r/developers • u/Nearby_Sky_6098 • 14h ago
Opinions & Discussions Title: Is AI making mid level developers do more testing and grunt work instead of actual development?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how AI is changing my day-to-day work as a senior engineer.
On paper, AI is supposed to make development faster. And yes, it can generate code quickly, especially when working with an unfamiliar or large codebase. But in practice, I feel like I’m spending less time actually writing and designing software, and more time doing grunt work around AI-generated code.
My workflow increasingly looks like this:
- Figure out what needs to be done
- Explain the requirements to AI
- Review the generated code
- Fix the parts AI misunderstood
- Review it again
- Test edge cases manually
- Verify integrations
- Deal with production issues if something was missed
- Then become even more cautious with the next AI-generated change
The biggest issue is trust. After fixing so many bugs or production issues, I simply can't trust it. As a senior engineer, the responsibility is still mine if something goes wrong.
So instead of AI completely reducing my workload, it sometimes feels like my job has shifted from writing code to constantly reviewing, validating, testing, and correcting code generated by AI.
Ironically, I feel like I'm doing more testing and verification than actual development now.
Is anyone else experiencing this?
Do you think this is just the current phase of AI-assisted development, where we still need heavy human validation? Or is the future role of a senior engineer increasingly becoming someone who manages AI-generated code and acts as the final quality gate?
Curious how other experienced developers are handling this.