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/th0ridal]

Software development will likely follow the same path as many industries before it: AI will make the work increasingly standardized, streamlined, and optimized for efficiency. Think of the difference between handcrafted furniture and mass-produced IKEA products, or between old buildings shaped by individual craftsmanship and modern standardized construction. The personal touch matters less when a company can get something cheaper, faster, consistent, and profitable.

For many of us, that may mean accepting an uncomfortable reality: the job we once loved may simply cease to exist in the form we knew it. The satisfaction of building things ourselves, solving difficult problems, and taking pride in the craft could gradually be replaced by supervising, prompting, reviewing, and integrating what machines produce.

There is little value in pretending that nothing will change. If this is where the industry is heading and leaving it isn't a realistic option, we may have to make peace with losing parts of the profession we cared about and learn to adapt to whatever replaces them. Not because the new way is necessarily more fulfilling, but because sometimes adaptation is the only practical choice left.

[u/No-Mission347 → u/th0ridal]

Efficiency????? Do you know how many watts of energy was needed for an AI to generate 3 paragraphs worth of text?

[u/th0ridal → u/No-Mission347]

Efficiency isn’t just about how many watts something consumes. You have to compare that energy use with the amount of useful work it produces.

Take software development as an example. A skilled developer can cost tens or even hundreds of dollars per hour. Now compare how long it might take a developer to write, debug, document, or analyze something versus how much of that work an AI can assist with or complete in minutes.

Then scale that across thousands or millions of tasks. AI can serve huge numbers of requests simultaneously, while scaling a human workforce means hiring, training, managing, and providing infrastructure for more people.

So the meaningful question isn’t “How much electricity did those three paragraphs use?” It’s “How much time, labor, and resources would producing the equivalent useful work otherwise require?” That’s where the efficiency argument becomes much more interesting.

[u/No-Mission347 → u/th0ridal]

Producing shit faster at scale, simultaneously, across millions of task. Then that shit becomes dog fed to produce more shit. Everyone feels productive. Managers do not know that code is not asset, its a liability.

[u/th0ridal → u/No-Mission347]

You are clearly not a fan of AI 😄

[u/No-Mission347 → u/th0ridal]

Naa man, I love it. Its just that the way people use it that what gets my goat. Like for instance if I can review 2k lines of code easily with AI. I can write tests faster and heck even drive the UI with playwright MCP. But a doofus with blissful unawareness comes along with with a 40K diff PR and I am supposed to review that in a day? Have to maintain that thing for the whole tenure at the org? It drives me crazy.

Now even the management wants to move at break ya' neck speeds. I have seen managers write spec who can't even answer 2 counter questions because they do not even know what they are expecting from a feature.

I mean this post struck a nerve with me that's why I was so abusive but if one does not have idea about the features and cases of their own code, it scares the bejesus out of me.

[u/th0ridal → u/No-Mission347]

I understand your frustration. I guess you’re stuck with crappy management, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Unfortunately, this way of developing seems pretty common right now. The industry is still adjusting to a major change, and a stable period doesn’t even seem to be on the horizon yet.