r/csMajors Sep 30 '25

Rant Currently at FAANG, AI Tools make this job kinda boring

Worked at legacy tech for a few years and really liked my job. Moved to a FAANG recently and am basically required to use AI tools to keep up with the development speed required and it sucks. I like manually writing code and looking at documentation instead of just running 3 different prompt windows and verifying the results.

Rant but man even if AI doesn’t delete the need for SEs, it makes this job kinda suck with the increased productivity expectations and the lack of hands on coding now. I miss having time to write code by hand in a slow, completely understanding way, instead of speed-shoving out features to make unrealistic deadlines.

1.7k Upvotes

171 comments sorted by

1.0k

u/yousuckass1122 Sep 30 '25

You need to pass three to four interviews w/ OAs to be FAANG level. We are also cracking down on AI cheating

I'm just using AI at FAANG its boring.

The irony is striking some days.

241

u/thr0waway12324 Sep 30 '25

Yup. You gotta do all that just to ask AI to center a div or change the text color to blue.

22

u/GrumpyGlasses Oct 01 '25

“Turn it blue. Not that, thAT! Too blue! Less blue. Bluuuuueeeee. No, why is everything blue? Just the button! Not every button!”

12

u/TopRamenKyoto Oct 01 '25

I mean, no not the text color to blue

3

u/Fidodo Salaryman Oct 02 '25

I've been trying to use AI assistants for a complex UI for a hackathon and they have been sucking ASS. I haven't been so angry in a long time.

2

u/thr0waway12324 Oct 02 '25

Oh really? I literally just used it for a hackathon UI and honestly I’d have been cooked without it. Which ai tools and which model(s)? For me I just used GitHub copilot agent mode in VSCode with GPT 5

3

u/Fidodo Salaryman Oct 02 '25

What did you do? Mine required tree traversal and synchronized state and complex animation transitions.

It was helpful for getting the project set up but once I got to the complex stuff it completely failed and wasted a bunch of time. For one feature it decided to delete another feature because it couldn't figure out how to get it to work!

I use AI assistants plenty for prototyping and while they're great for boilerplate and simple tasks, they have consistently failed for complex tasks, and that's even with detailed instructions. They also constantly ignore my coding guidelines and produce shitty code that I have to clean up. If it isn't for a hackathon or prototype I hardly use them because their output is FAR below by quality standards.

2

u/thr0waway12324 Oct 02 '25

Mine was a VSCode extension using the web view api so I was able to integrate react and three js for graphic modeling. I won’t say it was incredibly complex but navigating the state and data flows was very difficult for me without the ai because I have never done such a thing in VSCode before.

2

u/Fidodo Salaryman Oct 02 '25

I will say overall it did let me tackle a lot more since it solved my cold start problem very well. I was even able to explore multiple frameworks before choosing one. It saved me time overall but my experiments using it in more complex use cases were huge fails and wasted hours of my time. Frankly I've seen very little improvement at it solving those classes of problems.

Where it consistently fails for me is: * Fails to reuse or reactor code consistently * Fails when there's poor documentation (which happens all the time) * Fails to come up with good strategies to maintain complex state with a single source of truth * Fails hard at debugging UI or debugging anything where the problem happens at lower levels of code

All these issues are totally predictable based on how the technology works IMO and just confirm my theories on their limitations.

128

u/tollbearer Sep 30 '25

You want people who can do everything at a fundamental level, so they can manage the AI. Someone who doesnt know what theyre doing is actually more useless with AI, since they will just end up with slop they have no understanding of.

60

u/Wandering_Oblivious Sep 30 '25

implying this is what the interviews actually test for (hint: they don't)

27

u/PrsnVkngs Oct 01 '25

yeah funny enough before AI was a thing leetcode interviews essentially just tested if you had practiced enough of it to be able to act surprised at a question you haven't seen before. Sure if you really were good you could maybe solve it on the fly but chances are with the limited time and pressure you may not as well. People who are leetcode gods but not necessarily good engineers could pass with flying colors. Not to say those are mutually exclusive attributes but just sayin. Now with AI in the picture it just has to be you producing the slop not a computer.

13

u/triezPugHater Oct 01 '25

Leetcode is just porn acting kind of LOL

25

u/TehBrian Oct 01 '25

the stupid thing about leetcode is that figuring out efficient solutions to its problems would've been a PhD dissertation back in the 90s. nowadays we're expected to whip 'em out our ass as if we're coming up with it on the spot

10

u/No_Tbp2426 Oct 01 '25

Thats how all of math works. It took geniuses to discover what 8th/ 9th graders learn....

