This comment and all the responses to it so far are super cathartic. The cherry on top of all of this is the constant impression that, no, you're the crazy one. So not being entirely alone is nice.

Oh it's gotten so weird and depressing for me too. Like a lot of people I played with the free demo of GH Copilot when it came out in 2021. I was... not impressed for the most part. Its python suggestions were usually not any better than the standard Python analyzers, though every once in a while it would pop up a surprisingly decent function. Its C and C++ were either hilariously terrible or more likely just non-existent unless I was writing a textbook algorithm for some reason. Then it might be okish, maybe.

That fall, the company I was working for laid off my entire department, so I spent a few months looking for a job and ended up in management for a few years. The only code I wrote was a few hundred lines of Python to help me manage Jira tickets and I didn't bother setting up Copilot. I'm not sure if the company was paying for it. A couple engineers mentioned that they used it to do a couple of refactors, but nothing much seemed to happen with it.

Then, right about a year ago I changed jobs to go back to IC engineering at a company that had a strict no-AI code policy. In February I had a crazy work trip where I had three days to bring up some hardware that I had never touched before and script a demo for it. I pulled it off, after a couple of 3AM coding sessions in my hotel room. The C parts were straightforward, but the demo script was a damn mess of some of the worst Python I had written in a long time, due to the time pressure and the fact that I was writing it at 3AM.

Oh, but also in February the company softened its stance and was allowing AI coding assistance in some very limited ways as long as it fit into whatever our GH budget was. I knew that I would probably never touch the Python again as the real version was in process by someone else in Rust, but just in case I wanted it cleaned up. I figured it would take me a day or so after a good nights sleep to do it the right way. In the airport I asked copilot CLI to refactor my script, as a test, not expecting much.

Five minutes later it had refactored it into something much cleaner, properly using properties, and other such niceties. It wasn't perfect, there was a sign error in one equation, and there was still some minor cleanup to do but damn. It was good enough that if I was the reviewer I would have thought it was a good first pass and only had a few nits.

Since then we've all been given a decent LLM budget and told to use it as much as we want. I'm not being told I have to use it, but almost everyone is except for a few of us grey beards. And reviewing the code is terrible, because there is too much of it and it doesn't matter, I'm not actually teaching or working with anyone, just talking to someone who is talking to an LLM.

Due to some health issues that intermittently leaves me with too much brain-fog to really write code but clear enough to talk about my general knowledge and explain what I want to do, I'm tempted to use them to keep up. And when I do it's so disheartening. They have the judgement of a very junior engineer, but with perfect syntax in every language and documentation level knowledge of almost every subject. But they're just so damn fast at it. Previously, if I gave the kinds of instructions to a junior engineer, I'd expect to hear back from them in a day or three, with a passable first attempt and some interesting ideas to talk about. Now I hear back in five minutes with too much code and no reason to talk with them other than to give a few instructions to clean it up.

Same brother, same. I'm retiring the end of this year. I transitioned from a dev, to contract work, to now a contract code reviewer. I'm sick of it. I get paid to go to random startups or other companies to review code, explain to them why it doesn't work because they don't know WHY it's not working, and when I tell them they thank me for my time and keep doing it. And they all lie about it. They're all using AI for end to end builds but they simply continue to lie that THEY built it until after you consistently prod them they admit "yeah I had Claude build it, I don't know how it works". It's like dealing with a drug addict like you said. You know they're doing it, everyone around them knows, and yet they won't admit it.

So i'm done. Even with the FOSS projects I work on I'm done because now you're getting PRs from randos using omarchy they think they can now contribute to projects and when you review their shit they can't explain what they did, why they did it, or why they're even submitting it.

I'm totally done. I'm done with any type of code. the past 2 years have killed the past 25+ years of passion I had for this stuff. It's not fun anymore and I feel like I wasted half my life.

Dude, are you me? You said every sentence I wanted to say.

I fucking hate this AI too. In my (huge) company they're forcing us to use AI and treating the usage of token as a metric of performance. Say, I'm smart like Peter Parker and can move my fingers as fast as The Flash, I can still get a bad grade because I wrote the code myself.

I just love programming. I secretly enjoy doing my job not only for money. At least I used to. If I had a billion dollars I can give every one a middle finger and continue to work the way I like until they kick me out. But I am not rich in reality. I still need to feed myself and my family, and I'm too old to start over my career also too far from retirement.

One day I questioned the PR which was raised by a colleague. I can tell immediately that he proxied LLM output to the comment to answer my question. I empathized him, for one thing, that he was forced to work on this part of the project where he didn't understand much just because the management "converted" every one of us to be a "full stack engineer" due to AI-empowerment, and second, he was really overwhelmed by the new workload, again, due to AI-empowerment.

This is shit, man. In the old days, raising a PR you don't understand equals to showing every one else that you're an idiot, a shameless, ignorant idiot. But not anymore today. We're welcomed to do anything with AI. Low quality? Oh that's because you "didn't use AI properly". Upper management or high ranked "engineers" will show you a demo in a Zoom meeting how they "HARNESS"ed AI to generate their shopping list. "Look? It's 100% correct, so evidently you shall be able to accelerate your speed of work to 1000%."

Project tech leads apparently focus on quality. Oh, I mean quality of their promotion rate. "If it compiles, if it passes the test (also AI-generate), ship it! What readability? What logic? The fuck you're taking about? This code is Good Enough™!" We don't need to understand the code. We're discouraged to understand the code. Oh, but publicly they will stress, "AI is just a tool and you need to fully understand what your submitting." And they still come after you when the AI-generated code fails in production.

I also have decades of coding experience, but now it looks worthless. It's worthless at its face value: the corporation is no longer willing to pay for it. AI stole every answer on Stack Overflow, and now it spits out code that looks as if it's written by a human. It's good enough to them. Nobody wants the code perfect anymore.

It's a crime against human intellect.

And there are jobs better fit in the tide of AI-replacement: doctors. Doctors have a worklog that's of even higher quality for AI to train on. And if AI can generate correct boilerplates for silly requirements, AI can diagnose most everyday sickness.

Hey, don't point fingers at me. I'm just trying to talk like AI bros. I swear to god if they don't take legal liability in misdiagnosis, they will push AI doctors in hospitals.

Yes, they don't take legal liability in business software. "Who cares?" All they will ever face is few of us who do know their crime, and the non existent class action.

Humanity looks pretty grim. I don't fucking know how I'll survive the world with greedy capitalists with the most powerful robbing tool by far.