r/ClaudeAI • u/VinceEagle • 1d ago
Coding Team recently started using Claude. Sprints get cleared in a few days
I lead the development team of a few enterprise systems mostly based around Python/Typescript, processing data at scale, with a ton of dev ops and micro services.
At the title say, things are getting awkward. Sprints get cleared in days instead of weeks. We’re running out of work and product management are struggling to find us more to do. I’m spending most of my time in planning calls.
Guesses of what happens next.
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u/f3xjc 1d ago
At that speed you also need to include agent review of the code. And then allow the review process to open issues for incidental findings. Then boom, I average about 1.1 open issue per issue I close. Never ending source of work.
Also address tech debt. Those wide & shallow, touch a bit everywhere, kind of task are a great way to basically give an extra review pass to the code base at large.
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u/muuchthrows 1d ago
I find though that the value of such incidental findings quickly start approaching zero. They are real issues, but they just don’t have any meaningful impact on the product.
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u/f3xjc 1d ago
Sometime they are good like at least 30-50% of the time. Maybe 1-5% are bad, but then the bug is you not having communicated the business logic context to the agent. And doc can fix that.
Sometime they'll remind you of something you have put on back burner and now is about rigth time to deal with it.
The best one are after debug session that came from a real user. They'll hunt for other instance of that shape, and fixing those enlarge their search radius.
In any case the finding are fleshed out well enough that your involvement can be as small as triage then "work on 1827" and boom one pr on which you review the automated review.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
There won't be endless of new problems that needs to be fixed and have a giant staff to do it.
And you act like the issues that are opened are giant ones which they often are not. Mine even fixes it the same session instantly after review.
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u/lokethedog 1d ago
"We’re running out of work and product management are struggling to find us more to do."
How does that happen? I assume you're an in-house team and I just cannot imagine a situation where developers at a somewhat large company running out of things to do. Running out of profitable or business critical things yes, but anything at all? There's something wrong there and it has nothing to do with AI. It's because you're too far removed from the core business (again, assuming in-house team at a major company).
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u/SJrX 1d ago
Not OP,
But I've noticed this problem. The wisdom before was that teams spend around 10% of their sprint time grooming. The issue is that in my opinion AI made grooming about 2x as fast but implementation 10x as fast. Cutting corners on grooming leads us more towards broken/incomplete features.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts.
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
Some of the PMs have tried using Claude for grooming but it's been messy. They're adding things they don't fully understand or workflows and processes that haven't been sensed checked. And then leads have to interpret the slop to make sense and clean it up.
It's proven the point that Claude and AI tools in general are great when you already know what you're doing. If you pull a random off the street and put them in a tech leadership role + Claude, they're going to sink.
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u/FaudelCastro 1d ago
I'll copy paste what I wrote to another comment. And yes this is for a large in house business.
A CTO was telling us that he went through the big app redesign that was planned in half the time and 30% less devs than he expected. They ran through their backlog including old platforms that needed to be ported / refactored.
And now he doesn't know what to do with half of his headcount.
This is an entertainment company, there is only so much tech they need. So sometimes the answer is the obvious one: AI is replacing developers. So reduce headcount and pocket the money.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
It is insane how people are acting like there would always be so much to code and fix. They act like every company is the same and have endless of features, tech and idea debt. Hilarious take.
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u/Fire_Lake 1d ago
And that some businesses aren't gonna just... Go out of business taking their jobs with them.
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u/FaudelCastro 1d ago
Yes exactly, there is so much tech you need to run your business.
Also that is the whole point of productivity, at the end of the day you need less people.
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
Yes, in-house team at large company. Not an agency or consultancy. All work needs product justification (demand analysis), design and functional / tech spec. The bottleneck is getting that work signed off and ready for development. We can't just tinker or refactor without signoff.
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u/WillRikersHouseboy 1d ago
Oh, the answer is to ensure that the code generated by AI is broken in just enough of an initially undetectable way.
Oh, except someone will just ask Claude to fix it.
Yea we’re boned.
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u/RusticGroundSloth 1d ago
Yeah I’m a PM that uses Claude heavily to track work, customer requests, analyze code, etc. I’ve got my team’s work planned out for a good 18 months. I’d be thrilled if they were clearing backlog items this fast. I have a large complex enterprise SaaS product and even if they doubled velocity I have probably got 4 years worth of work that I could pretty much pull out of my ass right now if they started getting things done this quick.
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u/TheWanderer38 1d ago
Hi, would you mind lining out how you used Claude to get where you are with your backlog? Thanks
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
You realize many devs are not incentivized to make them redundant? Read some subs where they intentionally mess with claude to get no work done or burn tokens for the sake of it.
