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How are you fighting back against skill atrophy caused by AI at work? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 10 hours ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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I currently work at an "AI First" 🤢 fintech company, and we're mandated to program agentically. I was fortunate enough to start working before the AI hype, but the environment right now is daunting.

There's too much unmaintainable code slop and throw away scripts committed that I can't keep track anymore. Each PR has so much diffs that it feels like someone had diarrhea and shat all over.

I try to manually review the code, but it feels like best effort at most. Like I may only understand 70% of the thing that I'm reviewing. What ends up happening usually is that I just ask the model and verify the output(which is horrifying I know)

I spend the whole day arguing with AI, reviewing, and pushing back against its output that sometimes I wonder if I am the one driving AI or is it driving me.

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Recently, I noticed that I've becoming more reliant on the model and that my skills have been atrophying. What would've taken me an afternoon if I program it by hand, would take me a week now if I do it now. I also find my head hurting and myself glossing over the code in code reviews and prompting claude to do even the basic of commands.

I get that there's more to programming in software engineering (collaboration, dealing with people, etc etc), but I don't feel like I am in control of the systems I am building anymore with the engineering aspect being replaced with babysitting and self lobotomy.

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Off work hours, I try to brush up by reading on system design and architecture books, typing by hand if I'm learning a new technology or stack, but I feel like it's not enough to prevent from skill atrophy.

How are y'all coping and how do you recover from this? I am afraid on what skills that I'll be able to bring at my next place of employment if I resign and that I'm becoming a jack of all trades master of none type of thing - having only shallow understanding.

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[–] 17 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

I work at a very large company that has pushed Ai. I also have 27 years of professional experience, so I lead position hasn't changed too much, except reviewing Ai work as well. All your problems sounds like a team issue. People shouldn't commit things they don't know how and your commits should be small enough that they are easy to review. I had this issue before Ai. I would tell my team to please make small co.mits because either have to review them. We still do the stuff we enjoy ourselves but use Ai for the coding equivalent of "please read this 200 page document and remove all i stances of dog". Basically something that requires no skill but an insane amount of time.

That being said, I do worry about the new grads.

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  • [–] 17 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    People shouldn't commit things without understanding them, but there's a lot of pressure on people in some of these shops to push out updates at irresponsible speeds. Management is being flooded with messages about 3x, 5x, and 10x production, and you don't get that with bottlenecks like "understsanding what you're releasing".

    In a lot of companies, senior management has lost their minds, and have ben fully committed to the slopocalypse.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 hours ago

    It’s the pressure to ship things that gets you.

    I took over another guy’s work last week and have spent a whole week fixing issues, but his core work needed to get shipped for a major sales deadline. So I got it out the door.

    But now I have to bug fix it back to a real solution that aligns with our long term goals which sucks.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 hours ago*

    People shouldn’t commit things they don’t know how

    I don't use AI, but I read people saying you lose interest when an AI writes it. You check out. So you have less understanding, and it's not reasonable to expect people to have the same investment. So I don't believe it is just a team issue.

    your commits should be small enough that they are easy to review

    Depends on what's being asked by higher-ups. If there's management pressure to commit fast, then, again, it's not a team issue, unless you're including management in the team.

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