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Ask HN: How can you have fun doing corporate dev work in the age of AI tools?
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3 points
by uejfiweun
19 days ago
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My company, like many others, is heavily pushing agentic dev tools, putting up token usage leaderboards, etc. My problem is that corporate SWE work was already boring enough. You already had no say in the product or UX. This was compensated for by the ability to enter a fun "flow state" during implementation work, just working deeply on a problem for many hours and watching time slip by, having lots of schedule flexibility. Now, with AI tools, this seems totally gone. All that's left is constant context switching while you manage multiple agents and wait for them to complete at nondeterministic times. That, and increased expectations because "AI increases productivity", AKA more stress and more meetings. I have to say - AI tools have made solo and small group building 5x more fun... but it has made corporate dev work 5x less fun. All my favorite parts of the job are gone and all that's left is the stuff I hate. Is anyone actually having FUN out there in a corporate dev role with these tools? Is anyone actually reaching that flow state? Because I certainly am not. |
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Thing is, in my experience, work has gotten 10x more fun. Wrangling syntax and handling hundreds of little things that have no intrinsic meaning, just pure unadulterated accidental complexity, suck the joy out of my life. I experience no flow when I'm reading about how library X decided to interface with component Y in environment Z. It's all the same bloody thing over and over and over again. Connect this persistence to that service. Connect this service to that API. Log, sanitize input, log, write to persistence, read out of persistence, log, format into a response shape, log, audit, goddamn repeat, repeat, repeat. FFS.
Now I can just ideate, manage intent, control the architecture and let the bots handle the state management, all the endless and bullshit layout issues, writing SQL for the millionth time, the endless little things that suck time and energy out of my soul. I can have applications running in a day that took me a week and they look better too. It comes at a price indeed.. perhaps I am more suited to this age than the good coders of yore.