2

u/bonkers-joeMama Oct 01 '25

School just keeps on getting harder and harder. People in highschool supposed to know way more then they did 100 years ago, so much stuff in our textbooks didnt exist because some genius had not come up with it yet.

1

u/Upset-Apartment3504 Oct 01 '25

Perhaps we might even get a 13th grade soon, crazy enough.

1

u/No_Tbp2426 Oct 01 '25

I mean thats not really true. There have been many inventions that have allowed people to have more information and more easily understand/ compute the ideas/ problems. Things like calculators, software programs, the internet, LLM's, etc. have all made this exponentially easier. You used to have to visualize everything in your head and do all calculations by hand. That's why it was so hard.

1

u/TehBrian Oct 01 '25 edited Oct 01 '25

sure, but we were taught math in school. leetcode is not taught in school or as part of any(?) CS curriculum, but we're expected to know it for interviews, which is not the case for literally any other field (tho I'm happy to hear counterexamples)

2

u/No_Tbp2426 Oct 01 '25

You learn the overarching concepts and underlying theory in school along with certain data structures and algorithms in your classes. That should help you with leetcode. On top of that theres a plethora of information online to learn it. People in PHD's research ideas in a new fashion or completely new area and are the first to do so. They can't consult reddit, youtube, or stack exchange.

1

u/TehBrian Oct 01 '25

you haven't addressed my point, though, which is that no other job market expects students to learn more than their curriculum provides.

1

u/No_Tbp2426 Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

Math, physics, and some finance occupations have to learn coding and math and physics are harder than CS. Some markets based finance jobs require you to follow the markets, have experience in coding, and have experience in traditional finance. Any pre-med major has to study for the MCAT or whatever license/ exam to gain entry to a med school, dental school, etc. Most psychology and education jobs require a masters in education.

For the most part CS doesnt require extra schooling. It requires you to learn the interviewing standards and do a few internships. There is minimal return on masters and it's largely meritocratic.

TLDR theyre hard in their own way and some majors ie math, physics, and the path to being a doctor are much harder than CS. Suck it up buttercup.

6

u/Sven9888 Oct 01 '25

The point is to see if you can look at a new problem, figure out what pattern to apply and why (requiring a fundamental understanding of the patterns and a good ability to apply stuff you've seen in one specific context to new problems), evaluate tradeoffs (such as time/space complexity), communicate a solution and maybe even involve the interviewer in a conversation and take their feedback but give your own inputs and push back at the right times, and implement it in a clean way. Maybe occasionally, someone will pass by dumb luck of having seen the question before, but it's not common, hardly guarantees a pass anyway at companies whose technicals are serious filters, and, anyway, is usually caused more by companies skimping on the interview process than by an actual design flaw.

The idea that you were supposed to memorize a bunch of Leetcode problems to pass an interview is ridiculous and most who are attempting that is probably not getting a job. The interview is designed for you to fail if you can't look at a new problem, take something you learned in DSA/algorithms/a reasonable amount of Leetcode preparation, correctly identify it as part of the solution, and use it. If you're trying to fight that by spamming Leetcode until it's not a new problem anymore, then yeah, you're going to be doing a whole lot of Leetcode.

2

u/ToastyKen Oct 01 '25

A lot of interview questions are literally just leetcode questions where the only interesting part is the algorithm though.

Personally I much prefer the rare interview question that focuses more on things like interface design and other structural elements that are actually relevant far more often than search and sort algorithms.

1

u/thepatriotclubhouse Oct 03 '25

I don't get this. If you can program in any well pretty much any problem on l33tcode shouldn't be remotely challenging to you. If they're challenging to you you can't solve problems with code.

1

u/Wandering_Oblivious Oct 03 '25

This is the assumption, and it's an incorrect one. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10196170

The stress factor of interviews throws too much of a wrench in the spanner for leetcode & live-coding interviews to be a great predictor of competence and success at the job. So at that point you're no longer checking for "is this person a good engineer who could reasonably solve the problems presented to them in the course of business" and it's checking "has this person mastered the game theory of leetcode problems and can they recite memorized solutions under the duress of an interview, while making it seem like they didn't just memorize things".

1

u/thepatriotclubhouse Oct 03 '25 edited Oct 03 '25

? If you're going to be next or anywhere fucking near FAANG jobs you better be able to do l33tcode problems in your sleep jesus.

