The growing AI resentment

Many software engineers are becoming disillusioned with AI, and it's not hard to see why.

We're not learning anymore

It's mid June, and the UK is experiencing yet another unprecedented heat wave. Temperatures where I am are reaching the mid 30s - much, much hotter than it should be at this time of the year. Despite the heat, it's at a level where I can just about crack on with my work. I'm sat inside with the blinds down and the windows and doors shut to keep cool enough to focus in on what I'm doing.

I've been tapping away on my keyboard most of the day, gettings things built, when I get a message from an old coworker-turned-friend that I haven't spoken to in a while. We have our small chit-chat, we ask what we're both up to at the moment and so on, when the conversation turns to AI. We're both software engineers, we do very similar roles, just in different settings on very different products.

He first asks if I ever use AI tools for work. I answer honestly; yes, most days. AI tools save me considerable amounts of time building things in minutes that would take me a couple of hours. It's not that I can't do it myself, it just makes it far quicker; I can move on to the next problem at a much faster rate than before.

Then he tells me that his approach is much the same, however he's feeling burned out on it all. He feels that the joy of working on small bits of UI, wiring together separate systems, or fixing annoying little bugs, is gone. His whole worklife has become babysitting a machine that does the job that we used to love doing ourselves. All he has to do is open up Claude and explain the issue to it, and off it goes, and solves the problem. Usually. He leaves it in ask-before-edit mode and reviews what it comes up with, and 9 times out of 10, everything it figured out and suggested is what he would've done in the first place.

He says he's bored of it. He's never really learning anything. There's the occasional instance where Claude figures out an issue that he hasn't seen before, and sure, maybe there's a learning opportunity there, but for him (and for me, too), he's not really learning it, as it's not setting into his brain - he learns by doing. Before, we might get a bug report and spend at least a day even trying to figure out how to recreate a problem, let alone fix it. And now we just ask a machine to have a little look-see, off it goes, and voilà, as if by magic, it's fixed. Next ticket please?

This used to be enjoyable

I had a phone call from a client I did some subcontracting with not long after that conversation. We were wrapping up some loose ends on a project we'd worked on, and sort of parting ways for a while. The conversation had a bittersweet tone to it, as we'd both quite enjoyed working together, and were sad the partnership was going on pause. He very candidly told me that he'll keep me in mind as the first call for any future work, but given the current state of the market, he wasn't sure any more work would, in fact, be coming any time soon.

He's talking about the rise of AI coding tools, again. He runs a business focused on helping early doors startups get up and running. But everyone and their mother can now log in to something like Lovable, or Base44, or whatever else is out there, and start building apps. In many ways, this is a good thing, I can't deny the benefits of putting the power of tech into the hands of the people, but for small businesses - like the one I subcontracted with, and the thousands of others like it - I can appreciate the sting all the same. This is their entire market and business model being swallowed up rapidly in front of them.

But the saddest part, to me, was that, for a while, he'd been pretty much all-in on the AI hype train, perhaps trying to just keep up, I'm not sure, but I guess reality had set in. He told me he missed writing code. It was a hobby of his, that's how he got into this world, but now, he feels he has to use AI, because otherwise it's too slow. Any clients he's managed to keep hold of, that still appreciate the continued need for engineers, have grown accustomed to the speed that AI can develop, and his choice is effectively to either use AI to get things done quickly, or lose the ability to pay his rent and buy food. It's not a fulfilling choice, it doesn't make him happy, but we all know which option he takes.

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Both of these conversations resonated with me in ways I wasn't really expecting. I have been using AI tooling, I've been manually writing far less code than I used to, and I miss it. It's not as fun anymore, it's not as fulfilling. I don't think I'm learning nearly as many new things, or improving as much as I used to be.

As it happens, this isn't a novel thought. This seems to be a common sentiment among software engineers worldwide, albeit some appreciate this new way of working. I've seen some former colleagues posting on LinkedIn that actually writing code was just a means to an end, and that building and shipping something useful is the core driving factor, and now they can do that more. I appreciate that, too - building things that get into the hands of users and help to solve every day issues and make lives easier, even if they aren't "changing the world", is still hugely rewarding. But for many of us, AI has sapped a huge amount of joy out of our craft, and in many cases adding in additional soulless work such as reviewing and fixing AI generated code.

There are countless articles online referring to this situation, and hundreds of comments from other software engineers that aren't denying it.

Now, I don't think entirely writing off AI is the right approach. It is a useful tool, you just have to be careful with it. Here at Cavestone we aren't anti-AI, far from it, but we make a point of using it carefully. It can be an invaluable tool, the pair programmer on-demand that serves as an exceptional rubber duck - and using AI to drive features in apps, not write the app, is a wholly different conversation - but using AI to build entire features, letting Claude/Cursor/Codex run wild on a codebase and barely reviewing, it is not a sustainable road to reliable software, we have plenty of experience in fixing up vibe-coded apps to back that up.

We'd love to hear any input or feedback on this topic via our email: hello@cavestone.co.uk