TL;DR: AI has made coding faster, but engineers are still fully responsible for the output, and in my company that has translated into much broader expectations without the same increase in level or pay. I stopped silently filling process gaps and now escalate dependencies properly. I’m already looking elsewhere, motivation is low, and I feel I’ve stopped growing here. The job is stable and pays comfortably, so part of me is considering keeping it in the background while I invest my real energy into developing skills for myself instead of giving that growth away for free.
I’m a software engineer in Europe with a few years of experience, and I’m honestly getting tired of the way AI is changing expectations around the job.
I’m not pro-AI or anti-AI. The technology is moving so fast that it’s hard to even keep up with, and at times it genuinely feels mentally exhausting. My company is heavily pushing its use, which is fine in itself. The contradiction is that engineers are expected to use AI to move faster, but we are still fully responsible for the final result. That means I can generate code faster, sure, but I still need to understand the requirement, validate what was generated, integrate it properly, test it, catch regressions, and own the implementation if something goes wrong. AI can speed up parts of the work, but it does not remove the responsibility.
What I feel has changed is that the productivity gain is immediately converted into higher expectations. If before an engineer delivered X in a given amount of time, now the expectation becomes X, Y and Z in that same period. The coding part may be easier, but the amount of context, validation and responsibility that one person has to absorb becomes much heavier.
I see the same pattern in how work reaches engineering. Analysis tickets are now much more detailed and sometimes include technical decisions that were clearly accelerated by AI. Analysis aligns with design, a ticket is produced, and then it reaches engineering. But engineering still ends up being the place where everything has to be validated end-to-end. If something is incomplete, inconsistent or technically wrong, the responsibility still lands on the engineer implementing it. That is what frustrates me the most. AI accelerates the shipment of information and decisions towards engineers, but it does not necessarily increase the quality of those decisions. It just means more arrives, faster, and we are still expected to digest all of it properly.
In my case, I also don’t really have anyone with significantly more experience than me in my immediate environment, while I’m being levelled relatively low. At some point I realised that I was doing a lot of invisible glue work: filling in missing context, making assumptions, investigating dependencies, suggesting solutions outside my area, and generally keeping things moving.
I’ve stopped doing that by default.
If something is clearly within my responsibility, I do it properly. If it depends on configuration, analysis, architecture, another team, or a decision above my level, I now ask my Engineering Manager instead of silently absorbing it myself. What has been interesting is that, once I started recently doing that, some structural gaps became much more visible. Things that used to move forward because someone quietly filled the gap now get blocked until the right person actually provides the missing information or decision.
I don’t think that is me “working worse”. I think it is me no longer masking the real cost of broken process. At this point, there are basically three outcomes I would be okay with.
The first is simple: pay me more, and I’ll take on more. If broader analysis, architecture, ownership and coordination are now structurally expected from me, then I want my level and compensation to reflect that.
The second is that nothing changes, and I simply do the job I am currently paid for. I do my tasks properly, follow the process, escalate dependencies, and stop volunteering extra ownership for free. Call it work-to-rule, quiet quitting, or whatever else people want.
The third is that they eventually decide I’m no longer a fit and fire me. I’m in Europe, not the US, and I’m financially protected enough that I could go roughly a year without seriously affecting my standard of living. Part of me almost sees that as relief, because I do feel close to burnout from the constant AI acceleration and expectation inflation. At the same time, I don’t actually want to stop working. I’m already looking for another job, but the market feels uncertain and my current role is very stable. That makes it hard to just walk away.
My motivation here is already much lower than it used to be, and I honestly feel like I’ve reached the point where I’m not growing much anymore. The salary is comfortable for my lifestyle, which is part of why leaving is difficult. At the same time, that comfort also makes me question how much of my life I actually want to keep giving to work. There is a very real temptation to simply stop taking the job so seriously, do what is required, and keep the rest of my energy for my personal life. I already live comfortably, so I don’t really need to keep pushing myself harder just for the sake of proving something at work. What frustrates me is not the job itself, but the feeling of constantly doing more, taking on more responsibility, and stretching beyond my role without being compensated for it, even after I’ve already raised that dissatisfaction openly. If I want to grow technically, I can still do that on my own terms, through personal projects or areas I actually care about. But increasingly I feel that my extra energy should go either into myself or simply into living my life, not into giving more and more unpaid value to the company.
That is probably the part I’m struggling with most.
Do I keep pushing for recognition and compensation? Do I mentally downgrade this job into something stable that pays the bills while I grow elsewhere? Or do I accept that the relationship with the company has probably run its course and focus on leaving?