Have you SWE's found a way to stay relevant amidst AI - If so, how?

[u/Dfn73535]

I'm currently strugling with my career, as I feel like I'm nothing more than a prompt master. It'd probably be fine if I was working for a company that produced tons of software, but my current job consists of A LOT of waiting for other people (professionals of other fields) to complete their specifications for whatever kind of software is needed.

This means that my weeks at office consist of about 2-5 hours of actual coding with Claude and the rest is just sitting there trying to look like I'm not completely useless for the 35-38 hours of the week.

I'm by no means complaining: I have a job that pays bills while having to put in a very minimal effort, but if I got canned now, I don't know where I'd end up. I don't see "I can prompt" as a very good sales pitch to any company.

Have you guys found ways to pivot or specialize into something that keeps you relevant while AI is taking over?

[u/lhorie]

just sitting there trying to look like I'm not completely useless

Participate in those specification design conversations more?

[u/Dfn73535 → u/lhorie]

I'm already participating as much as it makes sense for SWE to be present. The issue is that for example engineers in the company have to do math and specify mathematical formulas and graphic designers have to create assets and UI plans, which I then convert into code. If I wanted to do some of that, I'd have to get another degree in something like electronics or machine engineering.

[u/Unlucky_Scallion_818 → u/Dfn73535]

Either your codebase is way to basic or you under estimate your prompting skills.

[u/Better_Sea8446 → u/lhorie]

real but waiting 35 hours still sounds like heaven from it support

[u/ProfaneWords]

The fact that meetings aren't mentioned as a substantial part of your day is concerning. You need to be having more meetings, then you need to have meetings about those meetings, and finally you need to write decision docs that recap the meetings about your meetings.

I see 35-38 hours of your week that should be filled with "yep", "mhm" and "no blockers".

[u/sm0ol]

my org is leaning heavily into agentic work and while there's pain points, an immense amount of my day is now discussions and planning around systems design, code quality/reviews, etc. We're greenfielding a new platform right now, which is the first big new thing we've built since agentic coding has come along, and it's been a fun experience. Most/all of the implementation is handled by the agents, which I thought would mean we'd barely ever talk as a team, but now we spend a ton of time talking about the design, the UX, data flow, deployment, etc, and we can actually have concrete and meaningful discussions about that stuff almost every day since we know we'll have large chunks implemented. We can also throw away bad designs/architecture much more quickly after we've tried it, and completely pivot approaches with only a few hours or a day lost instead of a week+.

Even with the implementation largely offloaded to agents, my mental overhead is far higher - at least for this project. To be able to competently participate in the discussions, I have to have the entire system we're building synthesized in my head and understand every aspect of it and what we're going for. I can't just ride on "eh I'm building a couple endpoints this week and then I'll catch up on what the rest of the team has done after" - it's building a couple endpoints in the next couple hours, while everyone else is also making a ton of progress.

I'm sick rn so this may not make any sense but really I feel like I've just abstracted up a layer

[u/ErZicky → u/sm0ol]

Problem is, how do juniors fit this picture? Like from what you're describing you're at a decent seniority level. But I see that what would normally be the duty of a junior, implement the stuff, was automated away.

It's not a critique of you, just a thought that came to me reading it

[u/sturdy-guacamole → u/ErZicky]

anecdotal for what ive seen , they dont fit in the picture.

[u/disposepriority]

Really, 40 hours of work in 5? What is it that you work on that can be compressed this much?

[u/LimpAd4924]

Giving away your thinking to an LLM is hilarious

[u/log_alpha]

It's like Squid Games right now. Survive all rounds of layoffs to keep playing. Also Squid Games were kinda better because your sufferings were over as soon as you lose the game. But here the real suffering begins once you lose.

[u/greensodacan]

It's just a tool.

[u/ccricers → u/greensodacan]

The question is not the whole story and actually a bit misleading here. Relevancy is not the real issue despite the thread title. The issue is using AI has made the person so efficient at their job that it's created too much idle time at work.

[u/oceaneer63]

Interesting to hear your take, OP! My company had a very good and experienced developer with whom I paired and together we developed a suite of rather sophisticated apps over about a five year period. He then had to retire for health reasons, and so I was left with the question of what's next?. I interviewed some, but wasn't looking forward to the learning curve that even an experienced developer would have to go through.

I do have a coding background myself, although that's maybe 20% of my job and my development focus is embedded firmware in C / C++ and not the Kotlin coded mobile app that I worked with the developer on.

So, I tried AI and it has actually been going very well for this existing code base. I am not using the AI as agents, but rather giving it the full code base and then working on one defficiency/bug or new feature at a time. The clear advantage is that the AI instantly understands the whole code base and we can make very targeted changes, in which generally blocks of a few to at most 100 or so lines of code are introduced or replaced at a time. So, I have been able to improve these apps quite efficiently, and be able to work on aspects that previously were too minor or (in the case of bugs) too sporadic and difficult to nail down.

So, for OP's question I do think you have to understand the application use case and the whole application structure to develop.and expand on the specification. I think coding knowledge is still important. But you don't necessarily have to be proficient in the particular language and available libraries. I find that my C / C++ knowledge serves me quite well to inspect the AI's Kotlin code for example. Even though I have never coded in Kotlin or built an Android mobile app myself.

[u/Significant_Soup2558]

The engineers I've seen hold their ground aren't the fastest coders, they're the ones who understand the problem deeply enough to know when Claude is wrong. That's the actual skill gap opening up right now. AI is genuinely bad at ambiguous requirements, legacy context, and knowing what the business actually needs versus what was written in the spec. If you can own that translation layer you become harder to replace, not easier.

The 35 hours of waiting is either wasted time or compounding time depending on what you do with it. Learning systems design, diving into a domain your company operates in, or actually building something with AI tooling rather than just using it are all things that show up on a resume as real depth.

If the anxiety about "getting canned" ever tips into actually looking, you can use a service like Applyre to run searches in the background without it becoming a whole project.