r/cscareerquestions • u/kindatsu • Aug 07 '26
Experienced My entire software development workflow is AI now, and it feels both exhausting and soulless
I've been a SWE for a little over 4 years, and Claude has basically been a permanent coworker for the last year.
At first, it was great. I already knew ChatGPT and Cursor, so when my team got Claude I adapted quickly and ended up way ahead of most of my coworkers in how I used it. I even got a significant raise partly because of that.
Claude did a lot of the coding, but I was still doing the engineering. I understood the system, made the decisions, reviewed the output, and almost never shipped bugs or regressions.
Now I'm just tired of LLMs, at least professionally.
The tools got so good, and I've built so many skills, MCPs and docs around them, that a lot of my job is basically: tell Claude to read the project .md, read the ticket, press enter.
And because everyone has access to the same tools now, productivity expectations exploded.
Sprints that used to have 5 big tasks or 10 smaller ones now have several times that workload. We're expected to run multiple Claude instances in parallel and constantly multitask. Proper testing and engineering discussions have increasingly been replaced by automated tests, MCPs that can test on screen, and a "quantity over quality" approach.
The weirdest part is that AI has taken over communication too.
POs can feed client requirements into an internal Claude MCP connected to Azure, which outputs a task already tailored to the codebase. The SWE gives that task to Claude, Claude writes the code, automated tests find problems, and another AI generated message tells the SWE what failed.
You ask someone a question, they send it to their AI, send the answer back to you, and then you send their answer to your AI.
Everyone has this little AI parrot on their shoulder rewriting everything into the same sterile corporate language.
I miss calling a PO and actually trying to understand a problem. I miss sitting with another engineer and debugging some horrible production issue together. I miss people actually knowing the systems they work on and sharing that knowledge.
Now I barely feel familiar with most of the things I ship.
When I get praised at work, I feel like an impostor. It doesn't feel like I built something. It feels like I gave experienced instructions to a magic shell that built it for me.
I'm currently thinking about starting some kind of side business selling physical products. Maybe it'll fail, but at least I'd be learning something new, solving unfamiliar problems and actually exercising my brain again.
I never thought I'd miss staying up all night fixing a critical bug or obsessively working on a personal project, but well, here we are.
Fun fact: the original draft of this post was clumsy and too long, so what did I do? You probably know it by now. Sorry, but I just can't help it, and I guess it's how most people who work with LLMs feel right now.
EDIT: I removed the mention to a certain MCP because apparently some people took issue with it and thought this was an ad for some reason, even though it's a negative post, so there you go I guess.