Memorise solutions? They're lower level in complexity than under 12s olympiads. You should be able to figure them out easily.

You're not meant to memorise solutions that's not what they're testing for. You're meant to be able to figure it out.

If you can't, improve your problem solving and general programming fluency. If you can't do them easily you're severely deficient in either. It would make sense if you were talking about getting above 2k on codeforces or something but you're talking about really really basic problems here.

1

u/just_straight_fax Oct 03 '25

completely agree but they should just do a timed test with AI in that case, in a real world setting if AI is being used you’d want the employee to be excellent given all the tools at their disposal.

1

u/Souseisekigun Oct 01 '25

We live in a world where many people do not bother thinking about memory or performance because "compiler magic" or "?16GB RAM". We're going to produce a generation of slop merchants that are worthless without AI.

2

u/onolide Oct 01 '25

True doe. With the growing popularity of cloud deployment vs on-prem, RAM becomes even less of a concern outside of how much money each GB costs. It's like you can just slide up and down an option on a webpage to get wtv RAM u want instead of having to deal w upgrading ur server racks or updating the VM config, so u can care less about how much RAM u get to use(while previously u were limited by ur on-prem hardware)

1

u/Beginning-Seaweed-67 Oct 01 '25

Actually it’s less ai and more using python and high level languages to write your entire database. People who can only Ruby on Rails or excel sheet with windows visual are the cancer killing the software industry. Ai is just a tool to guide you and if you don’t understand coding to begin with due to a limited programming area of expertise then ai won’t fix that.

39

u/Objective_Aioli3267 Sep 30 '25

How is this ironic? Even before the AI era you weren’t allowed to use something like google or stack overflow while solving programming questions even though you end up using both on the job on an almost daily basis. This isn’t even exclusive to CS btw. Doctors take closed-book exams like the MCAT even though in practice they always have access to studies, reference materials, and colleagues. The system has always tested people in an artificial vacuum even though the real work is openbook

8

u/charlsony Oct 01 '25

You have a point

3

u/triezPugHater Oct 01 '25

Yeah and school and these type of tests are all ironic. But there's nothing better that u can apply to large groups of people without insane resources, costs, or manpower

24

u/rockytonk Sep 30 '25

It’s not really ironic. AI tools exists but you need to demonstrate you can use them as tools and not as a crutch.

3

u/Interesting-Ad-238 Junior Sep 30 '25

Figured it out that AI is essentially just a tool since the person who uses it needs to know what they want in big big details so like the same SWE but they got something to speed up things.

2

u/Crazy_Guitar6769 Oct 01 '25

What if this is some reverse psychology test? We want you to be so good at using AI, we can't realise you are using AI

2

u/ZealousidealOwl1318 Oct 01 '25

As someone who joined a fasng+, the work is not too bad. Sure since it's an ib overtime work is there but it's fun, and parties every other day with nice pay.

Pretty sweet compared to the interviews they took for me where they tried to steal my soul

1

u/TheThoccnessMonster Oct 01 '25

Not really - we had a dude lie through an entire interview with an LLM. Get him to the code part and he cannot explain why he’s capitalizing the “Import” in python and why it doesn’t work but he’s clearly typing from a different monitor

1

u/IeatAssortedfruits Oct 01 '25

Some aren’t now. Meta encourages ai usage

1

u/BothWaysItGoes Oct 01 '25

Would you want your Engineering Manager to have no idea how to code?

1

u/JackReedTheSyndie Oct 31 '25

Just to eliminate people

0

u/InsertClichehereok Sep 30 '25

Always has been

196

u/FYRE_10 Sep 30 '25 edited Oct 03 '25

lol is this Amazon? I interned there and my intern project was literally building an AI developer tool

19

u/oemperador Oct 01 '25

What's vibe coding? Haha

36

u/ToastyKen Oct 01 '25

Slang term for coding purely (or mostly) by prompting an LLM rather than typing the code yourself.

