I work at a fintech startup with five developers and we haven’t yet launched our product, so we are early on. Our nontechnical CEO now builds and maintains small CRUD apps with AI agents, including an onboarding admin and some small apps that integrate with other services like Stripe.

He’s questioning whether we need dedicated frontend developers, or whether product/business analysts using agents—with senior engineering oversight—would be more effective. His tendency is to overly simplify the responsibilities of the developer and I have a hard time debating and proving he’s wrong.

I use agents heavily too, focusing on design, reviewing generated code, and validating behavior. I see his point for simple interfaces, but I’m unsure how broadly it generalizes.

For experienced devs using agents in production:
1. Have non-engineers successfully taken over development work?
2. How have your responsibilities and team structure changed?
3. What have you learned after months of maintenance and incidents?

So I am currently in the job market, looking for a position, and I found out how much AI coding ruined my chances in interviews.

In college I used to do competitive programming, I was pretty good at them. I was a lead backend on a Python project. I used breathe Software architecture, coding principles, SQL etc..

But now, after a year of executing what my current Manager imposed, which is to no longer code, no longer read the code, and no longer review it, I gained so much knowledge in AI coding, but lost so much in coding capabilities.

The result is that today, in the job market, I find myself struggling in the most basic technical interviews.

A few days ago I failed a very simple coding interview because I forgot that in Python you need to flush if you need to persist on disk directly.

And I have to do another interview with coding, SQL etc..

I totally understand that I should have found the time to keep coding a bit somehow, and that if I had more time to prepare it would have been alright, but still, it's tedious to try and remember everything in a few months (I only had a few days of preparations for these opportunities).

But still, I think that AI broke the interviews.

So I am curious, do you encounter anything alike?

And how do you manage to prepare for technical interviews these days in short periods?

My work is 100% remote. My current workload is stuff like PR reviews (as a tech lead I heavily use my time on reviews, since my team is comprised of a few meat proxys, and management won't do anything about it) which takes about 30% of the time. Another 30% of my time, is just having Slack discussions (design, telling the juniors where a problem could have happened, or where to look). the other 40% is actual development and hands on troubleshooting (I am on the devops side).

Meaning about 60% of my work, I can actually achieve from my phone (and I do this. I usually enjoy my hobbies, and look at my phone from time to time to achieve the initial 60%). The second 40% needs me in my laptop, as I don't have terminals, IDEs, permissions, or monitoring access from my phone. But I know for a fact the technology is there, and I know I could achieve the remaining 40% using Claude speech, connected to all the services I need, and just convert the last 40% remaining, to just more review work.

An example of what I am envisioning:

There's a problem reported of one of our Apps failing. I go to my phone and ask Claude (via mic) to look at the kubernetes logs, pods, services, and whatever, map it to our monitoring systems, and come up with potential root causes. I ask him to provide alternatives, so that I review the alternatives, and ask it to develop a fix, so that I can review. once I review, I sent it for actual code review, and if approved, I ask Claude to deploy it. Kind of like Tony Stark talking to Jarvis to do all his work.

This could all be done with a secondary phone (so limited apps are installed, just for work), which has Claude installed, with admin access to our AWS master account, and MCP servers against Jira, Slack, Confluence, and whatever service I could use.

Has anyone achieved this? any caveat that I should keep in mind?

Hi everyone!

We’re a group of third-year university students currently working on a group project where we need to develop an innovative system based on one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The system doesn’t have to be something completely new. We can also improve or add innovative features to an existing system, as long as it addresses a real-world problem related to one of the SDGs.
We’re currently brainstorming ideas and would love to hear some suggestions from people with more experience in software development or similar projects.
Are there any real-world problems you think could be addressed through a software system? Or any existing systems that you feel could be significantly improved?
We’re hoping to find something that’s creative, practical, and achievable for a team of third-year students.
Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

After 10 years of development experience, that writing code is not an energizing, enthusiastic activity. Every day, I feel that yesterday I wrote feature X and now feature Y. It's a kind of typical activity. It's even worse after LLM/AI.

I've tried more design perspectives but couldn't crack it. Any way to solve the problem and be more focused and consistent in the code/design?

hi this is a rewrite of a past post ( i still need help ).

