The codebases have been sloppified so only AI can understand it now.

Yep. This is what happens. Once you give up control it's mostly gone. The interesting thing is, if you maintain control, you can always choose to use llms here and there. But expecting humans to dive into 10000 file 40million line code bases branded todo apps isn't going to happen.

You cant expect humans to jump at code if management fired half of the department due to the big AI productivity promise.

You doing your work manually is like going back to the 90s or further even. It feels like dropping into 6502 manual assembly mode. It's fun but it's not "work" anymore. I honestly think without AI my company is better off if we programmers sat around and talked like humans about business. Coding is for the clankers now.

If all the professionals leave coding to clankers, and discussions about coding to people who code, I see nothing I don't love about that. Just like the web was more interesting before there was money in it, coding is more interesting without people who can't shut up about their work.

No not really. Most the companies I know that haven't gone full vibes are doing great.

People can and do still write code. Especially in regulated industries. The internet is just full con artists and hype followers not thinking about the future at all.

I suppose I can't bring myself to do the drudgery of coding. I enjoy some of the problem solving but not the workflow frictions, spending 20 minutes due to a stupid typos, syntax fuckery, API lookups, etc.

Sounds like you're in the wrong job ;P

If your job was shoveling, you were excellent at it, and then someone gave you a massive tractor that could lift 5 tons of dirt at a time.

Tractor breaks, you complain about shoveling again and someone says you’re in the wrong job.

That’s pretty common to the human condition.

I've started noticing at $WORK that a lot of systems, procedures, etc. that fall under SDLC or devX are being made ever more onerous or complex because "LLMs can do it."

Some examples include requiring that someone addresses every review comment separately, or that a PR description be formatted a specific way, or that support requests have existing JIRA numbers etc. All of these make the developer experience much worse and would never fly if generating text (that no one reads) wasn't cheap now. A lot of this is cargo culting to make vibe coding feel more serious and entreprise.

The teams that have gone full specs driven development are not AFAICT more productive but good luck getting any change in without 10$ of API usage, even for a one liner. In some cases development is now slower with LLM than it was before!

Really makes me wonder how much some programmers really understood programming 5 years ago if this is the reaction to a very recent knowledge center being down.

I suppose the equivalent would be Google search being down 10 years ago and being forced to read man pages again. Annoying but not literally "snow day" levels of lost productivity.