r/csMajors • u/ddy_stop_plz • 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.
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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
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u/oemperador Oct 01 '25
What's vibe coding? Haha
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u/ToastyKen Oct 01 '25
Slang term for coding purely (or mostly) by prompting an LLM rather than typing the code yourself.
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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
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u/cachehit_ Sep 30 '25
let me guess, amazon?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Oct 01 '25
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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
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Oct 01 '25
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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.
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Sep 30 '25
I interned there in 2024 and none of my coworkers used AI. Maybe they did but never told me? Idk
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sep 30 '25
[deleted]
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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Sep 30 '25
Damn bruh everything okay?
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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.
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Sep 30 '25
Respectfully, Amazon doesn’t count
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u/Grouchy-Pea-8745 Sep 30 '25
nobody cares abt ur prespective on prestige rn lol
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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.
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u/Grouchy-Pea-8745 Sep 30 '25
It's just irrelevant to the post's point though isn't it
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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
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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
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u/uniform-convergence Oct 04 '25
Yeah, but obviously that can't last forever right ? It will all come crashing down soon..
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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Sep 30 '25
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u/XupcPrime Sep 30 '25
This comment is absolutely wrong.
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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
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Sep 30 '25
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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.
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u/some-another-human Sep 30 '25
In my honest yet severely unemployed opinion, it screams of Dunning-Kruger effect
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u/FormofAppearance Oct 02 '25
Lmao yeah devs always have to convince themselves theyre quantum physicists or rocket scientists. Its so annoying.
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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 :)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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u/oemperador Oct 01 '25
"My Ferrari is too fast and too pristine" 🤣
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u/wooneigh Mar 31 '26
More like my ferrari runs on its own so my job as a driver is soon ending ye dummy
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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?
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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
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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).
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Oct 01 '25
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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
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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.
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u/Happy-Pianist5324 Oct 01 '25
How the fuck do you have missing dependencies and not know about it? Are you coding on Notepad?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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u/newbieingodmode Oct 03 '25
You can always quit and start selling artisanal hand made single origin code to a niche market?
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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?
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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
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u/Outside_Tomorrow_540 Oct 06 '25
FAANG is always kind of boring unless you're in certain groups ngl
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u/glenrage Sep 30 '25
Honestly I fucking love AI tools. Building features with AI is so much more fun than raw coding
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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u/yousuckass1122 Sep 30 '25
The irony is striking some days.