Context: ~3.5yo Drupal / Prestashop / Plain PHP dev
I tried Cursor because our company paid for it, and it does bloody everything near instantly.
If I need to write a module for some custom data report UI, or a data importer of some variety, this thing just needs to know the detailed spec and it gets me probably 80% of the way to the feature in minutes. It’s ridiculous. The rest is just me picking some UI libraries, fixing bugs, and probably optimizing the code a bit.
I really don’t know what to do with the information that this thing can do what it took me so long to learn, in minutes, rather than hours, while I stumble around plugin declarations as if I just started to code.
Even the off-usage limit Cursor works really good. I can just keep coding with it past the $20 mark and it’s fine.
Of course the code it generates is pretty shit and full of comments…but it works.
I’ve integrated it into my work almost entirely along with the rest of the team. We all spam it daily. We pretty much never write a feature ourselves anymore. From what Cursor says, most of our code in GIT from the past few weeks is AI generated (like 70-80%…)
Before you say it, yes, our codebase is shit, and was shit. We have practically no devops, no real team structure, and something is always on fire, though I’m under the impression that this isn’t very uncommon nowadays… (For context, we just wrote our first documentation for a project more than 4 years old, and it’s all generated by Cursor, and there’s more hardcoded shit in our code than configurable stuff)
I keep trying to manually write code that I’m proud of, but I can’t. Everything always needs to be shipped fast and I need to move on to the next thing. I can’t even catch my breath. The only thing allowing me to keep up with the team is Cursor, because they all use it as well. The last guy that refused to use AI was just excluded from the team.
How the hell do I deal with this information? Where do I go from here? I’m fucking terrified and I need some advice from somebody that isn’t all up in the latest Opus model paying $80 (tax included) monthly to code with AI… I love my team, they’re great people, but our obsession with AI is REALLY concerning.
PS: If somehow I leaked who I work for somewhere and this can be crossreferenced to my company please let me know. I don’t want to be found talking about this, just because I don’t know how they would react, but I really need a different perspective.
EDIT: Thanks all for the responses. You’re confirming my fears. Idk how to feel about it…
EDIT2: I’m a bit overwhelmed by the attention haha. I’m trying to reply when I get free time. Thanks everyone
Feeling embarrassed is a weird reaction. If it actually helps you in your job, there’s nothing wrong with that. Get that money. Whether you like programming enough to actually get good at it is a personal choice. I’m someone who has been extremely passionate about it my whole life, and when I was younger, I had a much lower opinion of people who only did it for a paycheck (the “9 to 5 people” who didn’t know the difference between Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows until they took computer science in college). These days, I couldn’t care less. The tech industry stopped being a meritocracy long ago. This recent wave of AI slop is just the boot stomping on the population of people who exist within one standard deviation from the average.
But as you’re sitting around scratching your balls while the agents generate your code for you, take the time to think about this bit of doomer outlook:
The “vibe coding” thing is a fad that won’t last. The only reason it exists now is because the current state of LLMs isn’t good enough to do everything on its own. These agents currently need a human in the loop to babysit them when they fuck up, as you’ve no doubt noticed. They’re also highly subsidized because the AI companies want to collect data in order to train them and make them better. If/when they’re truly able to build a product on their own from prompt to ops, then the price hikes and layoffs will come. Maybe they won’t even raise prices, maybe some billionaires will take the company private and only give access to their friends, family, and the young white christian men they’re using as blood donors in their longevity experiments…
I was originally really, really into programming. I wanted to learn. I still want to get the Drupal certification just for the fun of it, even though the test is pretty crap. Though it’s somewhat fading…I haven’t maintained my personal website at all for the past year or so…
Well put.
Not sure if I think coding by AI will ever truly become good enough. And if it does, eventually, they will have nobody to learn from, so we may have a few AI’s that can code, and a few other devs that stuck to it which will suddenly 10x their salary. Then we’d need a new role, someone to maintain that AI somehow so it doesn’t lose its knowledge so the company doesn’t need to pay the 10x salary of a real dev haha. Sounds both interesting and dystopian.
Of course the code it generates is pretty shit and full of comments…but it works.
If it’s shit but it works, it’s still shit. You are building technical debt that will eventually have to be paid when you get more customers, and current codebase starts surfacing bugs, security and performance issues.
Before you say it, yes, our codebase is shit, and was shit. We have practically no devops, no real team structure, and something is always on fire, though I’m under the impression that this isn’t very uncommon nowadays…
Sounds like your team doesn’t have a strong technical leadership, or they’re prioritizing expansion rather than stability. Maybe you’re working for a startup and have yet to turn profit? Or your clients don’t care about quality and reliability.
At only 3 years experience you are still learning, and it’s telling that you can already recognize AI slop code. I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont’t know what the job market is like right now. I believe that if all you do is interface with AI all day, your job itself can be replaced with AI, so the experience you’re getting now may be of very little value as a software engineer. But who knows, AI is a real disruptor, and being able to review and scriutinize AI code can be a skill in itself.
I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont’t know what the job market is like right now
Where I work, there’s really no emphasis on code quality or testing. There’s also like no mentorship or senior developers leading the way.
They hired a guy with 1-2 years of experience and I feel really bad for him. Not only is he learning very little, he’s learning actively bad patterns. No one is teaching him about automated testing. Code reviews are just “you skim it. Don’t spend more than 30 minutes”.
Management of course loves LLMs and wants more usage.
They hired a guy with 1-2 years of experience and I feel really bad for him.
same…we hired a guy for testing and minor tasks but all he’s done so far has been development in the belly of the beast, kinda like me. (I’m also quite new compared to the rest of the team)
I hope he’s not fired soon. I like him. He’s not the brightest yet but he’s putting effort in all day and can take any amount of criticism you throw at him.
AI (through agents, but even completions to an extent) extends your reach and reduces your grasp.
For some sectors, that’s perfectly acceptable. There are plenty of codebases that don’t need to worry about keeping devs accountable.
There are also plenty of business models these days (especially in the Trump era) that face no downside from failing to keep devs accountable even if they should. VC-backed vaporware looking to exit before they drown in tech debt, private equity acquisitions that just need to bleed existing customers dry while disemboweling the productive capacity of the firm, or even publicly-traded brands that are chronically unable to think past next quarter’s P&L. And especially if they’re already a monopoly.
The trouble is really when a CTO misunderstands what kind of business they’re running, and considers the wrong folks to be their “peers”. There’s a big incentive to just copy whatever Amazon/Microsoft/Google says. It’s the new “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
Idk if that’s your situation or not.
My peers are way more open-minded than that but I feel like we’re on a slippery slope.
We were not acquired by some so-called investment firm. I think we still have the original company owner which is a really, really important part to me.