So im in a team of 3 we want to build a Web App with kinda the same idea of timerepublic.com

that will have a Platform that connect people with skills to teach each other but we found a problem that wen the tow ( for example the student and the one how will teach him the skill ) in a build in face call ( session ) maybe one or both will do a illegal or Inappropriate thing.
So if some one could help us to how to build a system or already existing one for monitoring this session

( and the probelm that the users will speak darija moroccan and anamigh moroccan that AI is not traind that much for it )

edits :

but in the same time we don't want to let data of this session in our data base cus its kinda illegal

The stack : Java, React, Typescript, tailwind CSS
all the communication will be with REST API
the Archt : monolithe modulaire ( cus we want to make it fast as a team of 3 and also maybe in the future add other platform like mobile and desktop )

Life has changed so much with AI for the past few years. As a senior at a big tech I’ve been writing prompts for most of time to do my job, like 10% by hands and 90% generated.

This makes me feel like SDE is turning into a family doctor role, who makes money by mostly consulting🤣

Been stuck at senior engineer for awhile. Same salary. Stagnant on projects inspo. I’m on the job market (layoffs) & can’t seem to get interviews, let alone pass them.

I’d like to move on to lead or staff engineer but need to level up my qualifications. I’m getting lots of targeted ads for this (like A Life Engineered) but not sure if any has experience or resources that are relevant / worth the investment.

Senior Full Stack Engineer - 7 YOE

I'm a new software engineer and struggling with being assigned a story card, breaking down what actually needs done for it, and knowing which file(s) the code goes in.

Does anyone have any recommendations for YouTube videos or something that could help break this down for me? I tried searching on YouTube, but haven't found anything myself. Also thought there might be another platform with something like this. Thank you for any suggestions! 🖤

I recently saw a post about how google is changing their interview process to add two "ai rounds" and presumably will have less focus on DSA.

For anyone interviewing - what has your experience been like? Is DSA being de-prioritized in favor of system design or "ai design"?

Curious to hear your experiences

hi guys! me and my friends working on nostalgic moviestarplanet game.
we’re currently looking for a programmer who would be interested in joining our team as volunteer/hobby collaborator. we’re a small team with no budget, so we can’t offer payment right now. were hoping to find someone who’s passionate about old games, dress-up games, socializing and nostalgia.
we can contribute to the game’s art, outfits, character designs, community management, and promotion. we need someone who can help us with the technical side, especially web development, accounts, character customization, and multiplayer features. okay. it already been done by others, and it took too much attention by community. someone did “mspcity” or “mspfame”. and they got 1k in 2 weeks. we dont have budge rn and i know it might sound untrustful, but if you up to meet with us we can explain to you, and when game is ready and when weadd payments in game, we can give payments to coder.

I don't want to add my voice to those "AI is taking our jobs" doom-and-gloom posts, but something has really given me pause. I work on a software engineering team, and like so many others, we now have agents generate 100% of our new code. What strikes me, though, is the indifference that has crept in. A pull request is submitted that changes 60 files - and two minutes later, people have already approved it with LGTM - absolutely impossible that they actually reviewed the PR. We expect the code to do what it's supposed to because it was generated by Opus 5.5 anyway and the tests passed. But when you take a closer look, there are comments in the code like "correlate retry logs with code evidence" - what on earth is that supposed to mean? If you ask questions in the PR, the engineer uses AI to generate 10 paragraphs justifying that comment. Just like getting flooded with a lengthy AI generated response will shut down critical questions. Then the engineering manager asks, "Why is your review taking so long?" and everybody just seems to be fine that we generate something that looks like it does what it should but nobody cares anymore how we do it because there is time pressure and we need to deliver.

I'm not sure if I can work much longer in an environment like this and I'm wondering if this is just my team or really what the industry has become.

I have greet idea to make a game, the idea is already ready, server been made and we already started to promote the game. But we need someone to code. Is anyone willing to help? We dont know coding😭 I just need someone to guide me

How are you guys staying relevant with junior engineers who come prepared with all these latest technologies around AI engineering, LLMs, RAGs, etc

I know these are buzzwords but these buzzwords are attracting investments, creating new opportunities and opening up new roles.

I am mostly exposed to backend and data engineering and use basic AI tools. Now, I see new roles coming up around AI engineering, AI strategy, AI governance and AI infrastructure.

How do you guys prepare for all this while managing your regular day job?

