Experienced Engineers Report That AI Is Making Their Jobs Less Enjoyable, Not Just Faster

A seven-year SWE says 'my job as I knew it is gone' — sparking a nuanced conversation about whether AI-augmented development improves productivity at the cost of craft satisfaction.

Y Combinator president @garrytan shared a conversation with a friend — a seven-year veteran software engineer — who said their job "as I knew it is gone" and expressed concern about finding work they'd enjoy in the AI era. The post captured a tension that's increasingly common in engineering circles: AI tools make you faster, but the parts of the job they replace are often the parts people found most satisfying.

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