I’m a 46-year-old programmer from Mexico. I’ve been doing this work for a little more than twenty-six years now, and I don’t want to stop. Writing code is not just a way of living for me. It’s what drives me most of the day. It’s the first thing in my mind when I wake up in the morning, and the last when I turn off for the night. When I’m done, I hope I can be at peace with myself, knowing I did what I could to write all the code I dreamed of.
I’m telling you this, so you understand what I’m about to confess: I’m feeling lost with all this AI-coding-for-you stuff that has been going on for the last couple of years.
I don’t know how to feel about it.
I don’t know what to say when some people I know tell me that, these days, they don’t have to write a single line of code for a project, and they are happy about it. I’m happy for them, but I don’t know how to feel about myself.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Copilot. I believe it is the best tool in your coding belt. It is, in fact, a code-completion tool, but a smart one. A really useful one. I feel more productive these days. I can write more code during the day, and that makes me happy. But the whole idea of letting the Agent do all the work for you baffles me.
I don’t want to be that old guy who wishes time would stop, and we all did things the old, good ways. So I’m digging the docs and learning to use this technology. God, just saying “technology” makes me feel old.
I’ve used ChatGPT and Claude extensively. I’ve also been developing a project using Amazon’s Kiro for the last two months, and just recently started using Claude Code to make some changes to a customer's web app. I want to be good at it. I want it to work, but the thing is, it doesn’t make me feel a thing.
When I’m coding, I feel like I’m playing 5D chess. When I use these agents, I feel dumb. I feel like I’m cheating.
In the past, I had employees helping me with the job, but these days I’m running Han Solo. Mainly because the money hasn’t been good the last couple of years, I couldn't afford to pay for help. So I thought I could use these agents to run multiple projects at once instead of hiring people, because it is much cheaper, but the thing is, they're not exactly autonomous.
You usually ask for something, they think, get to work, and deliver something that is not exactly what you asked. You blame your AI prompting skills and try again, wait some more, test, ask for more modifications, and so on, until you get something similar to what you were expecting to get. It takes a lot of time and effort. It’s a skill issue, I get it, but I’m left with the sensation that I should: a) improve my prompting skills, or b) code it myself and get it done quickly.
This week I got an idea, so I did the following thing: I worked on two projects at the same time. On one screen, I had Visual Studio open, and I coded the solution with just Copilot's help. On the other screen, I had Claude Code working on a different project and prompted my way to the changes I had to implement.
In a way, working with Claude Code made me feel the same as a few years ago, when I hired junior programmers for the first time, but this time with a big difference —I had to admit: instead of waiting a week for a solution, I had it in a couple of hours. Is this the way I should be using AI Agents going forward?
Anyway, I might be getting old and afraid, but I wonder if somebody else feels the same way.
This is my first article on the site. I’m sorry if this is sad. I tried to warn you with the title. Leave a comment if you feel the same or want to share your perspective on the matter.
Top comments (80)
This is such a honest take on the current state of tech. I can tell you the "AI noise" feels completely deafening. One day it’s a new agentic framework, the next it’s a model that supposedly makes everything we learned last week redundant. And now it is either you catch up or you get left behind. With the current state of how quickly technology is growing, I think AI might actually come to stay. It is sad and frustrating, and I cant imagine how it must be for you who has been in the industry for that long
Thank you, but to be fair, it's always been like this; we just move faster nowadays. If it's not a new JavaScript framework, it is a new tool, a new packer, or even a new language every other month. You get used to it. But AI is getting complicated to keep up with, let alone find our place in it.
Rightly said Ed
Man, your two-screen experiment is actually the setup I landed on too. And I think you accidentally discovered the sweet spot that a lot of people are still searching for.
The "I feel like I'm cheating" thing resonates. I've got about 8 years in and I still get that twinge when an agent spits out something that works on the first try. But here's what shifted it for me: I stopped thinking of it as "the AI wrote my code" and started thinking of it as "I reviewed and approved this code." The skill didn't go away — it just moved from writing to evaluating.
Your 26 years of pattern recognition is exactly what makes you good at prompting, even if it doesn't feel that way yet. You know what good code looks like. You know when something smells off. A junior dev using Claude Code can't spot the subtle issues you'd catch in 2 seconds.
