Skip to content

Reasons AI makes my job harder

I am a software engineer. My job is more stressful because of AI. There are some obvious reasons for this: it produces crap code, it might destroy the world, etc. But here are a few less-discussed reasons.

  • It's a tool I use a lot, but have relatively little experience with
  • So I don't know the best ways to use it
  • In fact, I know I'm not using it in the best ways
  • Nobody knows the best ways to use it
    • There is no consensus and no "best practices" on how and when to use it
  • And so I could be doing things very inefficiently without realising
  • I keep doing things manually which I know, in principle, would be easy for AI to do, but we just haven't set it up with the relevant context and tools to be able to do them
    • It creates more pieces of tooling to maintain, and to decide whether it's worthwhile to invest in
  • I sometimes have to do things manually because the risk of it making big mistakes is too scary, but this means I'm knowingly being slow
    • I have to decide whether to do this
  • I have to worry about whether using it is making me lose (or never gain) important skills and knowledge
  • I have to decide whether to not use it for the sake of learning how to do something myself, but this means I'm knowingly being slow
  • Being knowingly inefficient in these ways makes me feel incompetent and vulnerable
  • The gap between "it works" and "it's actually good" used to be small, but now "it works" is achievable much quickly, so now it's harder to decide whether correctness and neatness are worthwhile
  • Also, correctness and neatness, which are things I enjoy, are worthwhile less often
  • It's slower than other tools, and so I am switching between tasks more often while I let it run in the background
  • More of my time is spent on the trickiest parts of software engineering: reasoning about safety, prioritisation, planning, architectural tradeoffs, ..., because I get less of a "break" from these by writing code
  • It has questionable externalities (environmental, copyright, sociopolitical, ...)
  • But it's so useful and important, I don't really have any choice but to use it
  • I don't even really get to think about any of the ethical issues with it
  • But it's polarising and in many circles I have to worry about being judged for using it
  • Every single thing about it keeps changing
  • There are unknown unknows to worry about

First published: 2026-06-05
Last updated: