The way you guys are working is not about speed. It’s procrastination. The work needs to get done. You can either do it now or you can do it when the bug reports and change requests start coming in. There’s no speed to be gained by procrastinating, often it’s the opposite.

If it was me, I’d focus on producing better code despite the pressure. You know you’ve got coworkers spending time watching YouTube instead of turning their work in or picking up the next ticket. There’s your time to ask Claude to refine and refactor the code before you commit it. Just don’t be the slow guy and you’ll be fine.

Just refactor as you go. You don’t have to over engineer things. KISS and YAGNI are valuable engineering approaches. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that turning your work in an hour or two earlier is going to make a big difference in how the higher ups see you.

Where this really starts to pay off is

1. Your name comes up less often when assigning bug reports since you don’t own the feature that is bugged. People notice this.

2. Less time spent fixing bugs means more time making new features. Means you own a larger part of the codebase. People also notice this.

3. When a change request comes in and you go “Oh yeah, that’s easy. I already considered that and it’s like a 1 line config/code change.” You look like a fucking wizard when this happens.

This has always been my approach. Even in places with little to no quality standards. Hell, I think it works even better in places with no quality standards because it makes you stand out more.

P.S. While you already have a job is the best time to look for a new one. Because you don’t have any real stakes for failure.

I’ve had a similar experience at my job, where we’ve gotten an unlimited access to a few models.

There’s one huge problem I’ve very quickly ran into - skill attrition. You very quickly get lazy, and stop being able to critically think about problems. Hell, I’ve only had access to it for two weeks, and I’m starting to see the effects. “Can you add this button?” is a very simple change that I could probably make immediately, but AI can make it a little bit faster, and without me putting in the effort. Or it can at least show me the correct script to put it in, without me having to go scouring the code looking for it. It’s addicting, and quite scary. YMMV, you might have stronger willpower and be able to switch between lazy and locked in mode, but I very quickly found out I can’t.

But is it useful? That very much depends on what do you want out of your job, and both cases have major (and mostly similar) problems.

If you don’t really care about the quality of your job, and are there just to work your 8/5 and get money, hoping to just balance effort vs. quality so they won’t fire you, the it might help. Especially at this point, where management isn’t really used to it that much, you can get away with a lot. But, eventually, you will very probably need to look for a new job, and good luck getting through an interview when you haven’t really thought about code without the help of an AI for the past two years. The fact that you started coding before AI is the only advantage you now have against literally EVERYONE who can do the same job with AI. And every day you don’t write a piece of code from scratch, you are loosing that advantage.

I have I job I don’t particularly care about, but I still use it as a learning opportunity. It might be vastly different in other projects, but my job is mostly just support and bugfixing on a game that has been released for years at this point by a large developer, so nothing really involved, so I can usually afford to use my time to research things I wasn’t familiar with, look into things we could do better thanks to new tech or updates that have been released, and how to refactor or rewrite our code into it. Or making tools that would make our testing easier. I could just not do that, easily get my paycheck, and be glad I have a somewhat stable position, but that would not help me much. In this case, AI is actively harmful for what I’m trying to get out of my job, even if it works pretty well. It only erodes my skills I have, which are not very practiced even without AI, since bug fixing isn’t really much of development. Adding AI to the mix would just throw away my years of college and dozens of projects I’ve learned on. And I won’t learn anything new.

Obviously, if you care about your job output and want to do it perfectly, you don’t want to erode your skills, and you don’t want AI output in your code. AI by definition outputs mediocre and average work, riddled with hard-to-spot bugs, and you should not be ok with mediocre if you really care about the work you do and leave behind.

Especially the point about the pretty large probability of having to seek a new job eventually is IMO the most important thing that’s really worth considering, before you go all in on AI. It’s something that a lot of programmers spend years (and in less developed countries thousands of dollars) in learning, and throwing it away in favor of a service that will very soon need to massively ramp up their costs to get out of red and earn billions they have invested into it is not worth it.

Currently, AI is cheap. It also actively harms your ability to do the job without it. They have also invested billions of dollars that they need to eventually make up, and you will eventually need to pass a job interview. Keep that in mind when deciding to offload your thinking to AI.

I keep trying to manually write code that I’m proud of, but I can’t.