Also, don't apologize for the post being sad. This is the most honest thing I've read on dev.to in months. More people feel this way than are willing to admit it.
Thank you, Kai. You gifted me with an awesome point of view. I'll keep experimenting and refining this new way of work. After all, this might be what I was looking for years ago: a way to build fast, better software.
I'll keep in mind what you said: I'm reviewing the generated code and finding a way to meet my clients' needs. But also, I don't have to stop writing code if that is what I love. There's something magical in thinking about code and writing those thoughts on a keyboard.
Wow what chutzpah to write a freaking AI comment under this post. And people are liking this shi. Or are they even people? Maybe the dead internet theory really is true.
I was reading about this a couple of days ago. I don't know if the dead Internet theory is true, but it is worrisome.
Same boat man. 20+ years doing web dev full stack [actual full stack, you know, dns, servers, email, along with web code and databases etc]
And yea the AI stuff is overwhelming. I'm using various tools and mostly using them alongside my editors, but not embedded as i just don't trust em yet to not screw up something massively as i have dozens of projects on my machine at a given time.
I have no idea where it's going, but I know we all have to be using them and learning to use them, just so we learn what to do when things go wrong.
And i agree... i love playing 5D chess too... and we still can... for fun, but most work stuff we probably need integrate AI since companies/clients/bosses are going to be expecting it even though they don't understand how any of it works.
Keep your manual backups and recovery plans handy :) and ask for a raise every time you have to use them :D
That's a beautiful way of seeing things. I'll keep in mind that raise trick :)
It is an whole other mindset using agents to code. You need to rethink your old way of working. That is more impactful than for example leaning a new language.
It is not going to be easy and it will have teething problems. But when you find the way that works for you it will be a benefit.
I'm sad to hear things aren't going well. I do suggest hiring someone to find out to work in an agent-people team. The speed of AI is going to cause burnouts faster because the hype is all about one person companies. Having people you can rely on is better than the fastest smartest model.
Thank you, David. It is true that having a team you can rely on is priceless.
This is a very honest post, and I can absolutely relate to this - on the other hand, I would say let's not go crazy, at this point it's good to be a little bit skeptical about the whole AI craze ...
One thing I'm not hearing mentioned often, but which is real, is that this stuff simply costs money (of course it's a business model for AI companies) - you can easily burn through a lot of tokens, unless you're already a bit of an AI "expert" - and if the results aren't up to the same quality standards compared to when we'd have coded it ourselves, then what have we gained?
Bit of an eye opener: in reality, on many projects the actual coding might just take 15 or 20 percent of the time - the rest is spent on planning, design, testing, debugging and so on ...
So now the focus seems to be on those 15-20% - I'd argue for shifting our focus to the 80-85% :-)
Having AI help with the thinking part (as an advisor) may have several advantages - one if that you don't need to review/fix the code that AI generates, if it doesn't generate that much code ...
It can still be used to generate some of the code, but the "boring" part, the pure boilerplate code - if used like that, it might free up the developer to focus more on the "interesting" work ...
Well that's the more optimistic take, but basically my point is:
Let's not go crazy and jump into having AI generate complete codebases full of crap and security holes, and I'd say the same to companies who think they can go for a quick buck and fire all their juniors and replace them with AI - look before you leap, the benefits might not outweigh the costs when you make the complete calculation.
P.S. went off on a bit of a tangent here, but I hugely appreciate the honesty of your post - I think this is relatable for many people! Let's have a healthy dose of "well reasoned skepticism" as an antidote ...
Thank you, Leob. You made an excellent point: using these AI agents costs money. They said in interviews that the costs will go down in the near future, but as they use more and more energy each time and have to replace their GPUs each year, which are more and more expensive, I don't see how costs will go down.
As you said, I would like to find a way to let AI generate code the way I like it, using my coding patterns and following my rules to the letter. Then it could be useful to me to handle all the boilerplate for each project.
Yeah what I think is that we can (and should) just keep doing what we love - and if what we love is writing great and beautiful code, then we should keep doing just that, AI hype be damned !
