This quote from Frieren summarizes why you should not use AI as a software Engineer.

I am a couple months away from finishing my Software Engineering degree, and honestly, things are not looking great for us new comers to the job market right now. And the main reason is not that AI is going to replace software engineers, because that’s obviously not true, but it is that companies believe so.

Being a junior was already complicated in the pre-AI era: convincing companies to even consider giving you a chance at interviewing, trying to pick your niche from all the languages and frameworks that exist in order to become an expert at one of them, impostor syndrome and feeling you don’t have what it takes. But now with AI, I feel like I am entering a battle that I already lost. Companies just do not want juniors anymore. I am pretty sure my CV gets discarded the moment HR sees I don’t have the necessary number of years of experience they want (their loss lol).

As a junior, I try to use AI as a way to retrieve information fast and nothing more. I know this might be a controversial take, but for me it’s like a search engine which shows you the answer to exactly what you are looking for. Agentic coding was never really my thing. You lose the hand of what’s actually happening in your code base after a couple of prompts. Agents are too confident and too stupid, and it just kills the fun. Let me dive into the analogy I want to make so I can convey what I want to convey from this post:

In “Sousou no Frieren”, Frieren devotes much of her time to collecting and mastering spells. In one episode, mages compete in an exam whose prize grants the winner access to virtually any spell they desire. One of the competitors named Denken clearly says that he is not interested in the reward because:

The fun of magic lies in searching for it.

This beautifully formulates why people should do what they do. I do not program because I want to “solve a problem” or to “build solutions from the ground up”, but because I actually enjoy doing it. And I genuinely think people who enjoy their craft are the ones who end up contributing to it the most. Companies who view you as a tool will never understand that unfortunately. For them, AI is a cheaper tool that does the job faster and better than this other tool they have been using, you.