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 (23)
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 :)
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
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.
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.
Hi Ed, You are not alone to have such feelings but you are way ahead of me. I fell in love with coding 45 years ago and have enjoyed a successful career of over 30 years as a result. I cannot bring myself to use any AI tools and accept that makes me a bit of a Luddite. I am a few more years away from retirement than I am comfortable with but fear my career in software development is drawing to a close.
I work for a large multi-national company that is pushing AI tools on developers hard. Fortunately in a way, I have not been assigned a coding task of more than a few days in the last years, otherwise I might have felt more pressed.
I have seen many changes in the industry and rode with them but software development will never be the same again.
I "doff my hat" to you and wish you the best for the rest of your journey.
Thank you, my friend. Forty-five years is a long road. You don't get that far without being a resilient, wonderful developer. I truly hope the future holds great things for you. Reading through some comments on this post, I came to the idea that AI is not going anywhere but forward. Maybe we should move in the same direction. We might find greener fields behind that mountain.
Your post is incredibly honest. After 26 years, you aren't just "typing". you’re a craftsman. It makes total sense that outsourcing your "5D chess" to an agent feels empty.
You aren't "getting old", you’re a professional who cares about the soul of his work. Keep writing the code you dreamed of, even if you let the AI handle the "grunt work" on the side.
Imagine not being a senior and trying to learn how to create solutions and now not only people don't want to hire you because AI can do it faster, but you are trying to learn and the code is already done in front of you. I try turning off the tools most of the time so I can do stuff myself, but I can't always do that for every client who wants something done within the hour. I'm evolving and building, but everytime claude starts spitting code I get a massive angst inside where I feel like there is no point. The thing is at least I can learn how to be a good software engineer by being an ARCHITECT of solutions and for that I need to know how to do the code logic, which I will (nothing will stop me. It doesnt matter). Still, I have high hopes that I will get to the point where I'm thinking and creating beyond the AI generated code, where I can get the basics and build amazing things. That seems to be the point of the AI right? Until then, I can still cheat at the basics, but as a designer and problem solver I want to be a good professional, so I will work on knowing better than the AI, correcting it and teaching it.
I recall feeling the same way when I started writing apps twenty-plus years ago. Please don't laugh, but back then, the Internet was not what it is today. In fact, it was a tool that few people had because it was expensive. The point is, I wanted to write apps, but I had limited resources. I felt I would never get very far at the rate I was learning to code. But the thing is, you can do whatever you put your mind to. Just keep moving forward. You are going to make it.
I can feel this so much! You are definitely not alone in this. Most of all I feel like alienated from the code I "write" or let write. I came up with a different approach. After more than year of using claude code, chat gpt or co pilot exhaustingly I have just deleted everything and canceled subscriptions.
I will test, if I get back the joy of coding. And I know it is a radically solution. But for me personally it was inevitable. I am going to write an article about it next month after a month of not using AI for code (or anything else).
My two main reasons are: I lost the feeling of loving to write code and I am not learning. I have the feeling that I get more stupid with every prompt.
I'm looking forward to that article. You know, one thing I've seen plenty of times is that things tend to follow a circular pattern: popular today, forgotten next week, rediscovered next month, popular again, and so on. Maybe we're bound to love-hate our relationship with AI until we find out how it fits in with ourselves.
Thank you for your post. Like Kai said:
I hope that there will be more focus on the human aspect. Not just how can we have the AI generate as much code as possible, but also how can we make sure the humans that guide / manage them feel fulfilled.
That is a wonderful way of seeing things. Maybe we're at a point where AI is burning so much cash that these companies are inventing stories about how AI can replace programmers to lower costs, because they want to sell more subscriptions. But when the dust settles, we'll see improvements in how these AI agents enhance our lives as programmers.
Nice read. The future is pregnant!
Thank you. I hope the future brings you amazing opportunities.
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