But even then, we could (I think) still use AI for other things, e.g. as a brainstorming buddy or sparring partner to develop ideas or options, to help with architecture, etc - and to write code, but only the 'boring' code ...
When used like that it could be a force multiplier, while taking nothing away from what we love to do ... well, that's my (overly optimistic?) view on how it could be used :-)
P.S. somehow I have a feeling that I'm doing a pretty bad job at articulating what I really mean (the way I see things) in response to your original post - it might feel a bit as trying to offer "solutions", where the point of your article wasn't really to look or ask for 'solutions', but to convey a feeling your have (which by the way I think many people have) !
Thank you for your comments. I find them truly valuable. I've been reading all the comments on the post, and they're treasure.
I like the way you see this AI partnership, and you might be right. I have to keep pushing and find a way to make them useful to me.
What I think is that we should try to ignore the hype a bit, and decide for ourselves (unless our boss decides for us) - it's still our own decision, that basically sums up how I see it ...
Of course if you're working at a company and your boss says you have to use it, then you have little choice, and you need to try and use it to the best of your abilities - and I do believe it can be used in interesting and useful ways ...
I'm following the discussions pretty closely, and I'm using it a little bit now and then, but 90% of the time I'm doing things in the old fashioned way - also because I don't want to burn through tokens and throw money at it, when there's no economic advantage for me in doing so ...
Outside of a corporate/company/employment context it's still our own choice!
Hello Ed, I really share the same feeling you described. Rather than pushing against the AI wave, I believe we should learn and grow with it.
Would you be okay if I translate your article and share it on cafeincode.com (a Vietnamese engineering community) with full credits and a link to the original post?
Thanks for the great write-up!
Thank you, and I think you're right. We should always be improving ourselves. That's the only way we can achieve marvelous things.
It's ok on the publication, but make sure dev.to is the canonical post so we don't affect this site.
This is exactly how I feel, also.
Saddening, right? But it's also funny. I've been in too many client interviews collecting information about a feature or project, and 95% of the time, they know little about what they need and how to present it clearly. I like to think that after doing this job for years, we become the perfect interrogators. We learn the client's language, and now the tables are turned: we need to learn to express ourselves in a way these AI agents understand us and do the job properly.
Exactly. But the most saddening thing for me is losing ownership of the code.
With the many videos and articles on the internet about AI coding agents, you begin to believe that you can get an autonomous AI agent to do all your coding projects with minimal supervision but in reality, it is not exactly like that.
That is true, Alex. In a couple of years, these might be different. I wonder why this is happening.
I always thought that AI would one day solve mankind's biggest problems, like diseases, hunger, and even world peace. But having it take our jobs as programmers, photographers, musicians, etc., feels like a sucker punch.
I feel you and in sort of the same boat. Going on 44 this year and also been developing for the last 20+ years. Using Claude Code professionally, mostly as a reviewer of my written code and sometimes for brainstorming. But I mis the excitement of a piece of code that works by my own hand.
Owell, time goes on, I guess..
It's been a long road, right? 20+ years feels like nothing. Time goes by really fast. You might be right about something, it's evolve or be left behind.
We shouldn't be afraid to admit that these tools suck for those who love programming.
And that the colleagues who love these "tools" are shit.
Many are afraid to admit it, but I think it's a perfectly normal attitude for those who love this job and realize that these "tools" are meant to replace us.
On the other hand, programmers are notorious for being miserable and will shoot themselves in the foot so as not to appear "inefficient" and to kiss the ass of their bosses who treat them like expendable animals.
I hate the programmers who work for these people who tell you exactly how many months are left until you're useless.
Personally, I only use copilot on my code; it seems like the best compromise.
You know, there have been times in my life when things were not going well, and I thought about going back and taking a full-time job. Most recently, last year. I even had some interviews for some job positions, but in the end, I decided to keep pushing my business, be smart, and make it work for me. There are a few things that drove me to that decision, with the main reason being that I don't think I'm employee material anymore.
I've been an independent developer for so long that thinking about letting someone take the reins and manage my time drives me insane.
I do love working with Copilot. It's a fantastic tool, in my opinion.
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