My company recently issued an "Use AI in your workflow or else" mandate and it has absolutely destroyed my motivation to work

Even though there are still private whispers of "just keep doing what you're doing no one is going to be fired for not using AI", just the existence of the top down mandate has made me want to give up and leave

My fear is that this is every company right now, and I'm basically no longer a fit for this industry at all

Edit: I'm a long way from retirement unfortunately so I'm really stuck. Not sure what my path forward is. Seems like a waste to turn away from my career that I have years of experience doing, but I struggle like crazy to use AI tools. I can't get into any kind of flow with them. I'm constantly frustrated by how aggressively they try to jump in front of my thought process. I feel like my job changed from "builder" to "reviewer" overnight and reviewing is one of the least enjoyable parts of the job for me

I remember an anecdote about Ian McKellen crying on a green screen set when filming the Hobbit, because Talking to a tennis ball on a stick wasn't what he loved about acting

I feel similarly with AI coding I think

I just don't understand your company and the company OP interviewed for. This is like mandating everyone use syntax highlighting or autocomplete, or sit in special type of chair or use a standing desk, and making their use a condition for being hired. Why are companies so insistent that their developers "use AI somehow" in their workflows?

Shareholders are salivating at the prospect of doing either the same amount of work with fewer salaries or more work with the same salaries

There is nothing a VC loves more than the idea of extracting more value from people without investing more into them

So you promote the most efficient employees and let them use tools like AI if they like

I disagree with siblings that it's fear or greed.

I think it's way more basic. Much like recruiters calling me up and asking about 'kubernetes' they are just trying to get a handle on something they don't really understand. And right now all stickers point to 'AI' as the handle that people should pull on to get traction in software.

It is incredibly saddening to me that people do pattern matching and memorize vocabulary instead of trying to understand things even at a basic level so they can reason about it. But a big part of growing up was realizing that most people don't really understand or care to understand things.

FOMO. They don't want to risk being the one company left behind because their engineers haven't learned to use AI as efficiently as others.

There are lots of ways to use AI coding tools.

Cursor is great for fuzy search across the legacy project. Requests like "how you do X here" can help a lot while fixing old bug.

Or adding a documents. Commit description generated based on diff. Or adding a javadoc to your methods.

Whatever step in your workflow which consists of rewriting existing text but not creating anything new - use Cursor or similar AI tool.

The other side of me thinks that maybe the eventual landing point of all this is a merger of engineering and PM. A sizeable chunk of engineering work isn't really anything new. CRUD, jobs, events, caching, synchronization, optimizing for latency, cost, staleness, redundancy. Sometimes it amazes me that we're still building so many ad-hoc ways of doing the same things.

Like, say there's a catalog of 1000 of the most common enterprise (or embedded, or UI, or whatever) design patterns, and AI is good at taking your existing system, your new requirements, identifying the best couple design patterns that fit, give you a chart with the various tradeoffs, and once you select one, are able to add that pattern to your existing system, with the details that match your requirements.

Maybe that'd be cool? The system/AI would then be able to represent the full codebase as an integration of various patterns, and an engineer, or even a technical PM, could understand it without needing to dive into the codebase itself. And hopefully since everything is managed by a single AI, the patterns are fairly consistent across the entire system, and not an amalgamation of hundreds of different individuals' different opinions and ideals.

Another nice thing would be that huge migrations could be done mostly atomically. Currently, things like, say, adding support in your enterprise for, say, dynamic authorization policies takes years to get every team to update their service's code to handle the new authz policy in their domain, and so the authz team has to support the old way and the new way, and a way to sync between them, roughly forever. With AI, maybe all this could just be done in a single shot, or over the course of a week, with automated deployments, backfill, testing, and cleanup of the old system. And so the authz team doesn't have to deal with all the "bugging other teams" or anything else, and the other teams also don't have to deal with getting bugged or trying to fit the migration into their schedules. To them it's an opaque thing that just happened, no different from a library version update.

With that, there's fewer things in flight at any one time, so it allows engineers and PMs to focus on their one deliverable without worrying how it's affecting everyone else's schedules etc. Greater speed begets greater serializability begets better architecture begets greater speed.

So, IDK, maybe the end game of AI will make the job more interesting rather than less. We'll see.

The one place it really shines for me personally is bash scripts.

I've probably written 50 over the last two years for relatively routine stuff that I'd either not do (wasn't that important) or done via other means (schelpping through aws cli docs comes to mind) at 2x the time. I get little things done that I'd otherwise have put off. Same goes for IaC stuff for cloud resources. If I never have to write Terraform or Cloudformation again, I'd be fine with that.

Autocomplete is hit or miss for me--vscode is pretty good with CoPilot, Jetbrains IDEs are absolutely laughably bad with CoPilot (typically making obvious syntax errors on any completion for a function signature, constructor, etc) to the point that I disabled it.

I've no interest in any "agent" thingys for the time being. Just doesn't interest me, even if it's "far better than everyone" or whatever.