u/WorthCaterpillar6990

I recently moved to a new city and don’t really know anyone here, so I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and go to an open mic tonight organised by a young professionals society. I’ll also be performing.

I vaguely know the organiser from a few text exchanges, but other than that I’m going in completely alone.

Honestly, I’m pretty nervous. It’s my first time walking into a room full of people where everyone probably already knows each other, and I keep overthinking how to actually start conversations without looking awkward or like I’m forcing it.

For people who’ve done this before (especially turning up solo to social events), how do you handle that first 20–30 minutes? Any practical advice for breaking the ice and not just standing there awkwardly?

I’m a recent CS graduate software engineer and I’m honestly struggling with how much the job seems to be changing because of AI tools.

A lot of the team I work with have fully integrated AI into their workflow. They use it for everything: planning features, brainstorming architecture, debugging, code reviews, writing tests, and even finding bugs. Some people have built really advanced workflows around tools like Claude and Codex.

I get that this is where the industry is going, and I’m not anti-AI at all. I use it too. In fact, in my team it almost feels expected that you use Claude as part of your workflow.

But if I’m being honest, I really miss the older style of engineering where you had to sit with a problem, think hard about the logic, architecture, and code, struggle through bugs, and build features end-to-end yourself.

What I miss most is that feeling when a bug has been bothering you for days and then the solution suddenly hits you when you’re doing something random like washing the dishes. That rush of finally understanding what was wrong and how to fix it. It genuinely felt rewarding.

Now I find myself instinctively pasting bugs and features into Claude very quickly, and I’m starting to feel a lot of shame around it. I know that sounds dramatic, but it almost feels like cheating.

I recently shipped a pretty big feature at work and got a lot of praise for it. Objectively it went well. But I felt zero pride in it because so much of it was written by AI. Honestly, I think I probably made more keystrokes writing prompts to Claude than I did writing actual code.

It’s making me question whether I’m actually growing as an engineer or whether I’m slowly becoming a prompt operator.

I also genuinely want to ask:

do software engineers still manually write code much nowadays? In my team it almost feels like you’re expected to use AI, so I’m struggling to work out what “good engineering” even looks like now.

So I wanted to ask people who are further along in the industry:

- What does good engineering actually look like now in the AI era?

- How do you keep growing technically without just becoming a prompt operator?

- Do people still spend time manually solving bugs and building things end-to-end?

Would really appreciate honest perspectives from people working in the field.