Shadowing Practice: ai killed software engineering - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Hey, I know you read the title, you probably think, wow, another guy on YouTube with the AI psychosis.

You're right, wait, no, you're wrong.

I've had the psychosis before and luckily I've overcame it.

This includes all kinds of writing with AI, vibe coding, creating videos.

And, you know, I spend still $3,000 a month on tokens at work.

And I've been a software engineer for five years now.

So I kind of have a view of what it looks like before AI and after AI.

So that's kind of some credentials of why you should still watch the video.

But I wanted to talk about one thing, and that's how AI has killed the joy of software engineering.

Let's get her going.

So a day before and after AI hasn't really changed too many things besides one thing, and that is the amount of code you're reviewing.

And I'll explain why.

So before you spent most of your time coding and working on the implementation yourself, and let's say it was like four out of the eight hours of the day,

you would have a good idea of what you're already implementing.

You would do a quick review of the code if you're submitting it to teammates so they can review.

And then once you do that, it's up to your teammates to then review and approve the change.

And then you get into production.

Now you're spending your time just talking to agents, going through the implementation, hopefully putting in good business context of why you're making a change

and then it's off to the agent to determine what to implement you might review

that and then it's it makes all the changes for you

but you're pretty much hands off between that initial step and

when it finishes and you know during

that time it's hard to just work on one thing right

because an agent might work for 15 to 30 minutes

so you can basically do nothing for that time

or you can try and fill

that in with you know another agent working on something else

which leads into something we'll talk about more at the end of the video.

But code review is still very important in the process because agents are good.

I would say like 80 to 85% of the time, but there's still that 20 to 15% of the work that needs to be adjusted

just to follow best practices or fix bugs that were missed.

And, you know, it's important you do this because you don't want these defects to land up in the user's hands.

So you try and catch these things before you ship this code to production.

But the issue is now

that you're further away from the actual implementation of what the

agent's doing It takes a ton more time to get up to speed on what changes it made

And then go in and actually review that

that code like you should be doing So

if you're actually being a good boy

and you review All of the code it creates which you should be doing because you know,

it's not perfect Then you're spending the majority of your day reviewing this agent output But it's also kind of annoying,

too, because you're looking for just these minor things that's wrong with the agent, like you would be doing if you were reviewing another person's change they were trying to make.

But except now you're just doing that way more.

So it's probably like you're doing double the amount of code review because you're reviewing your own code a lot more now.

And then now you still have to review teammates code.

Code review, I thought, and still is, is one of the worst parts of the job.

It's very tedious and it's still very important to get a good understanding of how your systems work,

but the joy of software engineering was around writing the code, not reviewing the code.

You don't get that same dopamine hit

when you finish reviewing the code with an AI agent compared to when you implemented that feature yourself.

Now, this is just a basic overview of what I think has changed, but there's a lot more smaller stuff that I will touch on that has also led to the joy decreasing.

The next thing I want to talk about is that I've never felt more tired after finishing working than I do now.

There's just an insane amount of drain on your brain after a full day of work

because I'm essentially running multiple agents at a time.

And these agents could be across multiple repositories.

So a repository is just where you put code, but the pieces, the chunks of code could be on totally separate parts of the business.

So you have to keep switching back and forth between these agents and the context that you're working in is totally different.

And there's been a lot of studies that show context switching is not good for productivity.

And I have some thoughts on that.

I feel like we are getting net gains from agents, But I don't think there's been any good studies that have came out and said, yes, we are getting efficiency gains.

But kind of a tangent, just flipping back and forth between these agents just takes a lot out of you

because you have to remember what you're working on and why.

And that's one of the key differences before and after, because before you would just be focused on one feature.

You would get it done and then you would basically ship it off.

Now you're I mean, you don't have to be, but most people are working on multiple things at the same time.