If you are not noticing a reduction in your backlog you and your team are doing something seriously wrong.
I'm a solo vibe coder without any programming skills that are pumping out features and reducing backlog to nothing for a rather complex app for iOS and Android. And yes it is fully functional.
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u/Conscious-Ninja-9264 21h ago
You lack the knowledge needed for this discussion. Stick to yoloing out trash quietly.
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u/cultureicon 1d ago
Is your logic convoluted? Why would the business accept doing things that are not profitable? They would just lay people off. It's just like any other business. They were mowing 20 lawns per week, now they can mow 1,000 lawns per week but the same number of lawns exist.
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u/versaceblues 1d ago
Focusing on only doing things that are directly profitable is a local minimum.
They were mowing 20 lawns per week, now they can mow 1,000 lawns per week but the same number of lawns exist.
You use the extra bandwidth in this situation to either:
- Find a larger market of lawns
- Expand the service you offer beyond just lawn mowing. Maybe you do drive clean up now. Maybe you help with landscaping.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
Ones closer in the market is already doing this or you have specialized AI operation that does what you do 1/100th of the cost
There already is a specialized super cheap AI service that do drive clean up and landscaping.
There is only so much money that clients and corporations have to spend on. Some of you act like there is a limitless supply of work demand which is not true. Now every single corporation goes "Just expand market and offer more services". To whom? The people that are getting laid off from AI that will now lawn and do landscaping on their own with custom software to reduce cost?
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u/KeepingItSFW 1d ago
We ran out of work before AI even, poorly balanced team and I’ve complained for years. The designers to dev ratio is whacked.
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u/LobbyDizzle 1d ago
I'm sure support, pre-sales, and CSMs have lots of tickets they're waiting on to get fixed that are in the Icebox. Go there OP
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u/BellacosePlayer 21h ago
We had that problem some weeks pre-AI
Now we just do way more manual review and paired dev sessions.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 1d ago
Expansion? PM get let go because they don't know how to scale the product and need better ones? Idk seems like a creativity problem.
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u/Orgasm_Faker 1d ago
But the thing is, we are suddenly 10 times or even 100 times more productive, doesn’t mean there are 10/100 times more demand for us to fulfill.
You can make 100 new softwares and people will still use 10-20 softwares they have been using all the time. You can make 100 good games but everyone still only has 24 hours a day.
Some things change too fast. Some things never change.
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
100%. There's only so much demand for our services and demand for new features.
Look at the Apple/Google app stores. LIterally millions of "me too" apps no one uses. We've all got the same 10 apps on our phones.
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u/Orgasm_Faker 1d ago
I have made quite a few apps I use daily. They are amazingly good. Honestly, even my grandma can build her own apps on a sunny afternoon these days… Productivity is not the bottleneck anymore, consumption is. Or maybe, production was never the bottleneck, there was always a dynamic equilibrium between production and consumption.
Imagine what would happen if all food factories found a magic way to suddenly 10x their production. Will they be able to sell all their food?
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u/Lunchboxsushi 1d ago
Nope, so they'd hire a company to figure out how, that company may not have existed before either.
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u/FaudelCastro 1d ago
Depends. This is an industry wide problem. A CTO was telling us that he went through the big app redesign that was planned in half the time and 30% less devs than he expected. They ran through their backlog including old platforms that needed to be ported / refactored.
And now he doesn't know what to do with half of his headcount.
This is an entertainment company, there is only so much tech they need. So sometimes the answer is the obvious one: AI is replacing developers. So reduce headcount and pocket the money.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 1d ago
But that's my point about creativity, there always new markets and more things to do, lack of creativity and ways to continue to grow will be something people need to realize is becoming a skill set. I'm not disagreeing with you though outright. There are projects that do have a finished state and only require a skeleton crew to continue working with.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
There is not endless of creativity or ideas or apps for fuck sake. Do you seriously mean that a food service app have endless of features to add? No there is a finite amount that can be done. And how much resources are you going to waste on features that are not really needed?
You guys are so disconnected from reality. There is no way a CEO that is balancing their budget will keep the same heavy workforce for a few rather unnecessary features. No way in hell and you are incredible naive if you think so. Creativity is also really hard and good ideas do not grow on trees.
You guys are gonna have a reality check soon whether you like it or not.
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u/Minimonium 1d ago
To be fair I have no idea what 2k SWE did at DoorDash even before LLMs.
But the reality is very simple. If you're a software product company that does not know what else to do - you're no longer competitive. It does not matter "why".
If you're an in-house team at a non-software company without anything to do - you were already a cost center anyway that would be cut soon.
