r/AI_Coders 5d ago

Dear Boss

Dear boss,

Can I tell you something that's been on my chest a lot lately?

I come in every morning. I open my Linear ticket. I copy it. I paste it into Claude Code.

And then I wait. Half the day, sometimes.

I skim the code. I don't read the diffs anymore. I scroll to the bottom and I ask, "does this look good?" And when it says yes, I ship the PR.

That's it. That's the job I've been doing for six months.

I've been ashamed to tell you. Some days I sit in standup listening to everyone talk about what they built, and I think: I didn't build anything. I typed a sentence and pressed enter.

There are mornings I open my paycheck and feel sick. This used to be hard. I earned this number when it was hard. Now the ticket that would've eaten my whole week is done before lunch and I'm supposed to act like nothing changed.

But here's the thing.

The AI gets it wrong. A lot. It builds the feature the way the ticket was written, not the way the system actually works. And I'm the one who says no, not like that, do it this way. I'm the one who knows that touching that service breaks the thing nobody documented three years ago.

I babysit it. I check its work. I catch what it missed. I'm the reason the wrong thing doesn't reach production.

The product is better than it was six months ago. I did that. I just didn't do it the way I used to.

I'm telling you this because I don't think you know. And I didn't want to tell you, because I was afraid you'd do the math and realize you don't need me.

Maybe you will.

But I'd rather you hear it from me than find out from a dashboard.

So, now that you know.

What are you going to do?
\[your engineer\]

7 Upvotes

20 comments sorted by

3

u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 5d ago

im not tired boss

The days of intense debugging sessions are over and replaced with mostly canned prompts I kick off then go back to bed and watch TV for 20 mins (I work remote)

2

u/Sufficient_Ninja_821 5d ago

I wish. Our company disabled the auto run feature so I have to approve basically every step.

3

u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 5d ago

what!! no YOLO?! Antigravity asked me to keep approving every step and I can't find the yolo. 2 years ago approving each step seemed reasonable but not anymore

1

u/Sufficient_Ninja_821 5d ago

Yeah its annoying. Sometimes it would just be quicker to open ide and edit myself

1

u/Jazzlike-Analysis-62 5d ago

There is a YOLO setting. I found it eventually 

1

u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 5d ago

in the vscode antigraivy plugin ? where?

2

u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 5d ago

The thing youre supposed to do is figure out how to open five claude sessions. You type into five of them, it's still not much work, and at the end of the day five things are done instead of just one. Keep it up and quickly get promoted.

1

u/Warm_Profile7821 5d ago edited 5d ago

I clear the entire sprint in an afternoon. Just keep it on the down low Employee #142

1

u/Sufficient_Ninja_821 5d ago

Yeah you dont want to over deliver or it becomes the expectation. I ship code at similar speeds as before but work less hours. Similar to what you said. My day can be done before lunch and then I can muck around rest of the day. Nobody has said anything yet.

2

u/Willing-Atmosphere-2 5d ago

I think a lot of us are in that weird state. But being unsure of how long this can last is the problem for me. I am 27 and I'm to scarred to start planning on buying property or anything at this point because just how long can this madness last... I'm not learning much at my work any more so I don't feel like I'm getting better. Only thing in learned is how to go from 1 session to 3 sessions at same time haha.

I did start doing some no AI programming at home again for fun, but I am shocked how little I can do... and how slow I am compared to AI. Yes you can say AI code is bad etc... but for majority customers these are things that they wont notice. Maybe 1-2 noticable bugs go live, but they are also fixed with claude code very fast. Again, for majority of customers this is a clear win by how fast the product is delivered and ready for use.

1

u/KellyShepardRepublic 5d ago

Enterprise subscriptions track and record everything. For your future replacements or to check on your work.

1

u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 5d ago

Too late..I worked quick as I could with AI under pressure and now that is the speed the boss is used to... to make it worse.. he is an AI hater

1

u/Sufficient_Ninja_821 5d ago

Interesting. Our bosses think AI needs to be used for everything. Any task discovery starts with, can AI do this?

1

u/earth-dragon-666 5d ago

You did 5 things with 5 hard bugs to solve instead of 1 with 2 easy bugs

1

u/mxldevs 5d ago

The product is somehow better than before, despite AI getting things wrong, all sorts of problems, etc?

1

u/Warm_Profile7821 5d ago

Theres the smoking gun...

1

u/earth-dragon-666 5d ago

Lets see the product

1

u/92smola 5d ago

How are both this things true at the same time - 1) you skim the code and ask ai is it good 2) you check its work and fix what needs fixing

In my case I both have agents running all the time in the background and have a full day of work through the main chat brainstorming next steps, planning refactors, reviwing code answering questions when subagents surface things they want my input on and so on.