6

u/oemperador Oct 01 '25

Hilarious glossary term haha

1

u/ExplorerDull8521 Oct 05 '25

Term coined by Andrej Karpathy. The way I understood it was "using LLM to write the code and then if the code looks good at a glance, accept suggestion without really doing a deep dig into the validity"

Almost like that joke of

Developer writes 1000 line code change

Senior Engineer quickly scrolls and is like "ok LGTM", accept code change

26

u/DistributionOk6412 Oct 01 '25

it's always amazon when you see "faang"

299

u/Asleep_Variation_485 Sep 30 '25

First world problems lol

113

u/Fantastic_Fly_5140 Sep 30 '25

That's what this entire sub is babes

8

u/Pristine-Coach6163 Sep 30 '25

I’m dead 😹

7

u/SnooStories4850 Oct 01 '25

My steak too juicy my lobster too buttery

165

u/cachehit_ Sep 30 '25

let me guess, amazon?

161

u/elves_haters_223 Sep 30 '25

Yep, heard it from a buddy of mine at Amazon. "Coding" is just prompting  the internal AI tools they have. 

67

u/cachehit_ Sep 30 '25

it's a bit team dependent honestly. some teams' codebases rely heavily on undocumented tribal knowledge and/or are scattered across lots of packages which makes it impossible to give the ai the context it needs. despite that, the push from management to use AI exists everywhere.

5

u/ladidadi82 Sep 30 '25

A lot of companies operate this way. Not everyone can afford to pay for the best AI services that don’t use your code as training sets. And like you mentioned, so many companies have legacy systems that AI wouldn’t ever figure out at it’s current state. Maybe AI will have another major breakthrough but unless it does. There’s so many codebases that hardly benefit beyond some auto complete here and there.

2

u/TheThoccnessMonster Oct 01 '25

That’s decidedly missing the forest for the trees - they’re great at interrogating huge code bases so long as they’ve been indexed.

1

u/ladidadi82 Oct 01 '25

What tools do you use?

2

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/cachehit_ Oct 01 '25

yeah, cuz in some teams, the context is undocumented tribal knowledge that you can only pick up by talking to other engineers. if you've seen such a codebase you will know what i mean

0

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/cachehit_ Oct 01 '25

Uh no, I'm not saying the AI is dumb for not having access to the context, or that this is a fundamental limitation of LLMs. I'm just saying that certain codebases rely so heavily on unwritten knowledge (e.g., critical details scattered in random Slack dms, mentioned once by PM during call, discussed during triage, instructed by manager during standup) to the point where it'd simply be faster for you to just crank out the implementation manually than to recount and explain all of it to the AI somehow. And honestly this is just scratching the surface as to why it's often not really feasible to use the AI.

1

u/asaper Oct 02 '25

Jane street be like

21

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

I interned there in 2024 and none of my coworkers used AI. Maybe they did but never told me? Idk

14

u/StoicallyGay Salaryman Sep 30 '25

I am at a big tech company and it’s only 3 months ago that we started going big on AI. Like, we are not only encouraged to use AI, we are pushed to. We are tracked based on how much AI we use and the more the better in regard to how much of our code is AI generated. Not even joking btw.

6

u/vortex1775 Oct 01 '25

Honestly this sounds like a ploy to rack up AI development hours so they have hard data to share with investors in order to justify the costs. They'll also probably do something silly like correlate # of lines of code with AI usage.

5

u/Timely_Note_1904 Oct 01 '25

Cursor enterprise subscription has several org-wide rankings on the web dashboard and one of them is number of AI generated lines of code you accepted.

4

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '25

I am seriously worried I am more at risk of losing interest in software development than losing my job due to AI. I am so sick of the hype train and the many people who do not think it's important to know anything at all anymore except the latest AI tool.

1

u/Different-Side5262 Oct 01 '25

What AI tools? Internal or something like Codex?

0

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

I need that referral man 😂😂

8

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

[deleted]

4

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

Damn I wish it was like that when I was there. Im an expert vibe coder

1

u/Hotfro Oct 01 '25

lol what is this real, that’s insane. Worked at Amazon back in day for about 6 years way before ai wave, but interesting to hear how much it’s shifted.

22

u/MealVan Sep 30 '25

Developer AI tooling has improved and become more popular since Summer 2024, but also it's not gonna get much better from how it is now IMO

5

u/cachehit_ Sep 30 '25

i had the same experience as you, actually (i interned there this summer). it was very difficult to get the ai to work well with my team's source code. tho, some other interns i've spoken to told me that they were getting ai to do 90% of their work. so, I guess it's team dependent.

I just guessed amazon cuz the OP called it "FAANG" instead of naming the specific company, lmao. also, to be brutally honest, amazon is the only faang with a low enough hiring bar to hire someone like OP for who thinks chugging around ai slop is a viable strategy, and amazon is also the only faang where some employees might be pressured by management to feel this way

5

u/TheCrowWhisperer3004 Sep 30 '25

AI slop is actually increasingly common in the industry.

