I feel the same way, but my frustration is a little different. The market is broken, people’s judgment is broken, and so are some egos. Too many people have developed enormous confidence from a very shallow understanding of software (Dunning-Kruger?).
AI might be one of the most impressive things I've seen in tech, hands down. The problem isn't AI per se — it's what people suddenly think AI means. Let's go deeper.
Yep, it can write code much faster than you, me, and anyone else. Great. But writing code was never the whole job, right? That was the simplest part of our job. I could spend days or weeks just thinking on a solution and then write the actual code in a couple of hours.
You know, I read some version of that statement every single day, yet I rarely see that understanding reflected in practice.
A non-engineer getting ChatPGT/Codex/Claude to scrape a website doesn't suddnely mean they understand production systems, security, scalability, UX, maintainability, a11y, <a big list of other stuff?>, and all the tradeoffs that come with shipping software.
And, inside orgs, I'm seeing another weird conclusion: if AI makes one part of my job faster, somehow I should now be able to handle 10 things in parallel and I become half-infrastructure, half-marketing, half-security, half-support, and still excercise the same engineering judgement everywhere. Quick reminder: AI is not making us ship software faster, the bottleneck just moved to other phases in the SDLC (referencing to Anthropic's articles and DORA).
AI didn’t simplify engineering. It simplified implementation—and implementation was rarely the hardest part. I’m genuinely glad it takes less time now.
If anything, it makes experienced engineering judgement more important, because now generating something that looks correct is incredibly cheap.
But looking correct and being correct are two very different things... right?
That's the part of this moment that disappoints me.
I am excited and at the same time I am sad, I have peaked my curiosity, I can learn anything but in the 8 hours I am working I am just a cog in the machine guiding agents and fixing their mistakes at that moment it sucks