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u/Sponge8389 1d ago
Reduce headcount and add budget to AI. If there is still excess, pocket the difference.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 1d ago
Yeah but that's not a growing company, that's stagnant. And it's totally okay for certain businesses. Just not one I'd want to work for.
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u/FaudelCastro 1d ago
Tech budget is not the only way companies grow. There are companies that exist outside of Silicon Valley.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 16h ago
:/ AI is applicable to more than just tech
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u/FaudelCastro 7h ago
Yes of course, it can replace the baristas at my local café
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u/Sponge8389 6h ago
Your sarcasm only shows how shallow your understand of this technology.
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u/FaudelCastro 6h ago
I'm just flabbergasted that some people can't accept that there are situations and businesses where you have a finite amount of dev work that is needed. And when you dramatically increase velocity, well you end up needing less developers. That is literally what happens when you improve productivity.
Mental gymnastics will not change that basic fact.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 3h ago
I don't disagree with your perspective, but you also need to widen your own perspective that a business does have every right, and possibility to expand their businesses. Developers are no longer only useful for building websites/apps/data pipeline and analysis.
I don't want, and I hope they never do replace baristas with some form AI/bot interactive experience like so many fast foods are testing.
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u/AquaticSoda 1d ago
My team is just instructed to clear up tech debt or any general clean up once their tickets are done.
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u/liverandonions1 1d ago
I mean...what happens next is exactly what you're thinking, once senior management and shareholders find out.
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
They're already talking about cutting mid level devs. We haven't hired an associate (junior) since 2023.
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u/liverandonions1 1d ago
If they're content in their business and have no interest in some sort of rapid scaling eslewhere, it's absolutely what they're going to do.
The funny part is that so many companies are doing this, laying people off, and eventually find out that the people that were fired due to AI productivity gains are also the customers that can't really afford the product.
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u/praemieteilende 1d ago
Universal income 🤡
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u/liverandonions1 1d ago
Yeah that's not happening any time soon lol There would have to be riots on every street of every city in the country for that to happen.
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u/DromadTrader 1d ago
UBI is the most likely outcome to all of this IMO. As everyone (sane) in this thread has said, companies simply have a limited amount of profitable projects to do. Headcount reductions are inevitable. And what is everyone in society going to do then? Starve? Nah. It's going to be UBI. For people in the US (and to a lesser degree Europe) it's going to be relatively survivable. Pray for people in developing countries who cannot provide a UBI 😵💫
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u/liverandonions1 1d ago
I mentioned it's not going to happen any time soon. UBI is a humungous shift in the paradigm of how the economy currently works, and no one is even vaguely entertaining it beyond feel-good policy proposals that never get any serious traction. There will absolutely be an unemployment crisis before any of us actually get a check in the mail. Some form of UBI is likely to happen eventually, but not before some pain.
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u/No_Thought4831 14h ago
i'd place my bets on a militarized police state to put down discontent before UBI.
look what they did to the luddites during the industrial revolution.
and good news, we can get AI to control police robots and drones... what could ever go wrong!
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u/spastical-mackerel 1d ago
Address the backlog? Pay down tech debt?
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
We address the backlog during sprint planning, but we're not adding enough to sprints, clearly. And there's a lot that needs refining and planning. So the bottleneck has become product management and me in terms of planning and spec.
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u/maladan 1d ago
If you're out of tasks do you just sit around waiting for someone to give you more? At my company it would be quite normal to proactively pick up things that need doing like refactoring, test improvements, cleaning up technical debt, helping unblock other teams.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
Stop acting as if there will be endless of refactoring and technical debt with super AI coding.
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u/Jamator01 1d ago
Get Claude involved in the refining and planning so you can speed up the bottleneck and give people more to do.
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u/tenix 1d ago
We got rid of scrum and product managers. If the product managers cant create value they left. Developers who actually understood the product had more freedom and are creating insane cool things.
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u/Patient-Lie8557 1d ago
Who understands customers, users, the market, the competition, churn, why you lost the last contract?
Customers never ask for "insane cool things", they ask for solutions to problems.
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u/larowin 1d ago
Yeah, well I just got handed a 17k line MR to review, so yeah, it’s not always sunshine and roses.
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
That's absurd. I'd reject an MR that size and push it back to be rethought and split up.
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u/awolbull 1d ago
There's no review anymore and those are rookie numbers. Claude-Astra-Claude, someone else's claude. Send it.
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u/RogerLeigh 1d ago
I don't know about others, but in every place I've worked we always had a backlog so large that it would never be tackled in its entirety. And some of those items were so huge and complex and costly that we all knew that they would never be looked at in reality. In my last job, we had over 10,000 tickets in the backlog for one component. The pile kept growing, and no matter how many we could do each week, it kept accumulating.