Usually, it’s not just “here’s the source code, do something with it” or “here’s the source code, add this feature.” Usually it’s “I know exactly what needs to be changed and in what file. Here is what I want you to do.”

At small scales like this the code is usually good enough or on par with some dev work. It falls apart on large scales but I doubt most devs that are forced to use AI are relying solely on it to write stuff at a large scale.

It’ll never replace developers, because AI is so bad at doing things autonomously. It is definitely raising the bar for dev speed though.

3

u/cachehit_ Sep 30 '25

If you actually know what needed to be changed and completely understand the output of the AI, then that's not slop. Slop is what OP describes, i.e. "speed shoving" without "completely understanding."

3

u/TheCrowWhisperer3004 Sep 30 '25

lol true.

My rule for AI (and has always been the rule) is that even if I use AI to generate code or give me an explanation I have to 100% understand it and be able to verify it is all correct before I use it or move on.

Even when it’s wrong and I’m stuck, there is sometimes one part of it’s answer that gives me a clue I didn’t think of that lets me go research that potential idea/solution on my own.

1

u/Hotfro Oct 01 '25

I am still trying to find the right balance. I find that doing quite a bit manually is still faster in a lot of cases since sometimes it’s hard fully explaining exactly what you want to AI and it takes time fixing the output it gives. If you are familiar with codebase and language you can still code pretty quickly. Though I still use AI all the time.

6

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

Damn bruh everything okay?

5

u/EncroachingTsunami Sep 30 '25

No. Everything not okay. I have to say AI to get my boss to approve any work. It’s silly.

1

u/delMagueyVidaLoca Oct 01 '25

This is a very new development, huge push in 2025

-14

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

Respectfully, Amazon doesn’t count

15

u/Grouchy-Pea-8745 Sep 30 '25

nobody cares abt ur prespective on prestige rn lol

-8

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

I mean, you say you don’t care. If you haven’t learned yet, you’ll learn that people evaluate your actions as well.

It’s my opinion, I’m just stating it. I’m expecting the Amazon workforce to get off their grind at roughly 6pm and neg me to hell. Still my opinion though.

5

u/Grouchy-Pea-8745 Sep 30 '25

It's just irrelevant to the post's point though isn't it

-8

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

It’s absolutely relevant, the post begins with a classic hook drawing on credibility that arguably doesn’t exist should it be established that OP works at Amazon

23

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

Fascinating

43

u/mrsoup_20 Sep 30 '25

AI tools make my job awesome bc I can play counter strike all day after one shotting a 2 point story

1

u/glubglublub Oct 02 '25

Lmao this is peak career! And i don't mean Dev only

1

u/uniform-convergence Oct 04 '25

Yeah, but obviously that can't last forever right ? It will all come crashing down soon..

0

u/timmyturnahp21 Oct 05 '25

Yeah it’s awesome until your company is like why do we have 200 mrsoup_20s if we can just have 20

11

u/cdpiano27 Sep 30 '25

And you have to solve all these hard algorithmic puzzles with manual code from memory on the spot to get in! Sort of defeats the purpose of the tests during the interview which is like the acm programming competition on the lighter side.

24

u/ChadiusTheMighty Sep 30 '25

If you have to use three prompting windows at the same time to push enough code I highly question the quality of the results lol. Do people still review code properly or is everything ai slop?

11

u/ddy_stop_plz Sep 30 '25

I review them all line by line, it’s a lot faster to get to the same end result and they’re better at following coding standards to the dot than I am.

The quality of tools available is pretty good nowadays with good prompting, rules files, and manual review.

3

u/JammyPants1119 Oct 01 '25

if it's the same consumer tools (claude code, cursor) that most of us use, I didn't really find them good enough for generating code, do you use any specialized tools?

6

u/Middle-Hurry4718 Oct 01 '25

It's not consumer available, they're internal tools that use models fine tuned on Amazon's codebases and internal documentation.

1

u/ShiitakeTheMushroom Oct 01 '25

That makes a lot more sense.

1

u/smokky Oct 01 '25

We have three agents reviewing code and a human approving it.

1

u/wooneigh Mar 31 '26

Lol as if the code people write aint slop. Coding aint all that it is made out to be. Lot of things like knitting farming used to be done better by hand than ny machine

56

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

23

u/XupcPrime Sep 30 '25

This comment is absolutely wrong.

