> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers....

> In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of coding agents, and they will inevitably learn to become complacent over time, out of pure necessity for their sanity. I’m a proponent of code review...but even I often consider it a slog to do my due diligence for a large code review (just because I think it’s important doesn’t mean I think it’s fun). If it’s your full-time job to review a swarm of agents’ work, and experience tells you they are good enough 95%+ of the time, you’re not going to pay as much attention as you should and bad changes will get through.

Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. The machine takes many of the fun parts and leaves the human with more of the unenjoyable parts.

Under our new ways of working, you are required to be excited an curious about this evolution three times per day.

Sounds a lot like "self-driving" cars - "they are good enough 95%+ of the time, you’re not going to pay as much attention as you should".

Same thing happens here, you get complacent and miss critical failures or problems.

It's also similar in that it "take[s away] many of the fun parts". When I can focus on simply driving it can be engaging and enjoyable - no matter the road or traffic or whatever.

I think it depends on what you find enjoyable. I think people who like the tinkering and the actual act of coding, debugging, etc. will find it less and less fun to be in this area, but people who like to look at the big picture, and solve problems, will see that they will now be better at both getting overview of larger and larger codebases and that technical debt that was never attainable to solve before can now be “outsourced” to LLM’s.

I find that fun. I work in a 50 year old IT company, with lots of legacy code and technical debt which we have never been able to address - suddenly it’s within reach to really get us to a better place.

The “fun” for me has never been “coding” and on the enterprise dev side that has been a commodity for a decade.

If you look at the leveling guidelines for any tech company “codez real gud” will only get you to a mid level ticket taker.

I like programming for fun, but professional software engineering has never been more than very occasionally fun to me. I do it because it pays well.

Most companies use some variant of the sprint/"agile" methodology, which means that you as the programmer are similar to an assembly line worker. You don't control the pace, you rarely get the chance to actually finish anything as much as you would like to so you don't get the satisfaction of a finished product, you get little downtime in between tickets or projects to feel a sense of satisfaction at what you have done before you move on to something else.

I totally understand why businesses operate this way. It's simple: if you try not to operate this way, you increase the likelihood that your competitors will release more rapidly and take all your market share. It's the basic evolutionary logic. If you can release a decent but buggy product six months faster than the competitor can release a better and less buggy product, there is a good chance that you will drive them out of business. It all makes sense, but it doesn't result in a pleasant experience for me as a programmer.

The job is also very sedentary and it puts stress on your eyes and your hands. Of course I'm not going to compare myself to a coal miner, but the fact remains that in its own ways the job is more rough on the body than some people might expect. Meanwhile the intellectual and constantly changing nature of the field means that you can never rest on your laurels - the job requires constant mental engagement. It's hard to do it well while multitasking and thinking about other interesting things at the same time.

If jobs in this field did not pay so well, I don't think I'd ever even consider doing this as a career. It just doesn't have nearly enough upsides for me. The only upside I can think of besides the money is that you get to spend time interacting with intelligent people. But one can get that in other places.

Coding with the help of AI is a big improvement for me because just automating away the boilerplate and greatly reducing the time that needs to be spent in doing reading, research and experimentation already takes away some of the main time-sinks of the job. And while I appreciate code's deterministic and logical elegance, I've written more than enough code in my life to not miss writing it directly. I also enjoy writing English, after all. It's refreshing for me to spend my time composing precise English instructions for the AI instead of writing in a programming language. My English skills are above average, so this also helps me to leverage one of my talents that had previously been underutilized. Well, my English skills always came in handy when I needed to talk to coworkers or managers, but I meant that they had been underutilized in the act of actually creating software.

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job.

Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.