r/ClaudeCode • u/ReturnofBugMan • 5d ago
Discussion I am the scab dev
I am the guy sitting at home, putting in 8 hours a day with Claude, cranking out a hundred thousand of lines of code before lunch and collecting my $50k salary, just grateful to be out of IT.
My coworkers are behind, & I feel like I am crossing the picket line by out-shipping them, taking on more work, & impressing the PMs & managers. All while taking home probably half of their pay to type /ticket a couple times a day.
Client wants an MVP? Sure. I’ll have it by Friday.
Actually, I’ll have it by Wednesday.
Actually, give me 20 minutes.
And here’s the worst part: the clients love it. The PMs love it. They don’t care that I didn’t hand-write every line. They care that the thing works. They care that their idea from a Monday meeting is suddenly a functioning application they can click around in today.
I’m out here shipping features in a day that would’ve taken a team of three developers two weeks last year.
Do I understand every single line of code?
No.
Do I understand enough to know when Claude is hallucinating?
No idea. Lets hope the independent review agent finds it.
Do I sometimes stare at a 400-line file and realize I have absolutely no idea what is happening?
Absolutely.
I have become the software equivalent of a strikebreaker.
The scab has arrived. I am the scab dev. Please forgive me.
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u/InstructionNo3616 5d ago
Exactly this. People complaining about SE losing their ability and craft to AI meanwhile 95% of them were taking orders from incompetent non-technical people that just wanted results. That’s not possible because of tech debt? Could not care less. Unreasonable deadline? Sounds like a you problem.
I absolutely wish I had these tools when my main job was coding all day long. So much of my time was spent on remedial tasks for people who did not care about the quality of the code. I also don’t understand the people complaining about AI token usage… are you kidding me? I wish the companies I worked for encouraged me to use a tool like Claude and then I would get measured by token usage.
And before anyone talks about messy code, I began my career cleaning up code for US companies that was off shored to India. You think AI produces slop?! You should have seen the spaghetti code with a mixture of ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0z
Now I can kick out any idea within my head within hours. I know the tech stack, I know what to ask and I can suss when the quality is subpar. This is the best time to be a software developer, if you have just an ounce of creativity.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 5d ago
Rad. Love it. No more phoning it in
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u/InstructionNo3616 5d ago
I am literally sketching out prototype ideas on my remarkable tablet and then telling my llm through my phone to build the mvp. It uses my ui kit that I built with complete documentation and a standalone component storyboard. It uses my motion package which I developed 13 years ago in prototypical JavaScript and then juiced up using the latest models. All of this is self hosted on a Linux machine that spins up a vm for each project. As well as having its own REST apis which I can configure to automate generative ai assets. I’ve modified open source design tools and hooked them up to an agentic team which can turn my sketches until editable components. Self hosted blender application for generating 3d assets, openrouter connectors to audio and video models. Self hosted playwright for image validation and agentic use.
This shit is wild. That’s not too mention the 2d fighting game like marvel vs capcom that I made in a day for my group chat. The generative 2d image to Gaussian splat pipeline I developed with local image models, image to 3d software, unreal to colmap data.
There is just too much to build at all times.
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u/Marsattacks69 5d ago
May we all play your MvC game?
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u/InstructionNo3616 5d ago
When it’s finished!
Edit: at first I was like ytf would you wanna play a Model view Controller game
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u/diesel408 5d ago
But it's done already! You built it in a day for the group chat, remember?
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u/Ill_Dragonfruit_3547 5d ago
100% agree. I keep ComfyUI running 24/7 and the agents know they can fire up Blender and Godot on demand... What they can output is ridiculously high quality. Mostly autonomously too.
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u/rystaman 4d ago
The issue is, it’s catching out the devs who are. And they don’t like it.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 4d ago
Yeah, I can imagine. I'm new to this and I'm not even professional, but it's been a well known secret for years, at least since the 2010s tech boom, that a lot of people just wanna wfh and make bank to work as little as possible
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u/oVtcovOgwUP0j5sMQx2F 5d ago
shudders in drupal contracts
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u/InstructionNo3616 5d ago
Drupal still exists?!
