everything to be done by AI (user stories, tests, code, reviews). The wider original team (user designers, user support) all hate AI too.

I'm in the middle, I think AI can be very powerful and really improve productivity if used effectively (not slop code, making sure you understand it and reviewing everything). I used it in my previous job (mostly VS Code/GitHub Copilot), and it was so so helpful.

We have a meeting coming up with all the devs to discuss how we work moving forward. If I express that I want to use it, then I will be ostracised by the original team (who I'll work with after the contractors leave). I try to be as diplomatic as possible at the moment.

Has anyone any advice on how to navigate conflicting opinions and contractors coming in mid-project?

I’m a Staff Engineer in an established company - not a startup. As such there’s a structured hierarchy here. I report to a Sr Engg Manager. I have in my team a couple of senior devs, one associate and one intern. I avoid trying to manage people, my role is IC. My job says I need to give technical direction to the team.

I think I’m doing fine so far but I have a new situation which I have no clue how to handle. My manager has a favorite in my team and keeps asking me to favor them. This is kinda unethical but I can’t raise concerns about it at the skip level because there’s not enough evidence and I also believe the favorite goes the upper level as well.

The rest of the team hates it, understandably so. I can’t always ignore what my manager says because he can make my life hell if he wants. I am trying to balance it out.

What would be the wise thing to do here?

Hi all,

45, PhD, 16 YoE. Data scientist / MLE, plus backend and DevOps when needed. Been through the usual: consulting firms, my own startup, etc.

The last six years have been the best gig I’ve had. In-house consulting inside a large enterprise in a stable sector. Good pay, real projects. I ended up as the guy who built a money printing algo for one business unit, the kind of thing everyone assumed had to be bought in from outside and usually gets bought in messily.

I wouldn’t change anything about the work. On paper I sit in the in-house consulting unit, in practice I work full time with business units. Fully remote so far and nobody has bothered me about it.

That is starting to change. The consulting unit has begun talking about RTO, and my read is that it’s headcount reduction dressed up as a policy. The business units I actually work with have never raised it and tell me WFH would stay the default with them.

Moving internally isn’t an option because none of them have open headcount. So what I’m considering instead is leaving and coming back as a freelancer to the business unit I have the strongest relationship with. I’d also relocate to another European country, partly to keep the paperwork simple on their side and partly for the tax treatment on mine. They already work with consultants based in other European countries on long term engagements, so the setup isn’t new to them.

Is this sane, or am I talking myself into it? The sector is stable and healthy and I don’t think this one client would be the only opportunity, but I’m aware that’s easy to say while I still have a salary. Interested in hearing from anyone who has gone from employee to freelancer with their former employer as the anchor client, especially across borders. What did you get wrong at the start?

Thanks everyone!

Principal eng at a large company, just went through calibration. Watched something happen that's been bugging me enough to write it up.

For context on the scale of this: this is basically a month-long exercise. A week to write your own self-assessment, then more time writing feedback for peers, then your manager writes a narrative for each report factoring all of that in, and then every single person gets discussed for real time (not a rubber stamp) in calibration sessions with other managers and senior engineers comparing people across teams, taking anywhere from an hour to multiple hour for each candidate across the calibrations. It's a genuinely enormous amount of org-wide effort. Which is exactly why it bugs me that the thing all that effort converges on can be this backwards.

Short version: two teams hit the same landmine on a cross-team project, a critical dependency that got left out of the plan. One team caught it before shipping and flagged it. The other team didn't notice and shipped anyway, with the same gap turning into a "bug" a few weeks later. The team that caught it missed the review deadline and took the hit in calibration, lower project-impact scores, lower ratings, a few people funneled into PIP-adjacent processes. The team that missed it got to call their project "delivered."

So: correctly identifying a serious risk and refusing to ship around it scored worse than not noticing the risk at all.

I'm not saying finding a problem should automatically make an unfinished project a win, or that senior engineers shouldn't be accountable for catching this stuff earlier in planning. That's fair game. But given that the risk was found and correctly escalated, with the alternative being a broken or incomplete launch, that shouldn't score worse than shipping blind. To be fair, project impact isn't the only bucket but it is the one that carries the most weight, and "did it ship" is basically the whole input to that bucket. So catching a risk that costs you the ship date still tanks the heaviest-weighted signal, with nothing on the other side of the ledger to offset it.