That’s normal. That predates LLMs. Honestly, that predates compilers.

Basically every aspect of LLMs has been overblown - positive and negative. They obviously have some utility… which the self-proclaimed haters will never acknowledge, and want you to feel bad about using. But the robot will never match Sam Altman’s cocaine fantasies. It is buck-wild that ‘what’s the next word?’ works anywhere near as well as it does.

When Microsoft was still pussyfooting around, training on Github’s GPL projects, and their model occasionally spit out entire stolen files, it all seemed pointless. Now, years later - there’s a guy on Youtube who built a camera that visualizes laser pulses in-flight, and halfway through the video he laughs and hand-waves the code for it. Another guy builds video-game aim-bots that physically move the mouse, the table, or his musculature, and similarly brushes off the part where the computer does stuff.

We have programs that write programs. That’s just a thing, now. If the bubble pops tomorrow, it’s not going anywhere, because local models will run on a Raspberry Pi. (Admittedly that example was an art project where the AI waxes poetic about mortality until it runs out of memory and reboots.) We’re in a stupid manic phase, but a decade from now, spicy autocomplete will be just another tool. F7 for spellcheck, F8 for grammar check, F9 for the Dixie Flatline to do his best at whatever you ask while he’s kinda drunk.

Of course the code it generates is pretty shit and full of comments…but it works.

If it’s shit but it works, it’s still shit. You are building technical debt that will eventually have to be paid when you get more customers, and current codebase starts surfacing bugs, security and performance issues.

Before you say it, yes, our codebase is shit, and was shit. We have practically no devops, no real team structure, and something is always on fire, though I’m under the impression that this isn’t very uncommon nowadays…

Sounds like your team doesn’t have a strong technical leadership, or they’re prioritizing expansion rather than stability. Maybe you’re working for a startup and have yet to turn profit? Or your clients don’t care about quality and reliability.

At only 3 years experience you are still learning, and it’s telling that you can already recognize AI slop code. I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont’t know what the job market is like right now. I believe that if all you do is interface with AI all day, your job itself can be replaced with AI, so the experience you’re getting now may be of very little value as a software engineer. But who knows, AI is a real disruptor, and being able to review and scriutinize AI code can be a skill in itself.

I’m a big fan of pair programming. I’m also a fan of rubber duck programming when solo.

I’ve found that an LLM agent can be useful as a rubber duck that can respond and sometimes as a more experienced pair that already knows things that I’m less experienced in.

Everything always needs to be shipped fast and I need to move on to the next thing.

This isn’t the AI’s fault, it’s the culture of your employer. A 100% human workforce would write poor quality code too. Using an LLM is just making you more productive in terms of what productive means for your employer: churning out rubbish faster.

Here. Read this https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/the-software-quality-and-productivity-crisis-executives-wont-address/

Executives aren’t ignorant. They have the data. They commission the surveys. They attend the conferences where CTOs present their concerns. They know that:

• 91% of CTOs cite technical debt as the biggest challenge
• 75% of projects are expected to fail
• 69% of developers lose significant time to inefficiencies
• Only 39% of projects meet success criteria
• The recommended 15–20% investment in technical debt management yields better long-term returns than crisis spending

Yet they choose:

• Not to allocate recommended budgets for technical debt management
• Not to make quality a strategic priority despite CTOs’ and developers’ concerns
• Not to mention these challenges in public communications to shareholders
• To celebrate AI productivity gains whilst developers report record inefficiency
• To focus on the next hype cycle (AI) rather than address fundamental problems

This isn’t a failure of knowledge. It looks to me like a failure of courage and integrity. A failure of the very concept of leadership.

3.5 year old developer? Damn they start them young now. /s

Write shit code, tell managers it’s shit, go on to next project. The only thing that will end this cycle is worker owned co-ops.

Your code is shit, you are stressed and anxious, you have no devops and most likely no best practices, and you exclude people who don’t comply with your shitty behavior? Sounds like an awful company. Are you proud of something?

I’ve found LLMs are impressive at first but as you start to dig through the code it’s quite shit. Give it a day or two and come back and try and really understand how it’s laid things out and your start to see the “six finger” of the LLM code slop world.

It’s great for

• straightforward tasks
• tedious work that requires little critical thinking
• small well defined functions

Funny enough one of the best use cases I have found has been for information retrievel then generation.