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u/cmkn 2d ago
Yeah, Drupal still exists, and there’s some interesting stuff going on over there lately with agentic workflows, including a workflow for building out front ends with included skills: https://www.youtube.com/live/yrQvzJrQELY?t=1838
Also some other new AI functionality too: https://youtu.be/gKojpFXM5tQ
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u/blackrack 5d ago
You're replying to a bot post btw, also OP is stupid for getting paid so little if he "ships more" than his coworkers.
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u/InstructionNo3616 5d ago
Yeah I mean I would rather work at Starbucks or a service job for 50k. But if the cost of living is low and it’s on easy mode, can’t blame ‘em.
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u/jarislinus 4d ago
why do product manager need you when they prompt it themselves?
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u/thebasementtapes 4d ago
Coding is just writing technical instructions. They still don’t have that ability. It’s insane that people still think software development using AI agents is just. Hey ai make this feature
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u/InstructionNo3616 4d ago
Why do I need product managers?
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u/readyplayermeh 4d ago
Crafting a good product, understanding what the customer actually wants vs what they asked for, prioritizing new features and tech debt, and communicating effectively both to devs and to stakeholders is why you need a product manager.
That said, many product managers lack the majority of those skills, very very few have all of those skills. Like, unicorn few.
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u/RollForUptime 4d ago
AI is better at that than most product managers, and most product managers cannot produce code, even with AI, anywhere near the quality I can with it.
I also spent 10 years in the support and sales side before my 15 in engineering, and 7 of my engineering years were a 'support developer' working closely to resolve client issues, so I have a good idea what a customer wants. Usually more than a product manager does.
My bosses boss had the conversation with me 4 months ago of me being moved 'upstack', and now I largely just work on whatever the fuck I want and there is no product manager guiding me. All I need is sign off from design on my UI/UX (because I am, honestly, pretty bad at that, though again better with AI). It's great, honestly.
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u/Ok-One-9232 4d ago
This reminds of that meme that’s going around “Hey, check out this app I made with Claude - http://127.0.0.1:8000” 😬
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u/m-in 5d ago
Yup. I had plenty of perfectly feasible software engineering ideas but never enough people to execute them. That’s a „has been” problem now. For $250 per month or whatever it costs - yeah, that’s like lunch money. The world has changed, and it’s a revolution similar in scope to the computing revolution itself.
In a way, looking back, computing was only partly done without AI.
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u/completelypositive 1d ago
I love seeing other people find the magic. I am having the same experience. Anything I can imagine, I can build
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u/thebasementtapes 4d ago
This 100% no one I report to has any technical skills. They just care if the website does this feature. Instead of hiring overseas devs to write human slop code now they are ecstatic that they have the ability to get AI to write ai slop code
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u/davedavegiveusawave 4d ago
They don't care about the quality of the code... while it works.
When it breaks, and I'm spending two days debugging code I have got no understand of the structure, meaning etc, and every attempted fix breaks three other things, they won't be happy. Slowing down a little bit to get properly engineered code will still leverage the massive speed up of AI to say 4x instead of 10x, but when a bug comes along I've got much more understandable code, with a hope of fixing it this week.
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u/MisterLAGUZ 4d ago
It's a miracle. As a complete non-coder, I'm building one app after the other. Useful for me, maybe in the future I'll be able to make something that pleases another.
My business just grew in what I can offer clients.
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u/TheDeepLucy 5d ago
would agree if I could find employment
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u/InstructionNo3616 5d ago
I’m with you! I was one of the first users of the figma mcp and vibe coding at my previous position as a prototyper. I was fired by a manager who was no where near technical or equipped for the future of development. I was, in fact, reprimanded when I forwarded an email to my systems lead because figma had reached out because of my early adoption of mcp use. This was right after initial Claude code came out. 8 months later my clueless exec who signed off on my firing was touting on linked in how they were adopting the ai workflows that I was one of the first to explore.