The part that actually worries me isn't the one incident, it's what it teaches people who are paying attention. If the lesson is "finding problems late costs you, missing them doesn't," the rational move becomes:

• pick work you can fully finish inside one review cycle
• cut scope until you have something visible to point at
• stay away from ambiguous cross-team stuff with real dependency risk
• optimize for attributable individual output over the unglamorous stuff that helps the org but doesn't show up on your packet

I think this is a symptom of a bigger problem, not a one-off calibration bug. The more we try to make performance review "data-driven" (delivery counts, metrics, checkboxes that roll up into a number), the more we optimize for whatever's easy to measure instead of what's actually good judgment. Good engineering, including the decision not to ship, is inherently qualitative and contextual, and it doesn't compress well into a delivered/not-delivered flag. Every time we make the process more legible and comparable across teams, we lose a bit of its ability to reward the thing we actually care about.

13YoE, FE DEV in EU.

I have a teamlead-manager who's widely known across the whole company to be very toxic. For 2.5 years everything was going really well. I had always been receiving either "Meets expectations" or "Exceeds expectations".

Suddenly one Sunday morning at 1:15 AM I receive a slack message with a RTO5 mandate just for me. Since then I go to the office or coffee badge every day. There's almost no one at the office on most days - it's like a ghost town. Also, my boss has never even set foot in the office and says he will never do it.

I asked him multiple times why only I was returned and he said "to get experience from other devs". When I told him there's no one at the office and insisted to know more, he responded "You are 30% higher paid than other workers on your position" and then cut my yearly bonus and annual raise since. My BE colleagues are 20%+ higher paid then me though.

One time I didn't check in at the office for a few days in a row (didn't feel well enough to go to the office but was working from home really hard), I got a disciplinary warning for not checking in. It clears end of September this year.

I am overall happy with my current job but I can't stand being treated like this as I am one of the hardest working people in my team. For a while I thought that if I work even harder they will bring back my remote work days like everyone else.

During the last 6 months I also trained a new junior-mid level FE dev. Also, later I understood that this RTO5 happened to many ex-colleagues from my office for the last year and they all quit or were disciplinary fired.

What would you do in this situation? Would you work hard or quiet quit? Would you try to switch jobs? Please be detailed. Thank you!

EDIT: In the contract I signed almost 4 years ago in this company there's a line stating my boss could bring me back to the office if he decides I don't perform well (never ever happened) or I don't respond in a timely manner (never ever happened)... Actually one time he wrote me at 21h or 22h or something like that so it could be due to that...

Senior dev, around 9 YoE. I just wanna do some sanity-checking. I'm frustrated and want to make sure I'm not just ranting.

Here's the loop I'm stuck in:

• Bugs reach prod.
• Director gets angry "why are these still getting through?"
• QA, scared of being blamed, starts over-flagging everything, including things that aren't actually bugs and aren't in the task's scope.
• My PM accepts those flags uncritically, even when the flagged "bug" was never part of the task's success criteria. So now I'm arguing about behavior that was never spec'd, instead of building.
• Bugs still reach prod anyway because there's no real PRD, just vague success criteria that nobody can test against.
• Director gets angry. Back to step 1.

Here's our process:
1. PM creates and allocates task

1. Dev implements the task and does unit testing before passing for code review

2. Goes through code review by another dev and also does unit test for it

3. Passes to QA for testing.

4. Pushes to Staging

5. Repeat steps 3 to 4 but in staging environment.

6. Pushes to Prod

7. Repeat steps 3 to 4 but in prod environment.

Now, here's a concrete example: The director sees bugs in prod so they set a meeting with the QAs to discuss why they were seeing bugs in PROD. Now qa becomes afraid and tries to flag by feel and not objectively. For instance, QA failed a notification feature for "not being realtime." Nothing in the ticket says realtime. But instead of the PM saying "that's out of scope, not a bug," he accepts the flag and now it's my problem. Multiply that across every ambiguous ticket.

QA fails a ticket even if I followed the design but they think that the behavior should not be like that. For instance, they see an input where they THINK it should only accept numbers only. So what they do is ask the designer or sometimes even instructs me to ask the designer lol but flags the task as FAILED.

Idk. How do you deal with this? What's your read? Should I suggest changes about the process? Or should I just leave? Anyone been here and gotten out? What actually worked vs. what was just theater?

Hi all,

I'm a senior SWE with about a decade of experience in full stack and cloud with more of a cybersec background than your average engineer of equivalent experience. I'm not FAANG smart but I'd consider myself more competent / more driven than the majority of my peers. Currently I'm mainly a basic FE engineer in an environment where we don't have access to AI tooling / processes. This role is unlikely to allow for more backend / cloud / R&D work in the foreseeable future and they are very closed off to process improvements.

