Written by u/LuckyStar1122

My day-to-day as a full-time engineer looks nothing like it did as an intern. A small part of that is because I’m on a new team working out of a new timezone, but it is primarily because the tools I use today are lightyears beyond what was available to me in the summer of 2024. 

Two years ago, I was on a Europe-based team, which meant I never got to snooze my alarm. Something about free lunch as an intern made working from home Monday-Thursday a non-starter, so I would wake up and hustle to make it into the office with plenty of time to caffeinate and prepare for my 8:45am daily standup. My whole team working out of Europe also meant back-to-back meetings in the morning followed by four hours of me adding questions to an ever-expanding doc titled “Questions” that I would launch rapid-fire at my extremely patient mentor the second standup ended.

I’m now on a west coast team, which means I can snooze my alarm and workout in the morning on days when I work from home. I work from home more often than not now, and it isn’t because of the weather, or the lunches, or the commute. I work from home because my primary workflow now involves talking out-loud to Codex. 

I used to snoop on incident channels as an intern and couldn’t wait to start up again as a FTE. What I saw when I came back felt a little dystopian. I had a great laugh over people talking to our incident management bot as if it were a human. I grew up watching Spy Kids and Smart House, and that’s exactly what the new incident channels reminded me of. I feel like a huge hypocrite now that I start nearly every morning saying “Hi, can you hear me?” to my computer. 

I thought talking to Codex would be better than typing because I tend to read too quickly and type too slowly, but I think the biggest help is from being able to start from a basically unformed thought. I’ve found that when typing to ChatGPT, I often start with the wrong question and spend way too much time polishing it before sending it off. As an intern, the way I’d seek answers was even worse. I’d transition from regexing Sourcegraph to inspecting git blame before clumsily drafting a message on Slack introducing myself and putting forth my best attempt at articulating what I believed to be the right question. Reflecting on the process now feels like looking at cave paintings.

AI is my teammate in ways I couldn't have even predicted two years ago. I have scheduled “standups” with Codex three times a day: one in the morning to plan my day, one in the afternoon to check my progress and reprioritize, and one in the evening to review what I've accomplished and where I'm still blocked. One of the hardest things for me to adjust to as a full-time engineer has been context switching. I took for granted being able to focus deeply on a single project throughout the entirety of my internship.

I’ve recently been able to offload a ton of that context switching to AI by keeping a running dialog throughout the day. It is so easy to stop mid-sentence and say “Oh, my Airflow PR got approved” or “my manager just responded and he said we should try ABC before resorting to XYZ” and then carry on with the rest of my sentence while my execution tracker and project logs get quietly updated in the background.

While having AI help me manage my workload is helpful, I try to put limits on what I let it do in terms of implementation. One of the best pieces of advice I received when I returned to Reddit as a full-time engineer focused on early-career AI use. It was suggested that, when starting a coding task I'd never done before, I implement the full feature on my own before setting AI loose on the same task on a fresh branch. I could then ask it to compare and contrast the two branches, explaining tradeoffs and design choices along the way.

This approach helped me learn faster than I thought possible over the course of my first six months at the company, and it kept me from falling into the trap of shipping AI slop I didn't understand. Comparing my own implementation against AI's forced me to think about why I'd made certain decisions, what alternatives I'd overlooked, and whether the code I was writing was actually good. 

I’ve found that using AI this way makes room for more interesting conversations with my teammates. As an intern, I’d wait desperately for one-on-ones to unleash all of my pent-up questions, and it sometimes felt more like taking than connecting. I think that’s expected for an intern, but as a FTE it is nice to have some of the technical burden lifted to make room for conversations ranging from professional growth to things that have nothing at all to do with engineering.

At the end of my day, after one last check-in with Codex to figure out where to pick things up tomorrow, I try to be done with work by 6pm so I have time to do something recharging. Now that it's getting colder, I've been reading or doing crafts after work. I just finished The Silent Patient, and now I'm reading Gone Girl, with The Martian next in the queue.

I really appreciate that Reddit supports a good work-life balance. I somehow love working here even more than I did when I first started, and I feel super grateful for the people and tools that have helped me grow. It has honestly been an insane time to enter the workforce. 

Two years ago, I was spending my afternoons GitHub stalking and stockpiling questions for my mentor. Now, I spend my mornings talking to my computer and my afternoons having actual conversations with my coworkers. I hope that two years from now I have a truly dystopian workflow where I don’t even have to speak out loud and can offload tasks to my cat, Domino (pictured below).