[jakewindle47]

LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years.

As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my career looks like.

[krisgenre]

18 years here (more if I can count my non professional years). Agreed, coding isn't as much fun as it used to be but AI has only increased my enthusiasm for tech. Its a lot more easier to learn and understand new stuff, build things (especially personal tools) and tinker in any programming language.

[jakewindle47]

For me, it was the craft that was fun, less the building. It was nice to have a really good result that customers were happy about, that other engineers were happy about, but it was also nice to have such intimate knowledge of a codebase because I and my team built it.

I miss that level of mastery. I feel that in the LLM-assisted coding age, that's now gone. You can read every section of code that an LLM generates, but there's no comparison to writing it by hand to me in terms of really internalizing and mastering a codebase.

[int3trap]

Why don't you just not use LLM's if it sucks the joy out of the process for you?

[jakewindle47]

Many reasons

Everyone else is using LLMs to assist their development, which makes it a lot harder to work without them, especially in just building enterprise apps. It doesn't feel like I'm creating something anymore. Rather, it feels like a fuzzy amalgamation of all developers in the training data are. Working with LLMs sometimes feels like information overload. When I see so much code scrolling past as the agent makes its changes, this can be exhausting. Reading this massive volume of code is exhausting. I don't like that the new "power tools" of software engineering mean that my career, our career, is now monetizable. I liked feeling like a craftsman, and that is lost.

[yoavm]

No the OP, but I feel like using LLMs to code is much more like management than coding. And the "person" you're managing is a not very smart coder with severe memory issues.

[wincy]

My guess is because it’s turning development into a Red Queen’s Race [0] where everyone has to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. If everyone else is using LLMs, how can you stay competitive without using them?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

[yodsanklai]

Same for me... fortunately, I'm reaching the end of my career anyway. But let see how it goes. LLMs are a very recent development so it's too soon to take such drastic decisions.

On the positive side, I have some old personal projects I couldn't complete because it was too much work for me alone. I think LLMs will help for menial tasks, while I can still work on improving the design and adding features.

[vips7L]

What are you looking of shifting to? I’ve thought about an actual engineering discipline, but going through the schooling just seems too big of a thing.

[jakewindle47]

Honestly? I'm not sure. I've looked at a few different paths.

I'm lucky to live in the Research Triangle area of the United States, so I've got really good options for schooling around me. My sister graduated with an aerospace engineering degree, and I've always been interested in space. Thinking about hardware as a possible path as well.

But in a complete twist, I've also always wanted to be an educator. A high school math or computer science teacher would fit me well. I remember a lot of my male teachers very fondly in terms of the impact they had on my life, and I'd love to give that back.

[llll_lllllll_l]

do you think shifting careers is gonna make us to avoid AIshitfication? I thought that was spreading on all areas.

[jakewindle47]

Yes and no, I'm looking for something that's deeply people-oriented now. I mentioned it in a different comment, being a teacher. Also thinking about being a nurse. My wife was a nurse, maybe we could work together.