I know this probably gets posted a lot, but I am not sure where I could post it and simply want to vent it somewhere. If this post gets taken down so be it.
I would consider myself as an experienced dev, have worked as Software/Electronics engineer for 4 years now, and I am currently in the lead role about a year now. I worked at a small company, leading on development but prior to being promoted to team lead, I was doing a lot of R&D work which is fun. I get to code a lot, and last year AI model wasn't that great and a lot of my experience were mostly primarily from passion projects and engineering society I joined in university. I use AI as like a super "google" to get some quick information.
After my manager left, I was promoted to the team lead role, my role kind of shifted a bit, I was not doing a lot of R&D work anymore, but was a lot more involved in trying to deliver milestones and expectation which involves a lot of off site testing of our equipment. We hired a new grad student, and he left me completely impressed, super smart guy, he walks the talk. Once he joined, I never tried to keep him on the leash, and actively made sure to keep trying to expose him to problems to get him more involved. I never regretted doing that, I think as a manager, I want to make sure everyone reached their own potential, and if they cant, guide them. Anyways, long story short, as I was trying to deliver milestones upon milestones, I let him do all of the fun R&D work that I have been meaning to do but since I dont have time, I let him have it. He kept on delivering and in fact, I was surprised that there were problems that took him half a day to fix an issue (e.g. third party codebase needs an additional feature). My guestimate based on my skill level would probably take me 3 days of actively working on it. I was impressed and for a few weeks when this stuff keeps happening (I was mostly off-site testing the equipment, so I was not supervising him constantly), I thought he was doing all of this by himself, but turns out he was using AI for it. Personally, that kinds of shift my perspective a bit but even without AI, he still walks the talk.
Anyways, I've worked with him for quite some time now, and I trust him and his decisions in which for one of our new project (not on the critical timeline), I let him lead the project. We went on making some architectural decisions etc., had some healthy discussions on what could be better and what not, and started assigning task to each other. Once we started working on it, he worked on his task, and I worked on mine, but since I am also responsible for off-site testing, my mind shifts between different priorities. As we were working on the project, in less than 2 days, he finished his, which pre-AI, it would have taken probably 2 weeks to do what he did. He made this full-on code-gen code that depending on the configuration, it would use the boilerplate and generates the code accordingly. Once he finished his, my task became the bottleneck as it needs to be done before he could proceed, which I ended up just giving up the task to him that I was excited to work on. The code-gen idea, was in my head, I was planning on making it myself but maybe not with the AI coding it, but I'd use it as a sort of a "super" google again, and built incrementally since it is a new system. All that was taken away because AI had built everything in 2 days and it does works. It just works... it just works and that's the problem. I am not one that would argue against progress, and even if I would to stop him from using AI, it's pretty much non-sensible since thinking in terms of the business, it's faster, and gets the project running.
This was the thing that's bugging me. I felt the need to pick up the pace with AI, and actually utilizing it as a sort of code gen thing, approved, test and move on. It felt as if my brain isn't there and I am not really in "control" of my code, which I dreaded of doing. It felt miserable and I hate it. The thing is again, it just works. If I had code it myself, obviously would take longer, but I enjoyed every second of it, but with AI, I just dont feel like turning up to work. It just does not feel right. For my personal project, I banned myself from letting AI code-gen my codebase, but at work, I might actually am inherently being forced to pick up the pace.