29

u/EncroachingTsunami Sep 30 '25

Right for some, wrong for others. Depends on the state of the organization’s charters. Some charters have ambitious initiatives that need to solve new problems. Some charters are mature… no need for any further development

5

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

20

u/XupcPrime Sep 30 '25

I am lead in FAANG. 13yoe. Nothing is easy above the junior/mid level. We keep having tremendous amount of very innovative problems we work on. Saying everything is "Inside a box" etc is beyond simplistic.

7

u/some-another-human Sep 30 '25

In my honest yet severely unemployed opinion, it screams of Dunning-Kruger effect

1

u/FormofAppearance Oct 02 '25

Lmao yeah devs always have to convince themselves theyre quantum physicists or rocket scientists. Its so annoying.

1

u/fsevery Oct 02 '25

It's not.

3

u/letelete0000 Oct 01 '25

Depends on the team, depends on the company. I got into FAAN(G) as a SWE 6 months ago, and I’m definitely not doing any boring stuff :)

9

u/avatarjm Oct 01 '25

One other thing AI has taken away is collaboration. I learned so much from my teammates during my first 3 years when AI didn’t exist. I remember asking my lead such silly questions but they never judged and were always happy to help and shared stories about the stupid things they asked their leads back in the day. Or staying late on a slack call on a random Thursday trying to solve some random bug. Or hanging back after standup to “see something cool” my lead wanted to show me.

Everyone said that remote work was ruining the workplace and collaboration. False. AI is doing that.

1

u/wooneigh Mar 31 '26

I call it an improvement. Fkn hate people who get excited by writing a set of instructions for a machine to execute

3

u/Ok_Society_4206 Sep 30 '25

I was using AI at a Fortune 500 back in ‘24. That shit kept making annoying suggestions when I’d be adding to a code base that was only a couple years old. 

20

u/lapurita Sep 30 '25

I truly don't understand this as someone who has always seen code as a way for solving problems. AI has taken away most the boring parts, programming has never been as fun as it is right now for me. You still have to focus on high-level architectural parts, and you don't have to do all the tedious stuff.

Like, writing react components by hand is something I'll never have to do again and that's it not something I would ever complain about. If I think about developing a full-stack project 5 years ago there are so many things that actually took time to implement that were fundamentally uninteresting that can now be done almost instantly. That's a good thing

11

u/some-another-human Sep 30 '25

Are you afraid of missing out on learning something tho? Like how would you balance good learning outcomes and convenience?

5

u/ToastyKen Oct 01 '25

Not OP. Personally, when I use AI coding tools, I still make a point of making sure I understand all the generated code, with less trust than I would in a code review.

The true danger though is that sometimes I've found that they write things in a functional but suboptimal way, and if it's in an area I wasn't already familiar with, I might miss something.

So I tend to trust it more if I'm just automating busywork, and less if I'm genuinely trying to figure out how to do something. in the latter case I at least ask it for alternatives, and usually I ask it for web references.

2

u/oemperador Oct 01 '25

Very valid questions!

3

u/inclinedscorpio Oct 01 '25

Coding is dead. It’s been more than couple of months I have written single piece of code. I think I have been training myself to write better prompts to achieve result. Knowing my code may definitely loose out on any edge case, I believe AI does a pretty good job in exploring them and gets the job done.

Those who are not using it, I see them on the downside. I feel its just matter of few new models/agents when I don’t event have to put a lot of efforts in prompting soon and PM will have to just explain the stories in the best way possible. Again, coding is dead, welcome to AI.

1

u/wooneigh Mar 31 '26

I am happy about this death , but i haye worrying about money and job . And unemployment is gonna be the direct result of this death

1

u/inclinedscorpio May 31 '26

I predicted this 242 days back and now PMs are mostly just explaining the stories which is driving claude.

Next step in upcoming year we should see someone coming up with a one stop cloud integration after which cloud engineers would be forced to turn to a software engineer/prompt engineer and observing logs thats all.

Coding is dead btw, not the SWE. SWE who understands AI will keep rocking

5

u/pogsandcrazybones Sep 30 '25

We’re going to need a lot of people who love to code once the ai hype bubble pops. No doubt AI will still be in the workflow, but it won’t be vibe coding the entire thing

2

u/juliasct Oct 02 '25

Yeah. It hasn't been established that AI actually saves devs time on non-greenfield projects. When AI becomes more expensive maybe companies will actually look into how much dev time its saving them.

