AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
Yes, writing code is easier than ever. AI assistants autocomplete your functions. Agents scaffold entire features. You can describe what you want in plain English and watch working code appear in seconds. The barrier to producing code has never been lower. And yet, the day-to-day life of software engineers has gotten more complex, more demanding, and more exhausting than it was two years ago. This is not a contradiction. It is the reality of what happens when an industry adopts a powerful new tool without pausing to consider the second-order effects on the people using it. If you are a software engineer reading this and feeling like your job quietly became harder while everyone around you celebrates how easy everything is now, you are not imagining things. The job changed. The…
