The problem: You can't win anymore.
The old way: You'd think about the problem. Draw some diagrams. Understand what you're actually trying to do. Then write the code. Understanding was mandatory. You solved it.
The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing. You're supposed to describe a problem and get a solution without understanding the details. That's the labor-saving promise.
So I feel pressure to always, always, start by info dumping the problem description to AI and gamble for a one-shot. Voice transcription for 10 minutes, hit send, hope I get something first try, if not hope I can iterate until something works. And when even something does work = zero satisfaction because I don't have the same depth of understanding of the solution. Its no longer my code, my idea. It's just some code I found online. `import solution from chatgpt`
If I think about the problem, I feel inefficient. "Why did you waste 2 hours on that? AI would've done it in 10 minutes."
If I use AI to help, the work doesn't feel like mine. When I show it to anyone, the implicit response is: "Yeah, I could've prompted for that too."
The steering and judgment I apply to AI outputs is invisible. Nobody sees which suggestions I rejected, how I refined the prompts, or what decisions I made. So all credit flows to the AI by default.
The result: Nothing feels satisfying anymore. Every problem I solve by hand feels too slow. Every problem I solve with AI feels like it doesn't count. There's this constant background feeling that whatever I just did, someone else would've done it better and faster.
I was thinking of all the classic exploratory learning blog posts. Things that sounded fun. Writing a toy database to understand how they work, implementing a small Redis clone. Now that feels stupid. Like I'd be wasting time on details the AI is supposed to handle. It bothers me that my reaction to these blog posts has changed so much. 3 years ago I would be bookmarking a blog post to try it out for myself that weekend. Now those 200 lines of simple code feels only one sentence prompt away and thus waste of time.
Am I alone in this?
Does anyone else feel this pressure to skip understanding? Where thinking feels like you're not using the tool correctly? In the old days, I understood every problem I worked on. Now I feel pressure to skip understanding and just ship. I hate it.
It’s a different, less enjoyable, type of work in my opinion.
It's also why the opinions are so heated on this. There's many forms of management, and some play way better with the AI tools than others. Some people are doing the assembly line jobs and some are doing code ninja jobs. Some are actually doing engineering, and some are code monkeys who are paid the same range as the engineers and using the same tools.