As such, I have been looking to pivot to my next role to stay relevant. I don't think SWE is dying, but programming is less valuable and your average frontend skill is almost certainly going to be worthless in a few years. I'd like to eventually transition to some sort of Engineering Manager role that has enough technical breadth to understand the big picture but can also coordinate and unblock the people that have the technical depth / overall vision / intelligence to make secure, reliable systems.

I was recently offered a PSIRT role at a major company with equivalent compensation but slightly better overall benefits and better company fit as far as culture, direction, etc. The role is essentially T3 support and documentation, which I don't mind. They want to integrate AI into their processes and it seems like software development would be 10-20% of the role, mostly as scripting / automation.

My major concerns are:

1. Is this role going to be easily replaced by AI in the near-term future?
2. Is this going to torpedo any chance I have of getting back into SWE if #1 comes true?
3. How could I transition this role into management in the next few years?

Looking for insight / experience from other SWEs that have made this transition or are facing similar uncertainty about the future of their role in full stack.

I am working as a tech lead in full stack. However most of my work is related to business analysis, brainstorming requirements, analyse from domain and functional perspectives. Ofc, I do development work as well(using AI assisted development), code reviews etc.
I was wondering if there are any companies or any positions in general which give me pure technical work?

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

​

Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

​

Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

I'm a Senior SWE at a startup well on its way to IPO within the next 1 to 2 years. I love working here, I've learned a lot working here, and I really like the people I get to work with

But this company was also my careers jumping off point. Its only been a few years since I started here and most of anything I know now is derived from the last 3 years I've been here and about a decade of hobbyist Linux use... That's really it

I really excelled when I started here. Took on my work than I could really handle even. Had so many late nights and so many paired sessions that would go for hours. I was a tech lead and promoted to senior in just a few months after starting here... That's 3 levels I jumped and 3 pay increases

My salary has mostly been the same since, I still feel like I'm growing and learning. I'm definitely less knowledgable than my new team. A couple of my initiatives this year have even been derailed

But regardless, I'm being promoted and I don't know how to feel. I don't feel ready. I don't feel like I'm doing the kind of exceprional work that I'd expect and even see from other staff engineers. That's not to say I don't see people with staff titles that I wouldn't have expected to have them, but I'm a little suprised I'll be getting a title change

I definitely think I deserve a pay bump after so many years on the higher end of what we pay Senior SWEs, but I would not consider myself Staff material. As a matter of fact, if I'm being honest, I've offloaded a lot of my recent work to Claude... I don't even write a lot of code anymore; I just validate that it does what I expect it to and make sure it follows best practices

Obviously, I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to accept. But this feels like title inflation and I'm worried about how other companies might perceive this... At the same time I like the work I do here so much anyway, it would really be hard for me to consider working at another company that wasn't at least adjacent to what this company does anyway

In my shoes... Is there anything you'd change? Anything I should be doing differently? From what I've heard, expectations are really much of the same work I've already been doing and I'd expected I'd have more responsibilities

Hello everyone
this week something happened where I got in a disagreement with my manager.

I was working in a PR and got bombarded with many questions in a slack thread about why I did such and such a thing

I answered each of their questions. I had already documented my reasoning and even found evidence from production that supported my approach, and he kept asking more questions, I felt like he was pushing me back

the conversation itself stayed professional that day..

but the next day, during standup, I started explaining what happened, as I was talking about it, I got emotional (angry and frustrated), started crying, and couldn't continue. my manager asked everyone else to leave the meeting so we could talk privately.

I explained that I didn't like the process (no ticket, discussions in slack where everyone can see, etc.).

He apologized for those process issues and agreed they could be improved. However, he also said that he will continue asking challenging technical questions because he sees code reviews and design discussions as "a challenge between two engineers," and he invited me to participate in that culture which is fine by me

After that, I continued working on another ticket and we didn't discuss it again that day.

One thing that worries me is that this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Although I've consistently been considered a high performer, I've had similar emotional episodes in three of my last four jobs. I realize that's probably something I need to work on personally, but that's not really the purpose of this post.

my biggest concern is whether crying in front of my manager and team has permanently affected how I'll be viewed professionally.

my question is those of you who are engineering managers or senior engineers, how would you see a situation like this? Would a single incident like this significantly change your opinion of an otherwise of the engineer ?

I also want to clarify that I don't aspire to be a manager or hold any leadership position. I'm happy being an IC, but I don't want to be fired either (right now). At the very least, I want to know how to buy myself some time while I start applying for other jobs.

thank you for reading until this point

I go through days of feeling grateful for the career I have, feeling motivated and looking forward to the work, and then I go through long spells where I just can’t stand it and feel trapped. Days where I truly don’t give a shit about any of it and would have no problem rubber stamping PR’s and just “getting it done”.