Are you taking courses, reading articles, building your own AI-related projects or learning on the job? How do you decide what is actually worth learning and what you can ignore?

I was recently quite down regarding this whole AI coding thing. I spent years improving my coding skills and get tremendous joy and pride writing good quality and maintainable software. Today, companies are valuing output over quality at the expense of code/product quality and their employees.

Then I thought about all the regressions in web applications I’m seeing. Not just the bad/buggy UIs and increased latency, but even the “shoved in your face” AI features. Features that their own customers on review sites and community forums are saying they don’t want!

I believe there is an opportunity right now to work on or build something that is good quality, reliable software. I cannot see companies slowing down on this AI sloppification and it’s going to show in repeated product degradation or security breaches. And once it does they’ll be hiring again anyway to clean up the mess that was made.

Sit tight and keep sharpening your skills!

I am a full stack developer and I don't have any prior experience working in a company. I just build stuff, and recently I built AI powered applications, and then I applied to an AI engineering position just to test if I'm qualified for this job, so they surprisingly accepted me.

Although I am a developer and I sure built some projects that are AI powered, like some AI agents and all, but I didn't go that deep in AI engineering, and I'm not a CS student, I started learning web dev as a self taught that's all, but I went through a technical interview and I actually passed and got hired!!

Now I feel stressed as much as I feel happy, because I'm not familiar with their tech stack, they use docker, clay, and other stuff I know nothing about, and I'm totally new in the work environment, I never worked before in a company with a team. I'm going to start working this Sunday, with really low knowledge in this field, so I'm so afraid I'm going to mess it up, and I'm so stressed about this I can't even sleep.

Is anyone here went through a similar experience so he can give me some advices 😢

Obviously we are at a point where coding agents are great and really fast in accomplishing a good amount of tasks, and people openly say if you're not using them to get things done you're already behind, and I can't disagree.

But there is also the fact that if you don't force yourself to think critically through difficult problems, if you just hand a bug over to the agent to find the root cause and a fix, you slowly lose your ability due to lack of practice which is quite natural.

So how do you guys make yourself get better at learning and thinking critically through complex tasks, at the same time use agents to do your tasks faster?

At my company (Germany), even small tasks take days to get merged because code reviews turn into endless discussions about variable names, naming conventions, or personal coding preferences.
Everyone has an opinion, and PRs keep going back and forth over minor details. Generally there are deadlines for tasks but they are not achieved.
Meanwhile, our agile coach keeps asking why tasks aren’t finished.
I understand the importance of code quality, but sometimes it feels like we’re spending more time debating code than actually delivering software.
Has anyone experienced this? Where do you draw the line between useful code reviews and unnecessary discussions?

so its not a secret that each and every company nowadays just trying to be 'better and faster' with 0 care about the people, so they just keep on pushing the ai stuff. it all went up to the absurd, that regardless who you are - you will be working on both - frontend and backend, basically a fullstack (with zero knowledge about the opposite to ur usual stack).

and I'm okay if there is a possibility of learning things etc, but when you are in rush and under huge deadlines, it's simply impossible to properly learn.

and here is the most annoying thing for me - i have different colleagues with different knowledge base, middles to seniors (juniors dont exists anymore rip), and everyone tries to contribute and learn (me included), but there is one person who has a level of critical thinking lower than the bottom of the ocean, this person will run huge amount of commits on a simple task (even in person's basic stack), the claude itself will push all the commits and there will be 0 reviews on that, and then there are merge requests created by claude which are not even operated by that person. if u comment, the person will just copy-paste the claude response. the whole docs are just generated ai-slop with ZERO filtering on what has been written. and whenever i see it, i just can't - i feel so fcking disappointed by the company, values and such - like why the hell did i study and work, learned things, if now a potatohead will just come in, copy-paste the whole ai slop shit and put it into the repo?

i don't know how to overcome this, the management doesn't seem to be helpful here, maybe they just don't care, and i'm tired of running and talking to people about - how in this stoopid reality we shouldn't rely on ai and we should have rules. it feels like im alone and noone hears and understands me.

consider it to be a scream into the void, i doubt it will be accepted positively even here. cheers to whoever read till this point.

It is the Wild West out there, and nobody knows what they are doing or what the best way to do it is. It is the future, and if used correctly, it can do marvellous things. We will hopefully learn from your mistakes.

