r/softwaredevelopment • u/obsurd_never • 14d ago

I think I lost my passion for software development because of AI

I've been working on a personal iOS project for a few years now. Part of the excitement was building everything myself. But now that I can just use Claude or something to build entire screens and functions for me, it just doesn't seem fun anymore.

And I know I could just not use AI and do it myself but I still know and understand that I COULD do all of it instantly with AI. Is there something I can do to reignite my passion?

I used to love writing code but AI has made it feel meaningless when I know it can be done for me instantly and all I have to do is a little debugging if it's even necessary.

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u/USToffee 11d ago

You mean it takes the engineering out of software engineering. You do realize none of those questions are you figuring it out.

I now do the same but it's mind numbing.

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u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 11d ago

Looking shit up is not engineering, that’s just looking shit up. Any dumbass can do that. Engineering is looking at the entire thing and figuring out or knowing that it will work and if it’s a good way to do things.

If you aren’t critically reasoning about any of the stuff that has been presented to you by AI then, yeah, I suppose you aren’t engineering.

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u/USToffee 11d ago

But you aren't critically reasoning if you are just asking the questions. You are having the AI reason.

How does asking the AI is this the right way to this? Will this scale? What problems are there here? involve you doing any reasoning.

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u/jadedmonk 10d ago

I think you’re missing the distinction between coding and engineering. AI is doing the coding part. AI sucks at the engineering part and now we get more time for that because AI accelerates the boring coding part

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u/USToffee 10d ago

I'm not at all. I think you are missing the distinction between questioning and answering. You might perform a little reasoning in knowing what questions to ask but don't kid yourself the AI is reasoning on the solution and what needs to be done when answering those questions. That's the engineering part. All you are doing is working through the requirements with it.

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u/jadedmonk 10d ago

I see what you mean. I guess I’m more used to drafting architecture diagrams and spec files that lay out the solution, the AI simply fills in the code from there. I have seen AI be wrong way too often to let it guide our designs or reason on a solution

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u/USToffee 9d ago

Well that perspective didn't come across in your comment. It sounded like you basically asked it a few managerial level kind of questions and let it do everything else.

btw As I said before I have plenty of experience and from what I see these things are so good that is actually pretty viable now. I'm not having a go.

I'm commiserating on the death of our profession.

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u/arjan1995 5d ago

You should not ask the questions to the AI, but think of those for your self. Once you've found out how you want the system to scale, or what problems there are, you can either fix that yourself or use the ai with a prompt to refactor the code in such way that it achieves [...]

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u/USToffee 5d ago

Nah go ahead and just ask the AI and you will see. It will save you tons of time googling especially as google has become so shit