So there's just a ton of context switching.

and now you're personally context switching a lot

but now imagine this your teammates are shipping more and more features

and you have to code review all this stuff

so just imagine all of that context switching you have going on now

because there's so many various things that you're working on

and what i've noticed now is

that people don't even review their code they'll have the agent

implement the code based on what they initially said they'll give it a quick glance be like okay yeah

that looks good then they'll create you know the the change request

and they'll leave it up to the person reviewing the code to actually try

and find stuff

or the person reviewing your merge request is just like yeah it looks good to me approves it

and then you just ship it it's honestly insane but

it just takes so much time to go through all this code

that you know people have to get stuff done themselves i'm

not saying we shouldn't review code like i still review all of the code

that comes through it's just like insane

because you have to be locked in for a full day

to get through all this kind of stuff you need to

get to i also want to touch on another thing kind of related

so as you know you care less about the code you

review less code you review less your teammates code you're going to lose understanding of your systems

and then you're basically in the ai psychosis where it's up to the ai to define implementation

and architecture and all that kind of stuff

and you're just kind of backseating

and letting it do whatever it's just going to be a terrible model because you're going to lose all your domain knowledge.

And at some point, you're going to be completely useless.

So you need to stay in the driver's seat and actually figure out what's going on, have a good understanding of your system so you can design them properly for the future.

I feel like I would be doing the industry a disservice if I didn't bring this up.

And that is AI slop.

And I'm not even talking about coding because, you know, that's an issue too with people vibe coding.

You know, within companies, obviously you can vibe code a random project

and it's totally fine because you're not shipping this to users.

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So the quality doesn't have to be that great.

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But I'm just talking about people, you know, shitting out documents about features we should implement

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that was all written with AI with not even like a thought behind

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that or people sending messages to you or in a Slack channel that have just been written by an LLM.

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So they just send this extremely long blob of text.

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And I'm like, bro, I'm not reading any of that shit.

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It's just so annoying.

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and I don't know.

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What I was saying at the beginning, I did have this psychosis where I thought, okay, you know, it would be cool

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if I could hook up Slack to an agent

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and then it could send messages to people and maybe they could have an agent that talks to my agent.

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And I'm like, bro, at this point, what are we even doing?

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Like how would their agent have more knowledge than what my agent has?

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Because all of that context should already be available.

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And I was like, you know, this ain't it.

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And then one more thing back on the code changes, people should still be writing their commits and their descriptions for their changes

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because that actually forces them to have a good understanding of what's being changed

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and then people still read the description of changes so you don't want someone reading just a huge blob of text, like a huge change log of, you know, what changes were made.

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They don't care about that.

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They care about why the changes were made.

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So you don't want to just put this huge burden on

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people to just figure out why the changes were made looking at the code.

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That should be in the description.

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Another thing that has reduced the joy of the job is just the executives at companies.

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They hear about all these things at other companies, you know, they might write a blog or a YouTube video or something like that about how they did something with AI.

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And then every executive thinks they need to do the same thing.

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When in reality, most of these executives have no clue anything about AI.

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And they're literally just being sheep, trying to figure out, you know, they're seeing all these efficiency gains or whatever that other companies are reporting with AI.

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And they're like, oh, wow, we need to do this.

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So they're like, you know, everything needs to be done with AI, crazy psychosis coming down from leadership and

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that just gets reflected down the entire chain

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and then it gets down to the devs

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and the devs are you know ai is pretty solid i think everyone will admit

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that but like using it for everything is just annoying

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and like the executives don't understand that there's still some other elements

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that shouldn't be used for ai but i feel like that's another thing

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that just causes a lot of burnout is just the executives not understanding

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and give and giving devs like the free will to do whatever they want.

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Like they understand that these tools are good so they'll use them for that

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but you don't need to like mandate stuff and force people to use whatever.

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And obviously this will vary a lot by company

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but it's I think it's pretty common from what I've seen online

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that a lot of the companies are doing this now

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which is unfortunate and it's kind of wild because they're spending

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so much on tokens and I don't think anyone's actually like seen the efficiency gains yet, or at least reported that.

