I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.
The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs.
Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.
I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.
You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.
Reviewing code that was written by somebody else is one of the least fun and enjoyable activities in my experience .
I personally don't know any programmers who enjoy process of doing PR reviews.
If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.
I really don't mind PR reviews, as long as the author is cooperative. I do not like arguing over obvious things with someone who isn't participating in good faith. Thankfully I have a good team in which it doesn't happen.