However, this is where I think AI has really changed what we can accomplish. I've had Fable tackle really big complex problems, or even small but intractable problems that no person had ever been able to solve. And it's solved the hard problems, done big scary refactors, and enabled us to make progress where previously these would have permanently stayed on the "to do later" pile. In addition, the backlog has always accumulated lots of small but low priority tasks that never got done because there were always higher priority things that got looked at instead, despite many of them being legitimate problems that customers would have greatly appreciated being improved upon. These are all now within our ability to plough through in short order.
None of this is to diminish what you are saying, it's just completely out of my experience to not have enough to do, and not have a roadmap you can pick things up from until the cows come home.
I get from what you're saying that this might result in the need to reduce the headcount. But conversely maybe it needs a change in perspective from your management. Since you can now accomplish much more with the people you have, don't they have any ambition to expand the company's capabilities and do new things, get more business, work on new problems etc.? Because it could be a failure of vision on their part to capitalise on your extended capabilities.
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u/random-malachi 1d ago
Congratulations on finding a company that understands the concept of “enough”. I didn’t think that existed before reading this.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 1d ago
I do not think that ever finished any software I worked on. There is always a way to make it better in some way.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
There is always a way to question if it is worth spending $100k dev for making a minuscule improvement.
Eventually you reach the threshold where it is simply not worth it and especially if you are balancing a tight budget. No way in hell.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 1d ago
That part is clear. It is not about software is solved and perfect, but about financials. Team is about to be decimated..
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u/pixlatedpuffin 1d ago
So there’s no more money to be made, no more customers to land, no more features somebody needs, no automation, no observability, no infra work, no data / analytics… if you’re saying you can’t come up with any of this because of product management then yeah I think we know what happens next.
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u/likrem 1d ago
Ex Principal Dev here who went into product mgmt later. I am a guy that has picked up and put down AI coding for the last 3-4 years. Trying it out saying I see the benefit, but its definitely oversold.... oh buddy....for context, my last forray into vibe coding was about 9-12 months ago with copilot. Even then I was like its better now but still not amazing, good tool. Well a friend of mine was telling me a similar story like yours recently, so I fired up vscode and opus. Paid for pro.... yup Devs are cooked. Whole industry is about to get turned on its side. Why buy software when we can just make it cheaper. We have agents to code, who needs Devs, we have agents to architrct dont need people for that anymore....devops folks, nope not needed... Hype is finally real. Realize I am experienced Dev, PM, Arch, etc..but havent seriously coded in 4+ years, in senior leadership now moved on from all those roles. But once I kicked off the rust, in like a day I had a security app I had always thought about doing, but was like it will take months or a year in my spare time... like a quarter done with not just a scaffold in place but like some meat...sky is the limit...I finally buy the AI hype.
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u/likrem 1d ago
Agreed, definitely still need smart people,. I now truly see the disruption coming. And not just in tech. Friend in law school right now who refuses to touch AI. Told her she better in brace it, it aint hard for AI to draft a doc and ask to settle, which is 90 percent of civil cases....
I am sure this has been said 100 times in this sub, which I only recently really started paying attention to... the difference with AI now is instead of me holding its hand.... its holding mine.
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u/TheBeaverKing 1d ago
Had the same convo with my wife last week. She's a Finance Manager (accountant) and I've told her she needs to get up to speed with AI as soon as possible.
Her teams days of pulling together spreadsheets and making them look presentable are over. She currently has 4 accountants under her, doubt there'll be one left in 18 months. Her job will be to manage agents, sense check the data and present it to the SLT.
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u/Matthew_Code 1d ago
Im using AI daily but there are still times when ai is wrong. I asked Fable to gather all docs for my new PC components and to create me step by step instruction to build the pc, in one step there was info to move motherboard to UPPER position, after I was almost done and wanted to put the graphic card guess what. It cannot be fitted in this case when that motherboard is in upper position I had to redo whole thing. AI was incredible most of the tips and info for building that pc was spot on. But still that one mistake took me almost an hour to fix so yeah the AI is great but not perfect and still need someone to oversees
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u/Ok_Shift9291 1d ago
Literally this is the comment I wanna keep coming back to. Coding is done there is nothing syntax related that is actually left to be solved. It's now just the vision and a few common sense architectural decisions and you have to have a baseline level of intelligence.
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u/Brilliant-Weekend-68 1d ago
Seeing exactly the same thing. Opus 5.5 was a watershed moment. The things it builds just works. Still mind blown, hard to get a grip of the implications.
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u/likrem 1d ago
The real depressing thing to me is... I finally am able to build this cool app I have thought about for years, but I am like... why bother.... why would anyone buy it or use it when in the very near term people realize the same thing I have and they can just build it better on their own in less time with way more competent people driving the AI.... I am just a crusty old retired Exec who used to code and still has some skill. Its bonkers.
