Like many, I became a SWE because I loved writing code. Ruby, in particular (whatever one thinks of its other strengths and weaknesses) can be very expressive and beautiful.

However, most code is corporate CRUD stuff. The world sort of runs on CRUD. But it's rarely particularly fun, or beautiful, or fulfilling. It tends to be pretty ugly because there's rarely time to make it beautiful. So I'm not losing much joy there.

Additionally, even with an agentic workflow, my team still thinks deeply about architecture issues. We believe that well structured code is better for bots and humans alike. So I am still exercising my engineering brain; I'm writing blueprints and supervising the bricklayers now instead of laying bricks.

Does that match your teams' experience at all? Sometimes I feel like folks on these threads are working in a parallel universe where the majority of coding tasks and somehow fulfilling and fun and not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities. Maybe people found joy in those aspects. I guess there are all types of people in the world. I mean, I'm a sicko who loves writing SQL, something that most coders seem to hate.

    I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate 
    feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along 
    with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't 
    alone in that feeling.

I got into SWE because I like solving problems. I like solving problems using code. I also like solving problems using AI.

I have very mixed feelings.

- AI lets me plough through issues which previously would require debugging, troubleshooting, googling, stackoverflow

- my coding abilities are starting to atrophy

- not having to deal with low-level language quirks is nice (parameter differences of subString in C# vs Java).

- but I'm seeing the same as OP: when working on a team, the sense of ownership and community is gone. You have AI un-AI-speak for you to properly read the Jira ticket another dev created using AI. Pull requests are echo chambers between the AI used to create it, review bots, other devs using AI for PR reviews manually.

- there's little denying that we devs are feeding the very machine that will replace us

> Everyone in SWE is experiencing this.

Obviously this is not true for every SWE. A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI. I see people that struggle because they've identified with the writing code part a lot and that's gone now that the machine is doing it, I bet that's hard.

Its nice to know others feel this way. I do feel some kind of despair when I think about the kind of work I used to do even just a year ago compared to now. A coworker of mine took FMLA recently to figure out what they want to do next because they no longer feel even the slightest fulfillment from swe.

> Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this.

I love writing code. But I also love solving problems. AI allows me to solve problems in different ways. And I am totally enjoying that as well. If someone got into this SWE only to code, yes, they may not love where things are today and appear to be going in the future.

Of course this does not undo any grief, dismiss it, or better their situation:

I don't know if it helps, but they should know that for every one of them that experiences this grief, it brings joy to ten other people that are now able to do things (make vibe-coded programs) that used to be out of reach for them.

> Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this.

Speak for yourself.

The Luddites literally turned to violence when their profession was replaced by better technology. This has been happening for generations to every profession. There is joy in learning new things and developing new skills though.

Not everyone. I’ve been a solo entrepreneur since 2015. Developing stuff now feels like I can unwrap a present every day.

I never cared about the social aspects of it other than releasing the odd plugin I developed.

My social life is entirely offline.

> And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.

We had our work stolen and they're squeezing us with it, all for garbage, what in the world are you talking about.

> And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting

Well, no, for a lot of us, there really is no other side. Slop farming is not software engineering and it never will be; scribbling some Markdown that begs agents to omit bugs is not equivalent to using high-level languages with thoughtful abstractions to directly define program behavior. I didn't want to be a manager when I worked in the industry and I certainly don't want to be one now. Moreover, it's downright offensive for a purported expert to defer their expertise to a SAAS black box.

On the bright side, we will probably (eventually) self-segregate into communities that code however they want and leave the other side the fuck alone.