I still find it exciting to watch the reasoning of the AI models, and this keeps me engaged in the product they produce. Many times I marvel at what they came up with. Trying to catch them going on the wrong path down a rabbit hole can be a fun game as well. It's a very interesting time and things are shifting. I do hear about the brain drain you are experiencing, trying to keep up with all the information that comes at you at high speed.
My advice would be to outsource the annoying parts to AI.. like have a sub-agent do the verification, debugging, playtest whatever to grade the work done for example if that's the part you least enjoy. Learn to trust the process, but also keep refining it.
Build a harness around the tasks, and spend time on improving that. It will give you satisfaction that you build that (in coordination with AI) and you've created something new.
I've heard the same concern from multiple fellow engineers recently. It also often comes with a fear that they'll be doing only "boring PRs review" in the future, or even worse - that their AI agents will be just talking to other engineers AI agents without involving humans :/
I believe it's really important to stop reading every line of code during the PR review and go one level higher. Work on the guardrails, security, creative parts of the architecture, challenge architectural decisions of your AI setup and learn. It's also often related to the lack of trust to the code generated by your setup, if you don't believe it then you spend a lot of time finding issues without actually improving anything.
Once you built a trust in what your AI generates, then you can skip many boring parts and focus on more creative things (or whatever you like more).
Btw if you don't like looking at a terminal window half a day then create a better interface in your setup - it can be better storytelling, diagrams, visuals, charts, whatever you like to make it feel better :)
Personally I'm more into diagrams and flows, so I try to turn every PR review into higher level flow analysis where I can predict what might be wrong, architecture flaws and so on instead of reading every line of code.
I still find it exciting to watch the reasoning of the AI models, and this keeps me engaged in the product they produce. Many times I marvel at what they came up with. Trying to catch them going on the wrong path down a rabbit hole can be a fun game as well. It's a very interesting time and things are shifting. I do hear about the brain drain you are experiencing, trying to keep up with all the information that comes at you at high speed.
My advice would be to outsource the annoying parts to AI.. like have a sub-agent do the verification, debugging, playtest whatever to grade the work done for example if that's the part you least enjoy. Learn to trust the process, but also keep refining it. Build a harness around the tasks, and spend time on improving that. It will give you satisfaction that you build that (in coordination with AI) and you've created something new.
I've heard the same concern from multiple fellow engineers recently. It also often comes with a fear that they'll be doing only "boring PRs review" in the future, or even worse - that their AI agents will be just talking to other engineers AI agents without involving humans :/
I believe it's really important to stop reading every line of code during the PR review and go one level higher. Work on the guardrails, security, creative parts of the architecture, challenge architectural decisions of your AI setup and learn. It's also often related to the lack of trust to the code generated by your setup, if you don't believe it then you spend a lot of time finding issues without actually improving anything.
Once you built a trust in what your AI generates, then you can skip many boring parts and focus on more creative things (or whatever you like more).
Btw if you don't like looking at a terminal window half a day then create a better interface in your setup - it can be better storytelling, diagrams, visuals, charts, whatever you like to make it feel better :)
Personally I'm more into diagrams and flows, so I try to turn every PR review into higher level flow analysis where I can predict what might be wrong, architecture flaws and so on instead of reading every line of code.
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