Alot of these models store vasts amount of info in their weights. You can get get pretty good results asking it basic questions about new tools.

My rule of thumb is that if it’s something someone would give you to answer a stake overflow post it’s something a LLM can do. These models function by re-composing their training data and inputs but they can only do it so well. The more specific you get the more it starts to fall apart.

I keep trying to manually write code that I’m proud of, but I can’t. Everything always needs to be shipped fast and I need to move on to the next thing. I can’t even catch my breath. The only thing allowing me to keep up with the team is Cursor, because they all use it as well. The last guy that refused to use AI was just excluded from the team.

This is the problem. It’s not new that a company rushes its devs to deliver new features at a pace that results in garbage code. What’s new is that devs who are willing to can deliver those features fast using a LLM. This obviously looks great to the imbecilic C-suites. Deliver features fast, get to market quickly, and spend less on devs!

This is just short-term thinking, and it looks like you’ve noticed this. The team you’re on won’t change because the culture at your company is to deliver the next feature ASAP and focus on the short term. This is common with startups, for example, because it’s a constant race to get more funding. However, it always results in some half-assed product that inevitably needs to be rewritten at some point. With LLMs now, you’ll also have a team of people who don’t even understand their own code, making it take even longer to fix things or rewrite it later.

Anyway, if you hate it, start applying places now. At least in the US (where I am), the job market is ass. The more time you give yourself to search, the better the chance is that you’ll find an option you like.

Do your customers ever complain about your software? If so, what does your team do when it happens? Is this what “something is always on fire” refers to?

Feeling embarrassed is a weird reaction. If it actually helps you in your job, there’s nothing wrong with that. Get that money. Whether you like programming enough to actually get good at it is a personal choice. I’m someone who has been extremely passionate about it my whole life, and when I was younger, I had a much lower opinion of people who only did it for a paycheck (the “9 to 5 people” who didn’t know the difference between Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows until they took computer science in college). These days, I couldn’t care less. The tech industry stopped being a meritocracy long ago. This recent wave of AI slop is just the boot stomping on the population of people who exist within one standard deviation from the average.

But as you’re sitting around scratching your balls while the agents generate your code for you, take the time to think about this bit of doomer outlook:

The “vibe coding” thing is a fad that won’t last. The only reason it exists now is because the current state of LLMs isn’t good enough to do everything on its own. These agents currently need a human in the loop to babysit them when they fuck up, as you’ve no doubt noticed. They’re also highly subsidized because the AI companies want to collect data in order to train them and make them better. If/when they’re truly able to build a product on their own from prompt to ops, then the price hikes and layoffs will come. Maybe they won’t even raise prices, maybe some billionaires will take the company private and only give access to their friends, family, and the young white christian men they’re using as blood donors in their longevity experiments…

Two suggestions.

First, take on a hobby project that you can build to your personal specifications, instead of having to push to meet deadlines and put out fires. This will allow you to learn rather than ride herd on an AI. You’re never going to get the time to write code properly at work, so you’re going to have to find time to do it yourself - or you risk losing what skills you have as you outsource your mental load to AI.

The downside of AI is that it doesn’t learn the same way people do. It can churn out code real fast, and if the language has a ton of examples on the internet it can do a pretty decent job of it, but it will never get better, and in fact it will get worse over time as AI output continues to flood the internet and gets scraped for training data. You need to get better, because without actual human learning and knowledge, programming skills will nosedive over time.

Second, understand the limitations of how your workplace runs and accept that. If you cannot accept that, then look for work elsewhere. Lots of workplaces operate on the ‘always move forward’ principle. Tech debt is something that will always be put off, shoring up your processes is going to get in the way of productivity, and as a result, your job will gradually become putting out fires more and more until it’s all you’re doing. This process will only accelerate with AI coding, especially because it means the people doing the work won’t know all the internals of what they’re ‘writing’. This will be your life, eventually. Get ahead of it if you can, and if you can’t, then it’s time to start looking for another job.

I am sorry fellow human. It seems the only way out is through. Document all the time you spend putting out fires or any time anyone else does. Add all those hours up, and present it to some manager who doesn’t give a shit. Then become manic with me and laugh as the invisible flames encroach on all territories.