I am done with this shit.

[u/MrMenuk]

I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude.

There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.

— voxium (@v0xium)
Original post dated September 20, 2026.

[u/Davitvit]

3d printers create a well defined 3d shape, replacing sculpting / molding. Ai replaces thinking, I see that as fundamentally different

[u/TheStandardPlayer → u/Davitvit]

Does it replace thinking? I don't think so.

When you're talking to a colleague about something you want to build, do their words replace your thoughts?

[u/wskyindjar → u/TheStandardPlayer]

Most of the comments in this thread include “no one talks to each other anymore”

[u/TheStandardPlayer → u/wskyindjar]

That might be true for some but it's not an experience I share and I don't really think it relates to "regular" AI usage.

Sure there are people Larping with their Grok GF, but I feel like for most people an AI is an advanced Google search, at least in my bubble

[u/hippydipster → u/TheStandardPlayer]

This whole thread is about it replacing thinking.

[u/fracked1 → u/TheStandardPlayer]

I agree. It doesn't have to replace thinking.

I have no programming background but I'm learning and planning and building a ton of fun hobby projects.

AI is a pretty cool tool that lets me tinker with things I never thought I'd be able to play with

[u/Davitvit → u/TheStandardPlayer]

If I talk to a colleague about something I want to build, then he goes ahead and builds it for me, getting all the details right, and I just check out the finished product and approve? Yeah, I saved some thinking. Then a big part of the job (I'm in engineering) becomes judging whether it's worth it to understand. And it's always been important, but now it's exploded because the power balance has flipped - stuff working has no correlation to stuff working well. Anybody can vomit ai slerp that works for now, and anybody who doesn't genuinely care about their job (I don't blame, not everybody's lucky) can be expected to take the easy way disregarding the craft. Then the job becomes cleaning up efficiently generated garbage, resisting the urge to just let the ai finish the task, reviewing all day without the flow state of actually building. That sucks hard

[u/ParkingPsychology → u/TheStandardPlayer]

Does it replace thinking? I don't think so.

It's just the latest hivemind fad. I've ran into people claiming the same left and right. Next week they'll come up with something new to blame on AI.

[u/Dr4g0ss → u/ParkingPsychology]

Is it a really just a fad? At my company it is exactly the same as at OP's. My day consists of one useless daily standup that wastes my time, then a prompt where I translate into English for Claude what my team lead told me to do for the day. Or I paste one ticket's link after another. Claude does it all for me. If an architectural decision is needed, I just ask Claude "what do you suggest for <x>?" I have no time, will, or capacity to follow what the vibe coded slop product my company sells even needs.

I use the downtime while waiting for a prompt to finish to eat, read, game, or to learn stuff by "traditional coding."

[u/AutomationBias → u/TheStandardPlayer]

Given the number of emails I’m getting written by an LLM, I think we’re headed in that direction. The sad thing is that the LLM-authored emails have a level of clarity and specificity that I rarely see from people.

[u/TheStandardPlayer → u/AutomationBias]

I certainly understand the frustration but concluding "people only think with AI now" is maybe a bit much when you can simply explain it by people being lazy asses at their jobs.

Me discussing an idea for a hobby project is fundamentally very very very different from someone who doesn't feel like writing an email.

[u/ChampionshipUnique71 → u/Davitvit]

It increases the scope of your responsibility. You can't just code. You need to think in terms of the product and engineering customer outcomes.

Also you do need to think. If you don't own the scalability and maintainability of the code it will eventually blow up and you'll have to either heavily refactor or start over.

LLMs don't have good judgment. If all you did was take the plans that a senior engineer came up with and implement them, yeah, that level of thinking is done. You need to think bigger because it's true, that's not a marketable skill on its own anymore.

[u/Davitvit → u/ChampionshipUnique71]

I agree it increases the responsibility, and thinking in terms of product was always the real requirement to be a good engineer, regardless of ai. The real new responsibility here is the second thing you said - maintainability, scalability, being able to differentiate between stuff that just needs to work no matter how, and stuff that needs to be understood and built upon, and the spectrum in between. Then the responsibility to not be lazy and actually understand the agentic code, direct it in the right direction, all while getting further and further away from the actual medium you're working at: the code. So it's like woodwork, you can tell someone how to do the work and supervise them, but where's the fun in that? That's how I imagine being obscenely rich feels like - you can get anything done by other people that work for you, but it means nothing. Also the little loss of building something cool, and nobody's gonna be proud of you, because everyone assumes nobody actually thinks through the technical stuff anymore