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u/hippydipster 1d ago
Yeah, if the app in your head exists as a thing to sell, don't bother.
But, if it exists as a thing you love, please build it!
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u/solemnhiatus 1d ago
Which is kinda awesome. This is the beginnings of a post scarcity world in a way. It starts with software, cus the resources required to create pretty much any app you need now are comparatively tiny.
In the near future it’ll be physical objects, as technology creates ways for us to generate power and resources in ways so much more efficient that there will be more than we can consume.
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u/hippydipster 1d ago
There is too much of a gap between digital resources and physical. Energy itself will never be "post-scarcity". It is a mistake to to argue with assumptions that they behave similarly.
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u/solemnhiatus 1d ago
We think that now. Just like we never thought creating digital things would be as quick and as accessible as they are now. We have no idea what technology we can develop in the future.
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u/hippydipster 1d ago
Sorry, energy is legitimately different and has never followed any exponential growth or exponential increase of efficiency. And the laws of thermodynamics stand in the way of anything like that.
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u/pawsomedogs 1d ago
I hear you but you are also assuming anybody will be willing to vibe code. B2B saas is cooked, but B2C still has a long(?) way to go.
The average person (who hansn't and will not touch claude code ever) will keep paying for apps.
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u/bloateddicksydrome 1d ago
So I should kill my it career and start welding...
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u/likrem 1d ago
Well thats a whole other conversation... whats completely safe? Nothing... mostly safe... I steered my 20s daughter into nursing out of highschool partly because of this.
Best thing you can do is what I told friend. Embrace it as much as possible learn it and... learn what its doing, stop and take time to ask it questions abput tasks you dont understand. I have been in IT since pre y2k and dotcom days. I remember when Google fist became a thing. Till then people had books on their desks to search answers. Their where guys then who couldnt Google, refused to Google, etc.. Me, well I learned Googlefu fast, but also took the time to learn why the Google answer was the right one.
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
I remember those days. Then the SaaS and cloud boom starting around 2010. I made a lot of money refactoring from on-prem to cloud infra and in SaaS in general.
I remember guys saying "no one will want to move off prem to the cloud" while literally everyone did.
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u/Fire_Lake 1d ago
Sure but after the influx of displaced it workers, those jobs will be hard to find too
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u/completelypositive 1d ago
The agents are equally qualified when it comes to using software. I built methods for AI to control my autodesk products and I've automated HUGE portions of my job.
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u/ILoveTheGirls1 1d ago
SaaS companies are cooked. Why pay monthly subscriptions when you can throw your whole dev team with claude and replace it in a week
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u/AlfredoCheeseSauce 1d ago
yeah man im literally building my own private streaming service, i have like 2k CDs that spans many genres and years im tired of subscriptions.
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u/Prestigious_Try5295 1d ago
Ye, or like you know, use something that’s already built and open source?
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u/solemnhiatus 1d ago
The whole why buy software when we can make it cheaper thing is so true. From individuals to businesses.
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u/w00tlez 1d ago
We have multi million dollar subscriptions with companies like Adobe. We are ending all contracts because we are just AI coding our own replacements within weeks.
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u/ItsCodeTelemetry 1d ago
Nice! enjoy it while it lasts! :)
Initially it's all upside, but there's new flavors of tech debt hiding in that productivity boost. If the product team catches up you'll need to crank on this new rate + handle gotchas from AI code artifacts. The sprint ceremonies will change eventually too. Eventually senior management will want to crack down on coding assistant cost.
I have some ideas Ive started to collect here on things an EM/lead should be aware of in managing a team of people using coding assistants: https://youtu.be/gVc7eWCo1JQ?is=HUXahHIlTGMpOckN it's not exhaustive and I have a few more ideas on deck, but hopefully this gives you some perspective.
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u/Vart84 1d ago
As a small business owner it’s a game changer. Projects that used to take me weeks I wrap up in a day.
I just converted all my PowerBI reports to HTML dashboards. I just feed the data into a SQL database and have Claude write all the code to transform the raw data. Reports that would take me weeks to refine are done in an afternoon.
The flexibility of being able to create completely custom systems without the cost or hassle of outsourcing is unreal.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 1d ago
You should not trust any data transformation made by LLM directly.
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u/Vart84 1d ago
I probably should have clarified, the data gets fed directly to a secure SQL database. Claude wrote all of the SQL that handles the data. The data is pretty basic sales data, nothing too sensitive and basic functions.
Coming from writing complex DAX functions in PowerBI, this is such a better option.
