As you can probably guess, AI is destroying me on different levels. It often creates much better solutions than I do because I don't know this large codebase well. It can write code without forgetting to add something somewhere. But sometimes I can see that the suggested solution is bad, and I argue with a soulless machine about it.
I don't know much. My solutions are too straightforward and stupid. I can't make architectural and design decisions, or the ones I make are simply bad. I can't sit down and describe how I'm going to solve something because I don't know what might come up when I start. And I'm trying not to feed slop to PR reviewers, and I truly learn something when they suggest something to me.
I want to be a good engineer, and I thought that if I started working, it would come to me naturally. But now I'm in this LLM loop where everyone is expected to use AI, yet it gives me nothing in terms of real experience, and people don't want to teach anyone anymore.
I don't know what to do. I want to become a good engineer even if this profession won't exist, and now my life and my family depend on my income, so I can't just decide "It's not for me".
What should I do? Spend my free time trying to understand the codebase without AI? Try to create something myself without AI? Improve my problem-solving skills, learn new things from books, practice implementation?