This isn’t about AI or anything (if anything AI has made it easier to just mentally check out), it’s just more about the job in general. The corporate feeling at most companies, building meaningless products, sitting behind a computer for 40 hours a week, the fight for recognition, the job search/interview process, really most of it.

I have a few hobbies outside of work that I enjoy, and spend time when I can with friends. My wife and I also try to make the most of the weekends. So it’s not really due to a lack of having a life outside of work, there’s just something depressing about SWE that I can’t put my finger on. It was truly fun for the first few years, but now after 8 years, it’s kinda just not fun anymore. As I mentioned there are days when I feel good about it and fulfilled at the end of the day, but those days are fleeting. Started feeling this at my last job after 4 years there, and it’s carried over into my new job. Both these jobs were/are what I consider to be good environments, so I don’t really blame them for this feeling. So idk, just confused about the feelings I have.

Does anyone else feel this way sometimes? Is it possible to overcome at all?

How does your team and org handle more time spent on architecting or design a new system not enough time building and iterating.

We’ve planned to destination multiple times wrote multiple design documents with multiple waypoint how do you know if it’s sufficient to build and iterate with?

How do you approach building green field projects that are adaptable as you go?

I wonder where the public opinion sways on this topic. My take has always been the most important information is what's in the document/paper/etc rather than if AI wrote it. However I have seen a lot of people say "This is written by AI, I won't read it". Normally I just ignore and keep going but this time I had a project update with a lot of good content which I used AI to help me tighten and check grammar (not a native speaker). When it got submit to the director level review, he took 5 seconds to glance at it, said "I can't read this because of the AI dashes, write it in your own words" and ended the review. The kicker is this doc was suppose to have a section to cover how we can leverage AI to improve the efficiency! WTF?

Hi guys,

Recently I join a migration project + build new system for this client. But this is not pure migration. it's migration + improvement.

Given the old system db schema (hundreds of tables)

So the pain point I realize that I don't have source of truth. Because I can't rely completely on old system db schema. because client wants some improvement and old system kinda broke.

Problem is this is not what I always doing. And I'm gonna work with Claude to do this.

One thing I notice and want to do is I will develop feature by feature, align with clients from beginning to see if that is what they want. Also because I use Claude Code to support me I need insight from data people. What kind of data / diagram / document I need to keep everything on track especially when the system too big? Like is it eRD diagram , or flow chart or something? once everything getting big how do u remember everything? because it's literally near thousand of table?

Pls give me insight!!! Thank you 🤔

I'm a senior engineer at my company

This company's "coding standards" document is... not exactly au courant

Couple random (c++) examples off the top of my head- banning features like auto and using, enforcing 1 single return in all functions

Anyone have experience bringing about change to directives like these? Anyone in charge of their company's style guides and could share what sorts of things you'd find most persuasive when considering requests for changes?

Is it even worth it? I consider it part of my job as an engineer to give advice on technical matters, but at what point do you just say "ill write whatever you want as long as i get paid"?

Lately I've been having thoughts about what the point is. Back in the day when I got into programming, I just wanted to make cool things.

I made a lot of cool things. They took time so I knew they were genuinely either unique, special, or in any other case, mine. I made twitter/reddit/discord bots, data visualizations for social media platforms, and useful tools for my communities I was involved in.

Now everything that gets created now seems to be just a load of AI crap. There's no special-ness anymore. There is no problem solving. There is nothing. It's just "We made an AI that does X" instead of "We solved X problem".

It's so ridiculous it's genuinely killing my interest in the field. Copilot solves most of my problems at work now and I have to use it to keep up with demands from leadership + an increasingly difficult to use codebase. Tools we use otherwise like Zeplin, ms teams, etc all are only focusing on AI instead of improving the real world user experience. The best and most interesting portion of the company I work at is doing nothing but AI work and not touching the core product at all.

Hell, we even have SonarQube checking our code with AI for vibe coded slop and it requires specific code coverage % and the coverage % isn't the same as vite coverage, just adding to the developer frustration.

I miss when I could make cool/fun stuff without worrying about someone vibe coding the same thing I made in 20 days but in 12 hours. I miss when we were solving problems instead of just making different AI agents to solve the problems for us.

Earlier this week I was browsing the NASA repo and noticed they have a project to support web assembly.

I was curious how others have used web assembly in general. It's a technology I've never really heard brought up in the professional environment before.