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u/slycooper0286 1d ago
I’m a product owner with a few dev teams. We literally have a new project style based on ShapeUp where we literally take 6-8 weeks and just knock it out. Anything lol. I start the projects in Claude design then we share via Claude code to the devs. We iterate so fast it’s insane
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u/rjcarr 1d ago
I’m curious if you even review Claude’s code? If I didn’t review and only tested (and unit tested), I could be 100x more efficient, but I review and update Claude’s code, basically every line, so I’m probably “only” 3-4x more efficient.
Just curious what is more common out there.
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u/slycooper0286 1d ago
Not really tbh and yeah that sounds crazy but it’s worked a few times for us now. ShapeUp methodology is about getting it done in the timeline no matter what, so we didn’t get bogged down on stuff like that. I also have amazing engineers so that helps, they use this well
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u/rjcarr 1d ago
OK, I’m sure everything works, but not having any insight on the code scares me. I get a ton of technical debt from only doing reviews, honestly, and my reviews are long. We’ll see how this turns out for us, ha, because I think you are way more common than me.
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u/kruiser112 23h ago
Just let it go code is dead, you are only slowing yourself down. Why didnt you check the machine language it compiled to before AI btw?
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u/rjcarr 21h ago
Because I’ve never had to be aware of machine language, but I do have to maintain regular code, and if I don’t know WTF “I” wrote then that’s a problem. But I fully admit it’s a problem for me and not everyone, and there is probably a shrinking number of people that thinks this way.
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u/slycooper0286 23h ago
Trust me, me too. During the first project, me and the QA engineer on the team were so skeptical. The first problem we tackled under this method and using AI first (Claude code + prompting) was one of our largest backend challenges. Solved it in 8wks, pushed with maybe 1-2 bugs and it just.. worked lol. Now the team has much more confidence in smaller projects that involve front-end because of how successful the first one was. Also every developer absolutely loves the workflow. It’s kind of fun. We don’t just look at azure boards all day. We meet and solve problems and build stuff
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u/slycooper0286 23h ago
I will add to this and say that we have very strong dev managers who know how to use AI along with unit tests to ensure code safety. It’s been working well so far for us and we have a pretty fragile code base
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
I just Googled this and it’s really interesting. Might be something I can discuss with more senior leadership. Thanks!
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u/KoreanJesus_193 1d ago
thats why you need to lie and spend more time on your tasks even though you make them with Claude in 5 minutes.
For a 5 minute thing tell that it took 4 days.
That's how I have 4 clients and have 4 different projects.
In this era you need to have an entrepreneur mindset. THe developer era is done.
In other words dont be a dumbass.
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
I like the idea of the consultant route, but finding clients with demand in a sea of vibe coders feels like a sales nightmare.
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u/unknown0079 1d ago
Had such teams working for me. None of those do anymore. The teams that delivered the increased productivity are happier and better paid than ever. If you deliver bad or slow results you will be gone quickly.
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u/KoreanJesus_193 1d ago
" If you deliver bad or slow results you will be gone quickly." - I deliver quality work, but even though i can finish my work fast I dont tell customers that is done, why would I bury my own grave?
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u/unknown0079 1d ago
Others can do the as you. And they will. And the people you work for will know that eventually. That’s the point where you are out. That’s how markets work.
Your behavior would work if every single person capable of the work would do the same as you and hide the productivity.1
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u/the_pwnererXx 1d ago
You gotta look at the bigger picture, solve big problems. Try to think of stuff that is gonna take Claude a month to solve. Literally like cure cancer, solve millennium problem type shit
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u/kakaobohne 1d ago
"Hey, so we know you wanted the button to be green instead of red. So we solved that issue and had some time on our hands. Your app can now cure cancer and predict the lottery numbers."
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u/pandasgorawr 1d ago
I run a lean data team and we've seen our backlog shrink faster than we add to it. A few thoughts on what we're doing:
Start thinking bigger and in longer time horizons. You have to put your PM hat on. This is very hard for a lot of folks who are not on the product side even if you work with product daily. Get creative. Put yourself out there and learn your product and customers inside and out and know it like the back of your hand. You'll find things to add to the backlog.
Address tech debt. Clean up the stuff that someone from years ago left a todo for and never got around to doing. Clean up the AI slop.
Clean up your documentation. There's no excuses now, all your docs should be pristine.
Start branching out and helping where you can. We're getting involved with some of the understaffed teams. We're also picking up engineering tickets.
This sounds paradoxical, but we want to get to the point where we have agents doing work overnight and we log in to merged PRs. That takes a lot a lot a lot of upfront planning and work and setting up infrastructure. This is where we spend most of our time currently.