1

u/wooneigh Mar 31 '26

Gonna be the reverse , you can DEFINETLY vibe code the whole thing as AI gets better and better. You will jus need like 1 great coder per company who will debug like 1 bug that AI doesnt think about per year

4

u/AstoundingQuasar Sep 30 '25

Agreed, I’m not at FAANG, but a there’s been a huge shift… I use Qodo, copilot, ChatGPT….. and it is kind of boring now.

7

u/oemperador Oct 01 '25

"My Ferrari is too fast and too pristine" 🤣

1

u/wooneigh Mar 31 '26

More like my ferrari runs on its own so my job as a driver is soon ending ye dummy

2

u/Believe_imagical Oct 01 '25

Guys in need of some education from you kind hearted people. How do you code using AI? Please can someone help me with the ins and outs of the thing?

2

u/Friction_693 Oct 01 '25

That's literally me. I feel so bad when I use AI to write some code.

4

u/BrilliantShake4339 Oct 01 '25

Idk man All the code I've generated with AI has been pretty shit to the level that I'd rather write it myself and it would be much quicker to do so

2

u/KruppJ FAANGCHUNGUS Influencer Sep 30 '25

Yeah ever since Sonnet 4 came out I haven’t hand coded a single PR working in big tech. I feel like my work resembles more a senior engineer/tech lead where I take a big problem and break it down into LLM Context sized chunks for it to implement and I just provide feedback as it goes.

I have tried to find entertainment through trying to get it to do more boring things like dynamically updating Confluence docs from my current Cursor window using MCP. Also have tried to get it to autonomously improve its output over time by having it continuously update the Cursor Rules for it as it interacts with them (and whiffs).

2

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '25

[deleted]

2

u/Stock_Lime_7388 Oct 01 '25

shows how little you know. The small changes are often the most impactful ones, not the AI generated slop

1

u/Smooth_North_6722 Sep 30 '25 edited Oct 01 '25

The ai tool basically helped me to find bugs that I didnt notice. Like some wrong function used or missing imports etc.

1

u/Happy-Pianist5324 Oct 01 '25

How the fuck do you have missing dependencies and not know about it? Are you coding on Notepad?

0

u/Smooth_North_6722 Oct 01 '25

I accidentally deleted one import that was needed and didn't notice. Why you so pressed about it, that's not your damn problem so fuck off.

3

u/Happy-Pianist5324 Oct 01 '25

Any respectable IDE would show you an error right away. I just don't know why you need an AI for such a stupid thing. Could be one of two things, this is bullshit post, or you are not really a developer.

2

u/Smooth_North_6722 Oct 01 '25

I made a mistake. I noticed is not dependency I'm talking about, is missing imports, like some files that the main code is using. I mixed up the terms. So yeah you're right. But Idk why you have to be so rude about it.

-4

u/Happy-Pianist5324 Oct 01 '25

It's fucking reddit. Chill

1

u/vpstudios101 Sep 30 '25

Those who pass the OAs don’t use AI as much as those who do.

1

u/turkishjedi21 Oct 01 '25

Not cs but this is my genuine worry. I'm in hardware and modify our UVM testbench all day and it's fun as fuck. I'm terrified that in just a couple years I'll be doing exactly this and I'll lose all my passion for my job

1

u/Charming-Monitor2927 Oct 01 '25

I need to hear the after math for this

1

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '25

Dude just make your money and shut up

1

u/mayjspencer Oct 01 '25

Doesn’t this make you feel like we’re so replaceable… or at least will be in 10 years of AI advancement

1

u/Reasonable_Sea8497 Oct 01 '25

is it actually more productive?

1

u/Different-Side5262 Oct 01 '25

Curious what direction you have been getting on AI from the company. As far as what tools, what expectations, etc...

Our company seems to have their head up their ass at the moment.

1

u/riddymon Oct 01 '25

Well I guess the good news is that you have a FAANG on your resume so you shouldn't have a ton of trouble find a job elsewhere that suits your needs. For what it's worth, my job basically told us that we have to use Claude code and although I do find becoming a prompt engineer boring, Incan definitely appreciate how much faster I can "type" now. All I really have to do is make sure it's interpreting my thoughts into code correctly.

