[entrox]

Almost a decade ago, I moved my career into the management track. I am a director by now and have two more management levels between myself and individual contributors.

I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You encounter the same challenges minus the „human people and emotions“ part: having to explain properly, the agents doing something different than what you intended, feeling detached from the actual work, only focusing on the bigger picture and so on

To me it feels very natural, it is what I do every day. But then again, I made that choice and it wasn‘t forced on me. So I understand frustration.

[rubslopes]

I feel lucky to have been promoted to a management position recently, just as I was starting to feel less excited about dev work because of AI. I still enjoy building systems, but I have to admit that the loss of challenge made the work much less enjoyable for me.

Now I have a team of interns to mentor. They're sharp and use AI constantly, so my guidance is less about code and more about UI/UX, understanding what the client actually wants, good work practices, well-documented tickets, thorough reviews, and so on. Thankfully, I like this work, it has been very rewarding.