AI Writes the Code, You Clean Up the Mess: Software Engineering’s New Normal

Adam Henson -

If there’s one clear thread running through the current crop of software engineering blog posts, it’s a paradoxical sense of exhilarating progress undercut by escalating complexity and cost. We’re cresting a wave where AI’s promise to do our jobs for us has come true—sort of—yet engineers are paying the price in invisible toil, risk, and cognitive load. Tech optimism abounds, but only for those who read the fine print between the lines of toolchains, prompt engineering, and unchecked feature creep.

AI Is Not a Free Lunch—It's a Prepaid Banquet

For all the hoopla around AI “writing almost all code,” the real world cost is seeping in: as The New Stack emphasizes, every AI-powered enhancement comes with burdens: new dependencies, hidden technical debt, convoluted reliability requirements, and a nonstop stream of maintenance. Infrastructure gets bloated, troubleshooting becomes probabilistic, and even on-call rotations are bent out of shape. The engineer’s workload doesn’t get lighter; it just shifts into new, oft-unrewarding territory. AI on the roadmap sounds strategic—until it’s the engineers holding up the entire architecture with a cocktail of duct tape and dashboards.

Meta’s approach to compliance and testing, as explained in InfoQ, cleverly leverages LLMs to generate more contextually relevant mutation tests, cutting through the computational waste of traditional mutation testing. Still, the process is neither set-and-forget nor foolproof; significant engineering effort goes into making these tests useful, filtering out redundancies, and integrating with human workflows. The road to reliable, scalable AI-fueled compliance isn't frictionless.

A Prompt Alone Is Not a System

The belief that “just add AI” takes your MVP to the next plateau is being reassessed, especially as agentic workflows become the new hotness. The pragmatic engineer is now discovering—sometimes the hard way—that LLMs excel when we break tasks into explicit, narrowly defined steps, not when we toss in a bucket of vague, multi-goal prompts. Atlassian’s hands-on Rovo Dev workflow highlights this: multi-stage, incremental prompting leads to cleaner code diffs, easier code reviews, and far fewer hallucinated abstractions. This is less “let the robots do it” and more “pair with an oddly eager, sometimes unreliable, junior developer.”

Furthermore, The New Stack draws a line between demo-friendly agents and true production scale. Relying on LLMs as universal adapters—expecting them to glue together disparate APIs without a shared semantic layer—quickly leads to brittle, unmaintainable “glue code.” Real-world production requires governed architectures: semantic domain layers, orchestration, and explicit governance, turning agents into governed co-workers rather than unpredictable interns.

The Smartphone: Your New Terminal?

While enterprise-scale headaches abound, individual developers are discovering new freedom with mobile AI tools. Gergely Orosz’s account in The Pragmatic Engineer, echoed by the DIY guide Doom Coding, describes a new breed of “doom coding”: writing, testing, and shipping meaningful software from a phone while on the move. Thanks to mobile extensions of tools like Claude Code, plus SSH and VPN magic, the developer untethers not just from their office, but from their computer altogether. It’s nomadism with a high-speed AI copilot in your pocket—at least for greenfield projects and low-risk workflows. But as several voices note, quality review and strong engineering discipline remain essential.

The Good, The Bad, and The Uncannily Productive

Is it really the end of coding as we know it? In short: not, yet—though we are approaching a world where typing is optional and code review is king. According to Pragmatic Engineer, expertise in reading, designing, and integrating software becomes ever more valuable, while rote implementation and language polyglottery lose their luster. Product managers and engineers are converging: with sufficiently powerful AI assistants, generating prototypes or even production-ready features is no longer a bottleneck. The arms race shifts from knowing how to code, to knowing what should be coded, and how to rigorously validate it.

The downside? As AI generates more code, teams must be vigilant about bloated, duplicated, or insecure artifacts sneaking in, especially without good practices around testing and review. Work-life boundaries blur; the productivity incentive runs headlong into the wall of operational drag. And when the AI gets things wrong (subtle bugs, hallucinated business logic), it’s the engineer’s weekend on the line.

Adapting to the (Agentic) New Normals

VS Code and similar development environments are rapidly morphing into agentic, AI-centric platforms. Dedicated tools for prompt engineering, test generation, and deploying AI agents in production are proliferating. Meanwhile, practical tips—like committing your code before invoking an AI assistant—remind us that fundamental practices are more relevant than ever. If “AI everywhere” is the new baseline, only resilient, skeptical, and rigorously process-driven teams will thrive. The others will become case studies in what not to automate without oversight.

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