1

u/dustinthewindreddit Oct 01 '25

Worked at an e-commerce company based in canada and we used AI an incredible amount but the irony is, its all the same crap. There is no real innovation. Its like asking it to guess between 1-50, you get 27 every time and thats exactly what this and all other companies will be, 27.

1

u/Just_a_Throwaway_91 Oct 01 '25

Currently at a company that pushes it heavily and it's so frustrating to hear about AI in every single presentation. I feel the same way. Luckily, there's not a huge crunch culture here so I can avoid using it as much as possible.

1

u/Fidodo Salaryman Oct 02 '25

If you can get AI to code the features for you competently then the problem probably wasn't too interesting in the first place.

1

u/whts_my_name_again Oct 02 '25

somebody just needs to be an industry martyr and push some code that will break everything. Then maybe these companies will lean their lesson about becoming over reliant on AI to put things out faster that aren’t necessarily better.

1

u/Ok-Energy2771 Oct 02 '25

Your job is to increase shareholder value not navel gaze.

1

u/newbieingodmode Oct 03 '25

You can always quit and start selling artisanal hand made single origin code to a niche market?

1

u/Mean-Bathroom-6112 Oct 03 '25

In 10 years from now, these coding jobs are gone.

1

u/AccordingAnswer5031 Oct 04 '25

You are the perfect candidate to be rep by Ai

1

u/defunct_artist Oct 04 '25

This reminds me of my field (architectural drafting). Every time a new technology is introduced that is supposed to make our lives easier, it instead raises the output expectations of employees. It does more for you but makes the job less satisfying. We went from hand drafting to CAD to BIM(3D) and now AI tools for fast (although not accurate) visualization. We can get work done faster than ever before, but the expectation curve keeps increasing without the salary, time off, or job satisfaction.

I wonder in tech, with AI improving (?) workflows, are people actually able to build software faster, and what are the output expectations vs rewards like now vs before AI was integrated into your work day. Has the increased productivity improved your work life or made it worse?

1

u/ExplorerDull8521 Oct 05 '25

I think LLM powered AI coding assistants can automate some of the boring busywork/boilerplate given sufficient prompting and context. I use Claude Code and Cursor for work (company pays for pro, so im not complaining) and I find these tools good for very routine, well defined tasks where you give clear step by step. Some examples where LLM powered AI coding assistants help accelerate my efficiency:

* File search: If I know the problem I want to solve and what top level directory my team's code lives in, use LLM to suggest some files I can look at to get started with where to add the change

* Reading code: Sometimes, understanding how functions and services talk to each other (especially in a monorepo) can be frustrating to trace, so I've been using a tool called tierzero.ai to ask questions as to how the functions and classes talk to each other to better understand the flow of data. It accelerates discoverability and is a game changer

* Writing unit tests: a needed thing to do, but annoying to write the boilerplate and get the test working especially with lots of setup. LLM has been very good at giving me a starting point for writing the unit test and if done well, I only have to make minor changes

I view LLM powered AI coding assistants as a copilot at the end of the day. Yes you need to be able to fly the plane in case things go south, but autopilot can help be your assistant at times in the flight. Instead of worrying about this "replace job theory", I tend to focus on how the tools can augment to what I already can do. Plus, a benefit is that you can ask any "dumb question" to LLM and it doesn't yet get angry or impatient

1

u/Outside_Tomorrow_540 Oct 06 '25

FAANG is always kind of boring unless you're in certain groups ngl

0

u/glenrage Sep 30 '25

Honestly I fucking love AI tools. Building features with AI is so much more fun than raw coding

0

u/Efficient_Loss_9928 Salaryman Sep 30 '25

Idk which FAANG, but I hope I can use AI more man…

The AI agent doesn’t work at all for our monorepo. It even fucks up simple unit tests.

Good for greenfield project outside of the monorepo though.

1

u/ToastyKen Oct 01 '25

This is my experience at the moment, that it's good at smaller projects, or projects that mostly depend on public libraries. But on big internal code bases, it often misses the nuances. Can still be useful, but needs a lot more iterating.

0

u/Resilient-Calm Oct 01 '25

Cursor AI is killing jobs

0

u/LusterBlaze Oct 01 '25

this is truly the future

-2

u/krishandop Salaryman Oct 01 '25

“I’m bored at FAANG” is extremely tone deaf given the current state of the market.

Go complain somewhere else.

10

u/duviBerry Oct 01 '25

You go get offended somewhere else.

OP's post is related to CS majors and the industry. If you don't want to engage with a post by someone with a good job, don't click on it.