Should I quit IT or just live through the burnout?

Some of you may have noticed I disappeared a bit from the community over the last couple of weeks. Well, first of all, I've been on holiday. I was travelling through Iceland, admiring its breathtaking landscapes, enjoying nature (I saw whales, reindeer, and puffins!), trying local food, and bathing in hot lagoons.

During this road trip, I caught myself thinking that I did not want to go back. That maybe I would feel much more satisfied if I just stayed there and lived a simple life, herding sheep and admiring landscapes that look like the set of The Lord of the Rings, maybe doing some artwork in my spare time.

Since coming back, I've had this feeling that I do not fit in anymore. That the work I'm coming back to is not the work I used to love. Instead, I'm coming back to the work I started to hate; to the tasks I do not want to touch and that do not have anything in common with what I used to do.

Burnout in the age of AI

I've seen many articles about burnout since I joined the DEV community, and I've always been aware of the problem. I thought I was doing a pretty good job keeping a healthy work-life balance. But I think AI has introduced a completely different kind of burnout that I wasn't prepared for.

I discovered that I am exhausted by the amount of low-effort content around me. Most of what I read now feels generated at the lowest possible cost, barely reviewed, and nowhere near the quality I used to expect.

I don't think I'm tired of AI itself. I'm tired of how quickly we've started accepting "good enough" instead of craftsmanship. And how we've started prioritising the chase for AI tools, putting AI everywhere, while forgetting that we are creating products for humans, not just generating work for the sake of working.

I miss the times when work felt real; when work was something authentic and tangible; when I had to go to an engineer colleague and work together on documentation, to grasp the point of how the feature works and explain it in plain language to the audience. I want to feel that someone still really cares about the content before publishing it, not just generates it to tick off the Definition of Done.

Redefining myself

Lately, I've been asking myself whether I still enjoy technical writing, or whether I just miss a version of it that no longer exists.

I used to architect documentation structures, build documentation from scratch, think about information architecture, and carefully review every change to make sure it genuinely helped people achieve what they came for.

What I enjoyed the most wasn't simply writing documentation. It was solving problems. Finding better ways to organise information. Cleaning up messy structures. Making documentation easier to navigate.

Now I'm supposed to work on an AI agent that writes documentation for us. Ironically, it pushes me even further away from the part of the job that I actually love. It's not that I dislike technology. I enjoy docs-as-code, information architecture, and working with technical systems. What doesn't align with my values is replacing thoughtful work with generated content that often feels disposable.

This makes me question myself.

Should I stay in this profession and hope things change? Is it technical writing itself that no longer fits me, or just my current environment? Would changing jobs help, or is this simply the direction our industry is heading?

Discussion

Have you experienced burnout yourself? Have you ever considered a total career change? Is there a way out of burnout? Or do you simply need to live through it and wait until things get better? Or maybe it's really time for me to move out to some desolate, godforsaken place in Iceland and herd sheep 🐑

Disclaimer: even though I complain about AI in this post, I still used it to generate the intro image and proofread the article. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite 🫠

Comments

[FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ]

Klaudia...

I guess this half year is the year of burn out.

I made promises to a good amount of people on my post about being behind and I will honor that in this comment.

I am so sorry that you are feeling this way. To be honest, I am feeling that as well mentioning "low-effort content around me. Most of what I read now feels generated at the lowest possible cost, barely reviewed, and nowhere near the quality I used to expect.". It's a sad reality, but rest asure @jess and @ben will release a solution for us. For right now, I am trying my best to reduce the amount of AI-Generated Articles, so that everyone is conformable to share their work with other people that feels human.

I'm tired of how quickly we've started accepting "good enough" instead of craftsmanship. And how we've started prioritizing the chase for AI tools, putting AI everywhere, while forgetting that we are creating products for humans, not just generating work for the sake of working.

This is a reason I am taking initiative to use my Moderation to the fullest extent for the common good. We have hundreds of moderators on DEV and it feels like there is no work being done. Sure, makes sense they are busy and all, but I feel like having this kind of responsibility makes me feel like I need to take action. I am a type of person who would want to see something change. If I want to see change, I need to speak up, which I believe what you are doing right now is courageous of you to share your experience. We need more people speaking up about genuine experiences.

Is it technical writing itself that no longer fits me, or just my current environment? Would changing jobs help, or is this simply the direction our industry is heading?

Keep doing what you do best. The only thing is that we have to adapt. Instead of using AI to replace, use AI as a hybrid. Find out ways that AI can help you speed up instead of relying. It might help.

Technical documentation, in my view, is based on if you can see what AI cannot. In fact, I believe we still need you. It's something I learn when contributing to Forem. AI only understands how to improve based on what is given, not what it can expand upon. For example, there was an article I read where it states "If you give AI a candle and you tell it to improve it. It will improve the lighting and the candle itself. However, it won't invent the light bulb". Outside the box thinking is CRITICAL and AI currently can't do that because it is trained on EXISTING knowledge. Otherwise, we would be at Mars by now lol.

I hope this makes sense. I am sorry that you felt burnt out and I will try my best to make DEV a great place for you. I would never let anyone feeling down like this and I am glad you shared your thoughts.

Also, for the disclaimer, feel free to remove it. I will make an exception to you. Besides, I don't send Sloan messages based on if the cover image is AI or not. It is more of content itself, which it doesn't seem to be the case. Either way, feel free to remove the disclaimer. I, as a Mod, pardon you :)

Hope you feel better. I am here if you want to speak to me about anything. You are chosen as a DEVenger for a reason. The great mind we ever know. Continue to show that :)

[Aalaa Fahiem]

This hit differently reading it as someone just starting out. I'm coming into Android dev right as AI reshapes what "good work" even means, so I don't have the "before" you're grieving — but I recognize the feeling from writing my own articles: wondering if the craft part still matters when AI can produce something "good enough" fast. I don't have an answer either, just wanted to say I see what you're pointing at, even from the other side of the timeline. Hope you find your way back to work that feels like yours.

[xulingfeng]

I think there's another way to look at this — the part about building an AI agent that writes docs for you.
You're not tired of writing. You're tired of being replaced by the thing you're producing. That's a different kind of burnout — it's not the work, it's watching the work get taken out of your hands before you're done with it.
You said you miss walking over to an engineer's desk, going through a feature together, figuring out how to explain it. That part got me. That's not something AI can do. It can generate text, but it can't have that conversation — the one where you actually understand what the thing does before you write it down.
So maybe the question isn't "quit or survive." Maybe it's: what if that AI agent isn't something you're supposed to work on — it's something you're supposed to own? Not "your boss said build it so you build it" — take it apart, find what it can't do, and that's your job. AI can write docs. It can't do information architecture, clean up a broken taxonomy, or sit next to an engineer and ask "wait, what does this field actually mean?" You said it yourself — those are the parts you love.
One thing I'm pretty sure about: the answer isn't in Iceland. It's in whether you still want to fight for the part of this job that's yours.