Brent Griffiths

It sounded a little dramatic.

I feel like sometimes you get like those, you know, kind of like phrases and especially in kind of like workforce development, like quiet quitting.

And you hear those, you're like, huh, that sounds interesting.

Let me dig into that more.

And I feel like this was a perfect example of that.

That's a great question.

And I feel like that's you've hit the nail on the head in terms of why software engineers are so frustrated.

I've heard from some engineers who go running, they work out, some of them take naps.

It's just kind of, you know, especially when you need this code and you can't really do something else in between, you're kind of stuck waiting.

I think it varies from place to place.

But I talked to one engineer who wrote a viral essay about AI fatigue.

And he talked about just how he feels like he's an assembly line because he's just he's plugging things into Claude or whatever coding agent he's using.

And then he's reviewing the code and approving it instead of writing it himself.

And

When, because he used to be able to write the code himself, he may be able to focus on one or two tasks a day.

Now he's doing five or six, but it's not just reviewing the code that it's outputting, it's doing other tasks.

So he's being pulled in all these different directions and he's not really getting what he wanted out of the job, which was the ability to kind of think through hard problems and really tackle them kind of one by one.

I think it's a combination.

I think in a lot of cases, it's the engineer themselves who's putting that prompt into a coding agent and then getting that output.

And then they're expected to go through and review it before they finish the pull requests.