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AI Status United Kingdom Supportive perspective

AI coding help let me return to work after caregiving

Supportive Posted by Helena Ostrowski Reading time ~ 2 min

This is community opinion, not fact. Moderated before publication.

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I stepped out of software engineering for almost four years to care for my mother, and when I tried to come back I found the tooling and frameworks had moved on more than I expected. A friend suggested I try pair-programming with an AI assistant while I ramped back up. I treated it like a patient colleague who knew the new APIs but did not know my codebase. I asked it to explain changes I saw in pull request diffs, and I asked it to draft tests so I could see the shape of what the team expected. I still wrote production code myself, and I flagged to my manager from day one that I was using the assistant as a refresher. Two things mattered. First, my manager did not treat it as cheating, which gave me confidence. Second, the tool was wrong often enough that I had to stay engaged. It is not a replacement for understanding. It is a fast way to surface what I should go read. I see a lot of worry in my industry about junior engineers not learning fundamentals, and I take that seriously. For someone in my situation — mid-career, returning, quietly anxious — these tools made the difference between coming back and not coming back. I hope conversations about AI in the workplace include people who are trying to re-enter, not only people who are trying to enter for the first time.
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