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No studies or no companies have come out and said that.

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And I think the next wave is going to be a huge token budget across all companies.

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It's going to be wild.

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I know Uber already came out with that, but that's going to be the next thing because I'm spending $3,000 a month on tokens, which I would say is a lot.

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But if everyone at your company is doing that, that's a lot of money to be spending on that, especially when you can't prove out the efficiency gains.

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So I feel like every company will have to take a second look at that.

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And all the mandates coming down, all that stuff, they'll probably just end up with token budgets.

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And that'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

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Another thing related to executives is just the amount of pressure they've put on people now with AI.

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You know, they hear all this stuff in the industry about how it's so good and you get all these gains.

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so then they're like okay we either don't need as many people

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or we just we're gonna ship way more features

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so then anytime you push back on like a project saying

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we need more time on this they're basically like oh don't

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you have ai like you can easily get this done

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and it's the same thing when you're like down a man on your team

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and you're trying to get another person they're like oh can't you just make up for

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that person's workload with ai it's like come on insane But yeah, back to my previous point about people not reviewing code,

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it's kind of hard when you have this pressure down from leadership about, oh, we want to launch these 10 features this quarter, however they're saying it.

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And then actually taking the time to understand what is changing, because you have to keep iterating on stuff and getting these features out to hit these deadlines.

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So you don't have as much time to actually take a deep look at the code.

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and eventually people will get destroyed from this because they're just offloading everything to the AI so they're just kind of cooked.

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Another interesting thing related to that point is

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what I've noticed is there's only so much to build for like an industry or domain or company

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and ideas are expensive now, like good ideas.

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So it's almost like yes you can implement so much faster now

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and i don't think anyone really disagrees with that

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but the end of the day you actually need to have good product vision

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and have a good idea that you're implementing

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like so many companies are just trying to layer ai onto their entire business

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but it's like okay first off the trust for ai is going way down right now

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and then does ai actually make sense for your use case

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you know it might make sense for like 10 of the use cases

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but they're throwing ai literally onto everything and it's like users don't want

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that so why are we implementing a feature

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that people will not use you know back to the psychosis

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all good i feel like we have to touch on the software engineering community too

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and honestly it's just a clown show first off i think it's

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because anyone that has a normal take on social media is not going to get any views

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so So you kind of have to be on like one of the sides and be polar.

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But I don't know, man.

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There's the side where it's like, okay, AI is trash.

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It's not useful at all.

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And there's a side of like, oh, everyone's cooked.

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AI is so good.

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Like AGI is coming.

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And I don't know, man.

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I don't know how they just can't realize that, you know, these tools are useful, but they're not like taking anyone's job yet.

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It's just kind of unfortunate.

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I feel like that leads to devs just being annoyed at AI because anywhere you go, it's like one side or the other.

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you go on social media

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and it's people posting like oh my god this is the

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most insane workflow like you're never gonna need to code anymore

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all this kind of stuff like oh here's a new model

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that dropped like your job's cooked it's just I don't know it's not very good like I wish people

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that had real takes actually you know got the visibility for

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that because I don't know it just also leads to the draining of being a dev hearing this all day

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and then you got the executives seeing this shit on social media

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and they're like oh why are we not doing x we're

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doing y like we should do x you know what i

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mean it's just not it i will say one thing

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that has remained the joy is

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if at work you can find a product you like working on

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because if you like what you're building

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and you can build towards what users want i feel like

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it's that's the satisfaction i see in ai now since you can build so much faster.

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The satisfaction is no longer in writing the code.

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It's just satisfying users and building, you know, a product that users love, building new features that they'll actually use.

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And, you know, it's getting ridiculously tough to build anything useful because there's just so much stuff out there.

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And what I mean by that is like building, you know, a SaaS tool that will scale, which is why I've been, you know, focusing on personal tools lately.

