I'm working at a big tech company (not faang). I use agents (claude/codex) in 3 ways:

1. mainly for discovery and research. I clone all the repos I need and then I talk with the agent: "I need to work on service A which has dependencies on service B, C, D and E. How can I accomplish X? Oh ok it seems, B can offer that but only when Z happens, after that I should rely on C. Cool. And now we probably need to extend E. Umm, ok, but I think E's team won't like that. Hold on, I'll reach out to them. Give me a succinct paragraph explaining what we need from them. Alright I'm back, so we have green light but only if we implement it like H. So, give me a plan"

2. Implement the plan. So the agent spits out code that I need to babysit (e.g., perhaps the class is not in the best package, or perhaps we are adding too many e2e tests when unit tests could be enough, etc.)

3. Answer product questions like: "Why is button K disabled in this screenshot? What are the potential causes? Afaik, I have the permissions A, B and C, and I have enough Z, so why is still disabled?", "How does the flow for endpoint 'api/a/b/c/ work? Where are the entry points? Dependant services? Tables touched?"

I could live without the agent generating the code, but not anymore without their help for discovery and research. I dislike using agents for coding (I feel the same as you), but not for research (I actually use them as a sort of improved "google for everything")

I feel the same way. I miss the joy of creative flow that came with architecting and solving problems. I also feel the entire computer tech industry is headed in the wrong direction. We're creating systems that are too complex to understand, that lack human discretion when it's most needed, and then we're turning over control of whole organizations to those systems.

onion2k has a point. You can still write a lot of code by hand, or at least write the interesting code by hand, but your output may fall behind your peers.

After 27 years in the industry, I've cut down to part-time software dev work, and I've enjoyed learning and doing more hands-on work, including bicycle and motorcycle repair. It's actually really nice to get away from the screen and the constant reading of internet garbage during those down times when I'm waiting for tests to run or an AI bot to come back with a response. My mind feels less polluted. But I'm not making money at my new hobbies.

My answer to your question is I don't know. But often, if you can free up some time and mental space, you'll find you start to drift toward other things that interest you.

People who write code with AI are mostly just moving their time from coding to reviewing the output of AI. If you just keep coding you won't be seen as going any slower, and if your peers are bad at reviewing you'll look better than them because your output won't fail testing as much.

> This work flow really took away my passion and joy of writing and building software systems.

With agentic development and senior experience you are now able to write and build systems that are 100x more complex and powerful. You’re no longer thinking about how to some mundane data massaging or crud - rather you can spend time thinking about how to solve actual problems that matter and have an impact - as a solo engineer!

Got a problem with climate change? Start brainstorming.

Want to model how a chemical factory works to simulate its IoT topology? It’s at your fingertips.

Think bigger. A lot bigger. Forget about the trees. Look for the forest.

Your decade plus of engineering experience combined with AI is a super power many other new comers to game would benefit from. Capitalize on it and do something cool.

There's plenty of places that still don't use any AI for coding - I work at one of them. There's far too many lies and nonsense out there, with "research" stating that 90% of software companies are using AI for most of their programming. This is clearly bollocks.

As a developer building a custom 64-bit OS completely from scratch on bare-metal C and assembly, I feel your pain to 100%. Prompting an AI to write a kiddy "Word clone" or boilerplate web apps is the ultimate passion killer. It makes software engineering feel like monitoring a factory assembly line. The only way I found to escape this AI-slop burnout is shifting your focus entirely to low-level or complex domains where AI models constantly halluzinate and fail. When you orchestrate raw hardware registers, write custom USB-HID or xhci stacks and handle direct MMU paging without any framework safety net, AI stops being a driver and becomes a basic typing assistant. You can't vibe-code a stable OS kernel 'cause if you don't understand every single byte in the RAM, the CPU will just triple-fault and instant-reboot. Don't let corporations turn you iinto a prompt manager. Switch to systems programming, compiler dev, or bare-metal embedded stuff. Go back to where you have to understand the machine, not just nudge a model. That's where the real joy of building lives. If you need such a project, try to write a bios-like system for microcontroller like the esp32 'cause there you have to save resources for developers who want to write an os for your bios-like embedded system. No AI just you and the hardware.

I feel we should accept the change and try to move on from writing code manually. Instead we should build guards around AI coding..

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Go work in another field for awhile and see if your motivation returns?

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