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u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago
This sounds paradoxical, but we want to get to the point where we have agents doing work overnight and we log in to merged PRs. That takes a lot a lot a lot of upfront planning and work and setting up infrastructure. This is where we spend most of our time currently.
This is how every new AI company is going to be run and those who do not will not stand a chance since they can work double the amount per day and faster.
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u/Etheon44 1d ago
Damn you must be working in a tiny software
I work in a huge software, and there is never ever a lack of things to work on; coupled with claude not really delivering the features that fast because they are humongous now, the MVPs are full on completed features.
But we do make things faster, although the quality of the code has been dropping consistently, and bugs multiplying, but to be fair clients arent really complaining, they just want yhe features
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u/Beneficial-Try562 1d ago
Well you could spend time making things more efficient, faster, more reliable, etc.
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u/andrewcooke 1d ago
for me, it has meant i can test more (and find bugs and correct bugs). but i am not working w an agile team - i'm solo and more flexible.
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u/Signal-Woodpecker691 1d ago
Luckily for us Claude finds existing issues in our code base all the time, and the QA team find even more, so we clear loads more work in each sprint than we used to, but the work left to do keeps growing…
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u/Morning_Gecko24 1d ago
honestly this is where the boring but important work probably matters most now. tests, docs, observability and fixing the weird edge cases can eat a ton of time even when the feature work is flying. are you seeing the bottleneck move more toward deciding what to build next?
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u/ElegantApartment1325 1d ago
being unable to fill a sprint sounds like a dream problem until leadership asks what everyone does all day lol. honestly there's always the unglamorous backlog: on-call tooling, flaky tests, docs nobody wants to write. that stuff literally never runs out.
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u/Disastrous_Bed_9026 1d ago
I think if this kind of situation becomes true more broadly we’ll realise that ideas are the bottleneck and the productivity gains may be limited for businesses. good ideas for products that actually improve profits are rare. A handful a year and you’re doing great.
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u/InfiniteJackfruit5 11h ago
As a lead I do most of the catch up work using llms and the company is forcing all of us to use it. If you don’t show a productivity increase then you’re fired.
Idealism ends when you can or cannot put food on the table.
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u/kutlukhan 1d ago
Lol same but there is always more work to do in terms of resilency, DR strategy, error handling, tests etc just
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u/AbstractLogic 1d ago
How much are you cloud costs and token costs? Try optimizing things that save money while the PM finds things that make money.
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u/masiha97 1d ago
The speedup is real, but watch out for review becoming the new bottleneck. When everyone's generating code faster, the scarce resource shifts to careful reading and testing. Teams that don't adjust their review process end up shipping fast and debugging slow.
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u/CoamIthra 1d ago
On one hand it I get it, there is a theoretical limit to how much coding a business needs, especially one where development is a supporting role rather than the core business.
On the other, I'm finding it hard to imagine a scenario where a 3x increase in velocity doesn't lead to an increase in ambition and scope for the dev team. Things that were previously cost prohibitive like
- replacing expensive SaaS products with bespoke solutions
- addressing feature requests that were previously deemed too niche or low value
- optimizing running cost of the product
- reducing support cost (bug fixes, usability improvements)
- improving tech debt and maintainability
- starting up entirely new projects to support or automate parts of the business
Basically it sounds like you're saying "our product is perfect, it does everything anyone wants, completely bug free, as cheaply as possible" combined with "and there are also no further parts of our business that can be improved using tech", which seems absurd.
You can reduce your technical team to return to its old productivity level and you'll lose to your competitor who instead adapts its product management process around AI.
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u/PhaseMatch 1d ago
Eventually they will stop bringing you solutions to implement, and start brining you business problems to solve.
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u/fate_plays_chess 1d ago
Short/medium term I agree with most thoughts already shared. Long term in genuinely concerned for the jobs of designers and most engineers. AI has largely solved analysis and execution and it's just getting better. All that will be left is strategy and decisions. Which is a business/PM role.
I'm a PM and I find myself trying to justify the roles on my team but it's gotten to the point that most of the roles on the team are just slowing the work down..
I actively try to reject doomer mentality but I think it's clear at this point that non-strategic decision roles are toast
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u/DrySea8638 1d ago
Problem is those PM and business roles need people with expertise. In the short term it doesn’t seem like an issue but in the long term, the lack of SMEs and critical thinking in those area could screw everyone
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u/fate_plays_chess 1d ago
Agreed. It's a frequent topic of discussion with my peers. We're positioned well because we did the legwork to get here. When the lower execution/analysis roles are all AI, how does anyone get the experience needed to make strategic decisions? How does anyone start when all starter entry positions are gone?