My experience is that it is great for brand new projects but not so great for 10-year-old codebases written by dozens of developers.

Stuck at my first company for the last 5 years in production support and honestly feeling pretty low.

I keep seeing people move to better opportunities while I feel like I’m not growing anymore. I want to switch, but I’m scared that 5 years in one company has left me behind.

Anyone else been in the same situation when you are lacking skills and dont know what to start. How did you finally make the move?

I have an AI-assisted technical screen coming up. I have been told, it is a small repo, and a couple of tasks that build on each other.

They say they're evaluating how I use AI, how I break down the problem, and how I communicate while working. Interview is time boxed for 1 hour.

If you've done one of these, either as the candidate or the interviewer:

• What separated strong candidates from weak ones?
• How did you split time between prompting the AI and reading or verifying its output?
• Any mistakes to avoid?

Thx.

I see a lot of devs got laid off this year, and most of them do the same thing. They go even deeper in one stack, polish the CV and apply to companies that are cutting people too.

I think the cuts happen for a simple reason. A few years ago a client asked their IT partner something and waited a couple of days for the answer. Now AI gives that answer in a minute, so the company needs fewer people in the middle.

From what I see with my clients, they don't care if the code was written by hand or by AI, as long as it solves their problem and it's secure. And that part still needs a developer who understands the business.

So I don't get why people keep doing exactly what worked 2-3 years ago. I'd stop sending CVs, go sell the solution to businesses directly and use AI to the max for everything it can do now.

If you got laid off, what stops you from going to clients directly?

Back in 2022 i started a CS degree in hope to find a good job and get my family out of our financial struggles. I graduated in August this year, with general degree,(skipped an academic year). Now here I am without a job. Applied to several hundred job offers and only got 2 interviews & in both I was interviewed by an AI. Idk what they are expecting, i have plenty of real world experience for an entry level job, I have built & deployed in-production software before AI.

And the other thing is AI. I'm writing this post at 11pm, right after a full work day (freelance) using AI tools, I am tired of talking to AI & reading it's output all day. I'm tired of telling it what not to do. im tired of it pretending me as a dumb fk.

When I was in university I did some labor jobs to earn some money, the work was hard but at the end of the day it felt good. Building software by hand used to feel the same, but things are completely opposite now. I feel miserable & don't want to work tomorrow.

I know AI is here to stay & the this is the new normal. Today I understood that, this new normal is not for me. Im gonna leave the industry & find a blue collar job. Wish me luck. (English is my second language, I'm not very good at it, but i typed this rant by hand, so kindly ignore grammar mistakes)

I’m ~6 months into my first full-time job as an SDE 1, after interning at the same company. I’m genuinely grateful for the opportunity and I want to do well, but I’m realizing I have basically zero idea how to navigate the unwritten parts of corporate life.
My main issue is that I’m still learning the codebase, but my work is spread across a lot of different areas. I often get stuck because I don’t have enough context, and I’m not sure where the line is between “I should figure this out myself” and “I should ask someone who knows this.”
I do try things before asking, but I’ve been told in 1:1s that I need to pick things up faster, take more ownership, and communicate better. I’ve also missed deadlines because I sometimes spend too long trying to solve things independently.
The frustrating part is that if I ask early, I worry I look dependent. If I don’t ask, I can waste hours and miss timelines.
I also have absolutely no idea about things like:
- How do you make your work visible without looking like you’re constantly trying to prove yourself?
- How long should you be stuck before asking for help?
- How do you push back on unrealistic timelines?
- How do you communicate blockers properly?
- How do you avoid becoming the person who gets all the leftover work because you’re willing to take it?
- How do you build trust with seniors and teammates?
What are the basic corporate “rules” you wish someone had told you as a junior?
I’m also WFH, so building relationships with the team is harder, and I sometimes feel like I’m missing the informal communication/bonding. Also a language barrier I face is that I don’t know to speak in hindi.
I’m currently working way too long some days (sometimes until 10 PM), and I don’t want “being a good engineer” to become synonymous with working the longest. I want to be a reliable engineer for my paycheck.
For experienced engineers/managers: what would you tell your 6-months-in SDE 1 self? What am I probably doing wrong, and what should I start doing differently?
I’m genuinely looking for practical advice, including criticism. I’d rather fix things now than develop bad habits.