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There's some stuff that I would want.

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I can tailor that to how I would use it.

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And I don't need to adapt my, you know, thinking to some platform someone created or some tool someone created,

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which I might make a video on next explaining some of the stuff I've been working on.

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But yeah, I feel like that's where most of the joy is going to come from.

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And the unfortunate thing is I feel like most people work for companies

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and products that they don't really care about and not blaming anyone, but most devs I feel like just work to collect a paycheck, which is totally fine.

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I wouldn't say I'm not that either, but yeah, it's just kind of unfortunate.

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But let me know what you guys think.

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Are you still having joy in software engineering?

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I think I kind of am, but a lot of it has been decaying.

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And with all that said, it's still one of the best jobs out there that pays in saying, I personally get to work from home.

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I don't know, solid work hours, so you can't complain.

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I'm just one of the things I've noticed as AI has progressed over the last couple of years.

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And lastly, I would advise getting familiar with these power tools, just in case your job gets taken by AI.

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Peace.

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150 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “ai killed software engineering”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: code, agent, review. This video has 230 sentences and 3160 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:52. The speaker talks fast, about 199 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 88% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
implement verb	/ˈɪmpləmənt/	To bring about; to put into practice; to carry out.
psychosis noun	/saɪˈkoʊsɪs/	A severe mental disorder, sometimes with physical damage to the brain, marked by a deranged personality and a distorted view of reality.
dev noun		A monster, dragon, serpent, or giant.
token noun	/ˈtoʊkən/	Something serving as an expression of something else.
teammate noun	/ˈtiːmˌmeɪt/	One who is on the same team.
annoy verb	/əˈnoɪ̯/	To disturb or irritate, especially by continued or repeated acts; to bother with unpleasant deeds.
unfortunate adjective	/ʌnˈfɔː.t͡ʃə.nɪt/	Not favored by fortune.
vibe noun	/vaɪb/	An atmosphere or aura felt to belong to a person, place or thing.
blob noun	/blɑb/	A shapeless or amorphous mass; a vague shape or amount, especially of a liquid or semisolid substance; a clump, group or collection that lacks definite shape.
repository noun	/ɹɪˈpɒz.ɪ.t(ə.)ɹɪ/	A location for storage, often for safety or preservation.
mandate noun	/ˈmændeɪ̯t/	An official or authoritative command; an order or injunction; a commission; a judicial precept; an authorization.
drain noun	/dɹiːn/	A conduit allowing liquid to flow out of an otherwise contained volume; a plughole (UK)
approve verb	/əˈpɹuːv/	To officially sanction; to ratify; to confirm; to set as satisfactory.
satisfaction noun	/sætɪsˈfækʃən/	A fulfilment of a need or desire.
backseat verb		To act in the manner of a back-seat driver or a back-seat gamer.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
come out verb	/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/	To be discovered; to be revealed.
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.
come down verb		To descend, fall down, collapse.
come out with verb		To say (something) unexpectedly.
come through verb		To come into a room or other space through a door or passageway.
get down to verb		To start focusing on doing something serious
get through verb	/ɡɛt ˈθɹu/	To overcome; to endure.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

You're right, wait, no, you're wrong.
There's some stuff that I would want.
Are you still having joy in software engineering?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	I've been working · has been decaying
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've had · I've been · has killed
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	be adjusted · were missed · be locked
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	scale, which is · paycheck, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 116 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, credential /kɹɪˈdɛnʃəl/, sheep /ˈʃiːp/
Long words — get the stress right: unfortunate /ʌnˈfɔː.t͡ʃə.nɪt/, repository /ɹɪˈpɒz.ɪ.t(ə.)ɹɪ/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, ridiculously /ɹɪˈdɪk.jə.ləs.li/, visibility /ˌvɪz.əˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like implement, psychosis, dev.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: ai killed software engineering - Learn English Speaking with Video

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