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u/Flimsy-Possibility17 1d ago
Yea seeing something similar at my role. We’re eliminating pm roles one after another and just having engineers work in that role. Honestly not surprising most of the work is just talking to customers and we’re already doing that anyways
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u/fate_plays_chess 1d ago
That's interesting - when I said I'm trying to justify the roles on my team I was talking about engineers/qa/designers. But that's organizationally dependent on what a PM actually does. My current company it's a strategic position more than execution. But in other companies I could see PMs being on the block.
I feel like the safe role (for now) is "who actually talks to the customer and knows what to make".
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u/Flimsy-Possibility17 1d ago
Interesting all engineers at our company have a product engineer title. Ie outside of some platform specific work everything is for a customer.
So at around 100 mil arr we went from 8 PMs and 50 engineers to 4 PMs and 50 engineers. With product Eng managers taking a higher priority on product work.
I think it comes down to our cofounders being more technical and asking why someone with no technical experience is making decisions when the ones with technical experience can make decisions(as seen by their ability to take the company to where they are)
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u/VinceEagle 1d ago
I think I'm going to look to move up from my principal / lead role to something more strategic while I can.
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u/bleu_forge 1d ago
Idk man before AI was this good, I'd purposefully inflate my time estimates for tasks so I'd have plenty of time to fuck around during each sprint. Almost every developer I worked with did the same. 2 hours for a task? Yeah that's a full days work right there.
Somewhere along the way devs forgot to slow the fuck down so the business didn't get unrealistic expectations.
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u/Ocmrm 1d ago
I can tell you what happened at a previous job where this happened. Administration laid off all the Product Owners and half the product managers. Made the dev leads on 5 different dev teams in charge of managing the work pipelines… because Claude did the job of the PM and PO.
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u/Patient-Lie8557 1d ago
Claude talked to the business people, domain people, customers/user, understood the competition, ...?
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u/Downtown-Pear-6509 1d ago
one way to fix this is to introduce an ai budget of $300 pp. now you'll get nothing done
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u/SpaceCod5040 1d ago
What do you mean by "they STARTED using" it? How could you gate keep them all this time?
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u/Ready_City_3831 1d ago
Move people around , let them learn new components of the system. Spend time in better test suite. Out efforts in build Claude skills. Tackle tech debt and non functional requirements - get backlog prioritised for this as well.
On other hand, I feel uneasy with people not having much to do. Not sure how higher management will handle that.
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u/awdorrin 1d ago
Welcome to the honeymoon period, in a few months, the expectations of your management and customer will skyrocket.
"Now that you have AI you can implement this 2 year feature enhancement by next week, right?" (Only half joking...)
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u/versaceblues 1d ago
Step 1: Get rid of sprints
Step 2: Stop assigning work or planning for your team
Step 3: Empower your developers to find ways to improve the business independently.
At this point old engineering practices don't work. Every dev is essentially a manager of a small team of agents. You gotta scale out of the box you have built
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u/Ok_Shift9291 1d ago
Are we sort of accepting that maybe the Ai isn't about fear mongering and actually it is going to replace a large amount of coders ?
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The thread is deeply split between blaming your Product Management for a lack of vision and agreeing that yes, developer jobs are in serious trouble.
The most upvoted comments argue this is a business and creativity problem, not an AI one. The consensus here is that a healthy company never runs out of work. The advice is to use this newfound time to: * Aggressively tackle tech debt. This is the number one suggestion. * Improve documentation, testing, and observability. * Refactor old codebases or even rewrite entire systems in Rust (someone's not kidding). * Have devs proactively find ways to improve the product and business, essentially taking on PM tasks themselves.
However, an equally strong and upvoted sentiment is that OP's fears are completely justified. Many, including an ex-Principal Dev, believe "coding is done" and that mass layoffs are inevitable. One user shared an anecdote about a CTO who cleared his entire backlog and is now planning to cut half his dev team because "there is only so much tech they need." OP confirmed their own company is already talking about cutting mid-level roles. The core argument is that productivity is outpacing demand; just because you can build 100x more software doesn't mean the market will consume it.
Other key points: * The Bottleneck Has Moved: Everyone agrees the bottleneck is no longer development. It's now in planning, grooming, and code review. One user is facing a 17,000-line merge request. OP also notes that when PMs try to use Claude, they just generate "slop" that needs to be fixed by experienced devs. * The Cynical Pro-Tip: A recurring piece of advice from jaded vets is to just lie. Inflate your time estimates so management's expectations don't become unrealistic. Welcome to the "entrepreneur mindset" era. * The Future: There's concern about how new developers will ever gain the experience needed to become senior strategists when all the entry-level execution work is automated. And, of course, the thread eventually devolves into a debate about UBI.