It feels like it's becoming harder and harder to escape AI in programming, and it sucks. It's making being a programmer so miserable, it feels like everyone around you is relying on it, so even if you don't use it yourself, you're spending all your time reviewing slop, and having to fight with coworkers who don't understand their own work.
I'm really not sure what the hell to do about it at this point? I just want to work with people who enjoy writing their own code as much as I do.
I'm still one of the luckier ones. I have my own projects and they fulfil me. I do contract work just to pay the bills, and I just only give the bare minimum to them now.
But my partner is a career developer. She loves training teams, curating codebases, and driving architectural improvements. And she's now surrounded by slop engineers who just aren't interested.
And I just don't know what she can do to find work that shares those values?
I just want to work with people who enjoy writing their own code as much as I do.
In my experience that was already a major issue with the field for me, even before LLMs. Haven't figured out yet.
I found it one time, a team of people who cared deeply about the work. But it was within a larger org that was the polar opposite, so everyone left. (The team became all good friends to this day though, so that's great!)
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On an LLM anecdote however, yesterday I had to review the most idiotic slop yet: in a statically typed language, using reflection to write to specific statically known fields of a class we control, just to be able to make the same code work with multiple classes. Just use an interface, it's literally less code.
So yeah, they definitely make the experience more exasperating.
@kroltan I've been very lucky a few times in the past to work with some really great people, and my partner grew a wonderful team at her last job, but in all cases the org itself has chewed them up and spat them out. Sadly that part has always been hard to avoid.
That's some pretty atrocious sounding code for sure, and it's becoming ever more common. It's a real shame. Unfortunately, if the product works "enough" then the code powering it doesn't seem to matter.
@SudoCat This resonates with me so much. I had to review my coworker's AI slop recently and it wasn't a fun experience. Lots of unnecessary lines and comments.
It's even worse for me since I'm also getting pressured by management to use AI to "ship features at lightning speed".
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