The advent of powerful AI coding tools has quickly made programmers heavily reliant on the tech, with experts warning that they’re slowly but surely losing the ability to write code by hand.
It’s a growing existential crisis that’s significantly raising the chance of errors or security issues in AI code that hasn’t been properly vetted. Experts are warning of a “class divide” between those, who are over relying on AI tools and more experienced coders, or “craftsmen,” who are left wading through the former’s group’s output and applying any necessary fixes.
Meanwhile, coders who’ve been instructed to use nothing but AI in a race to the bottom are losing their minds, saying they’re relegated to pushing buttons instead of taking pride in their work and building meaningful products themselves.
As a user who goes by “v0xium” argued on X, the situation is getting out of hand. In a post that’s been viewed over seven million times and liked tens of thousands of times, the user warned that “it is over.”
“The state of engineering right now is horrible,” the user wrote. “It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here.”
The engineer explained that everything at the unnamed company is being made by Anthropic’s coding assistant Claude Code.
And while everybody is “being forced to ship as much as they can,” and pushing code isn’t a “bottleneck,” operations are still “slow.”
“People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter,” v0xium wrote. “Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude.”
That means there’s “no sense of victory” and “nobody is resolving bugs.”
“In reality, nobody is thinking anymore,” the engineer concluded. “Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking.”
The concerning tweet thread drew a somber reaction. Even X owner Elon Musk chimed in with a “yikes.”
“We are turning an entire generation of technical experts around the world into the equivalent of retirees pushing a button in front of casino slot machines,” podcast host and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya responded. “Essentially the brain rot of doom scrolling social media is coming for your development team…”
The comments highlight an alarming fundamental shift, with AI tools effectively stripping engineers of the cognitive tasks they once found fulfilling.
That tedium could result in companies pushing uninspired and buggy products.
“The value of automated software is not making the software faster,” Palihapitiya added. “It is understanding your intention and making the software BETTER.”
A recently-coined term perfectly describes this behavior: “meat proxies,” or people who regurgitate the output of AI chatbots verbatim without ever critically engaging with it.
“Most software engineers are facing an identity crisis bordering on depression,” VC firm Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das tweeted earlier this year. “The craftsmen are tired. Day after day, their workload grows. Bugs seep into production. No one seems to care. Another round of AI is thrown at it. Their animosity to their colleagues rises.”
“Eventually, they give up,” he added. “The craft they loved is dead.”