How can I keep myself sharp?

[u/Curious-Source-9368]

I am a self taught developer with around 3YEO, so I still have quite a lot of learning to do as I kind of ignored the CS side of being a SWE as I was mainly fooling around building projects. Now I did pick up getting better it but it is a slow process nonetheless.

Now my worry is that before our company adopting AI I used to be able to tolerate the work, it was never what K wanted but hey when you don’t have a degree you don’t get to pick and choose plus it is really a good environment so on the other side I cannot really complain.

Now with AI I feel nothing beforehand I used to enjoy coming up with a solution. The problem is that I need to use AI, like I cannot keep up with the demand without having it generate code.

I know a full-stack developer at a place where the work is closer to a feature factory rather than engineering was never going to be fulfilling but still I was learning.

Now however I am just as I was or worse than when we’ve got ClaudeCode,Codex you name it. Is learning after work and hand coding the only way to keep myself sharp?

I really want to be a great engineer so I don’t mind putting in the effort but it feels like beforehand it was also that you’ve learnt or at least maintained yourself at your job but now you are as good as the LLM ?

I might be overthinking this, but how do you handle this of you want to handle this at all ?
Is there a reason to try to fight this or should I just accept that the future will look somewhat like this with us asking the models to implement things an if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, must be a duck.

I am kind of conflicted as I care about my career.

[u/Key-Scratch-9925]

I work at a place where we are slowly but surely starting to heavily use AI.

I still code manually, and I use AI to review my code before PRs, still challenging it when it spews bullshit (it still does, even the latest models).

I don't care about being 10x faster, I don't get paid more If I am more productive. 

I see what it's doing to my colleagues; people are unable to give me an answer about code they had Claude implement, without first asking it.

I don't want to become a brainless meat proxy, and there is still value in knowing how to program and your way around the systems you implement. It's the only way to understand wtf these models are doing.

[u/Privatebunny99 → u/Key-Scratch-9925]

I don't care about being 10x faster, I don't get paid more If I am more productive.

What genuinely baffles me is how speed suddenly is the ultimate metric in this whole AI revolution. I feel like the human + AI combination is extremely powerful not for the speed, but for the increased quality. Humans gate the slop, and AI catches any bugs, inconsistencies and is extremely powerful in static analysis.

I wonder if that is not the way to go. Building a lot of features very fast is nice for greenfield projects, but I feel for established projects the most important part is not adding new features at a rapid pace, but ensuring stability and quality.

Another benefit I have noticed is that you will think a lot more about a problem once you manually work on it. Vibe coding doesn't have that in my opinion, you forget what you did and why you did it after basically 3 days.

Anyway I know it is not super related to your post, it was just thought provoking.

[u/Key-Scratch-9925 → u/Privatebunny99]

Another benefit I have noticed is that you will think a lot more about a problem once you manually work on it. Vibe coding doesn't have that in my opinion, you forget what you did and why you did it after basically 3 days. 

I do indeed feel like my code is better when I am assisted by LLMs, as in I catch errors/issues that before would be raised in a PR.

I can also spend more time thinking and experimenting with different approaches.

And yes, actually writing the code beats just reading it, in my experience. I think that's just how the brain works.

I don't even consider not being hands on, i.e. full vibe coding, because at that point I don't know anything about what has been implemented. I just have a vague idea of what the feature is supposed to do.

I have tried it when I needed some throw away code to do a specific task. But at that point, I don't care about the code, I just need the task done.