🔶 Coding Agents 抹去了我的身份认同。你们有什么感受？

我一直都是那种很书呆子气、技术钻研很深的程序员——会在业余时间为开源项目贡献代码、阅读论文的那种程序员。

对我来说，编程就像下棋：获胜（也就是交付一个产品）很重要，但前提是这盘棋得由我自己来下。如果对手掉线了，我并不享受获胜；我也不享受击败那些连棋子怎么走都不知道的人；我更不享受借助引擎获胜，而 Coding Agents 本质上就是“借助国际象棋引擎获胜”。

很久以前，在 Copilot 刚推出时，我就开始使用 AI 编程。一开始我很开心：“哇，它可以写那些无聊的样板代码和单元测试。”时间过去了，Agent 变得越来越好，我亲自编写代码的时间越来越少。半年前，我突然意识到自己已经一个多月没有写过任何代码了，而我是一名没有管理工作的全职软件开发者。我不仅不再写代码，Agent 也已经很擅长提出方案和架构；大多数时候，我只是在补充缺失的上下文，以及我们基础设施相关的技术细节。

有一天，我突然被这个认知重重击中。Coding Agents 移除了我热爱的一切，并且——在很大程度上——放大了我讨厌的一切。我的角色变成了从其他人那里收集上下文，再向某个超级聪明的工程师提供详细说明（类似一份写得很好的 Jira 工单），然后审查结果，并在必要时继续补充上下文和说明。所以，基本上，我成了一个经理。

几年前，我可以花几周时间完成一个单独的编程任务。我了解所有类、所有函数，并以舒适的节奏逐步积累信息。如今，我被迫将自己的脑力吞吐量提高好几倍。过去需要几周的事情，现在几个小时就完成了，而我仍然需要理解它们。我总觉得很疲惫，没有足够的脑力容量容纳那么多抽象概念和技术细节。因此，你要么自动接受，要么就在审查数万行代码的过程中精疲力竭。

还有一个缺点是，代码的价值变成了 0。你可以从头开始编写自己的操作系统，人们却会想：“是啊，我一个周末就能用 vibe coding 把这个做出来。”我甚至不知道如今什么才是有价值的。

也许我是个糟糕的员工。提高雇主利润从来不是我的目标。我一直喜欢解谜，而在过去 10 年里，这与雇主提升利润的愿望恰好高度一致。我从来不擅长当经理，也不擅长提出绝妙的想法。我的能力——也是我的热情——在于亲手快速且高质量地解决复杂技术问题。现在，这一切永远消失了。我感到彻底迷失，也失去了动力。我看不到学习任何与计算机科学相关知识、阅读论文、为开源项目贡献代码还有什么价值。我讨厌自己新的“AI 委派者”角色，也讨厌我的工作。

我曾经如此热爱编程（顺便说一句，我用的是 neovim），以至于我确信自己会一直做这件事直到死去；而现在，我不知道该如何继续生活。这是我唯一会做的事，更重要的是，也是我唯一热爱过、或者说曾经热爱过的事。还有人有同样的感受吗？

I always was a nerdy, deeply technical programmer. Contributing-to-open-source-and-reading-papers-in-my-spare-time type of programmer.

Programming is like a game of chess for me: winning (i.e. delivering a product) is important, but only if I played this game myself. I don't enjoy winning if my opponent disconnected. I don't enjoy beating people who don't know how to move pieces. I don't enjoy winning with an engine, and coding agents are basically "winning with a chess engine".

I started to use AI for coding a long time ago, when copilot was first introduced. At first, I was happy: "wow, this can write boring boilerplate and unit tests". Time went by, agents got better, time spent writing code myself went down. Half a year ago I suddenly realized I hadn't written any code for over a month, and I am a full-time software dev without any managing work. Not only did I stop writing code, but agents also became pretty good at proposing plans and architectures, and I was mostly providing missing context and technical details of our infrastructure.

One day the realization hit hard. Coding agents removed everything I loved, and - mostly - amplified everything I hated. My role is to gather context from other humans and provide a detailed explanation (similar to a well-written jira ticket) to some super intelligent engineer, then review the result and provide more context/explanation if needed. So, basically, a manager.

A couple of years ago I could work on a single coding task for weeks. I knew all classes, all functions, I was slowly building up information at a comfortable tempo. Now I am forced to increase my mental throughput multiple times. What took a couple of weeks now takes a couple of hours, and I still need to comprehend that. I always feel tired, I don't have enough mental capacity to hold that many abstractions and technical details. So you either autoaccept or get burned out reviewing tens of thousands of lines.

One more downside is that code has 0 value. You can code your own OS from scratch, and people will think "ye, I can vibe code that in a weekend". I don't even know what is valuable nowadays.

Maybe I am a bad employee. Increasing employer profits was never my goal. I always loved to solve puzzles, and for the last 10 years this was well aligned with my employer's desire to increase profits. I never was good as a manager, or brilliant at generating ideas. My power - and passion - was solving complex technical problems with my hands, fast and with good quality. Now it is gone forever. I feel completely lost and unmotivated. I don't see any value in learning anything related to computer science, reading papers, contributing to open source. I hate my new "AI delegator" role and I hate my work. I loved coding so much (I use neovim btw) that I was sure I would do this until I die, and now I don't know what to do with my life. This is the only thing I know, and, most importantly, the only thing I am/was passionate about. Anyone else feeling the same?