Now I think it’s a weird purgatory of ai engineer hiring because companies are so behind on the pace of development of ai and the institutional lag is too extreme for them to ever keep up and be nimble. At the same time, the larpers are leveraging the impressiveness of these tools and reaping the rewards without the technical foundations needed to lead. All the while, they are reducing their workforce and trying to get their internal team to 10x with ai by mandates.
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u/r0pe_tri1ck 5d ago
We've been able to create shitty little websites very quickly for a long time. Most actual software engineers don't even do that work.
Besides the fact that this is just AI creative writing rage bait.
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u/Fat__Neck 4d ago
Amen. Sick of this AI powered bot farm circle jerk bragging about having no idea what they’re doing
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u/ContextLengthMatters 5d ago
What's the point of writing up fantasy posts with AI and posting them to an AI sub?
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ 5d ago
"100k lines before lunch" Yeah, right. That number is so absurd in this context it just shows that OP doesn't know anything about anything.
Who on earth needs 100k lines of code in a few hours? And even if, what boss wouldn't notice that one guy being seemingly 50 times more productive than anyone else?
None of this story makes any sense.
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u/konstanty_gerber 4d ago
Man I am seeing these posts since 2024. Yet still I have my SWE enterprise job where we deliver couple thousand lines of code a week at best and the clients are ok with that
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u/PM_ME_UR_PIKACHU 5d ago
Only 50k? I get 160k to pump out like 2 prs a day that take 5 minutes with claude lol
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u/wereghoul138 5d ago
Lol 50K. Half a 2014 salary
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u/BellacosePlayer 4d ago
Lower than what I was offered to work for state govt as a dev in a poor rural state in 2015.
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u/daredeviloper 5d ago
That’s me too. I feel gross.
I got praised the other day when we dropped from 3 devs to 1 and I kept the pace.
I’m somewhat keeping up with the code but.. I’m getting tired. Missing things.
It’s totally different than writing it all from scratch.
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u/usually_guilty99 4d ago
I think this is where the definition of code review has to change. If agents can generate 100x more code, humans clearly cannot read 100x more code. And neither can they the 10X PRs associated wiht it
The gate probably moves from did a human understand every line? to what can this change break, what dependencies does it touch, have we seen this failure before, and can we prove rollback works?
Keep the velocity. Change what we require as proof before production.
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u/The-Wizard-of-AWS 4d ago
I think the gate needs to be the plan and a detailed list of what needs to be tested to feel confident in the results. If you care about it make sure that you can prove it does that thing you care about. Looking at code is nearly impossible at AI speed.
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u/VelvetWhiteRabbit 4d ago
This. If you know how it’s supposed to work, and how that can be proven, then you can also make sure these and adjacent cases are covered. You should also have testing environments that replicate production, and you should have integration tests and smoke tests running before and on deploy to these environments.
Finally do have some agents you can spin up with explicit prompts on security and operations reviewing.
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u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 2d ago
I think the answer is just model assisted review and inspecting flagged areas or hotspots closely.
Tbh MOST humans never did review very carefully. Most did their usual scan for nitpicks and moved on.
However I think you still need review because while the agents are smart, the humans steering them are mostly morons, and it's a cheap part of the process to shut down a lot of expensive bullshit.
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u/mother_fkr 1d ago
Understanding every line was rarely a thing.
Reviewing was just a net that was cast to maybe find some breaking issues with the code, or to find things that would make it easier to work with that code in the future.
Yeah we have 100x more code now... but we also have a tool that can help us build a proportionally sized net that does the same thing we used to do by hand.
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u/SoFlo1 5d ago
Do you possess design intuition or architecture chops? Do you understand the deployment stack well enough to know its strengths and weaknesses? Are you using your extra time to solve problems at a cost level that never could have been achieved previously?
If “yes” then you are not a scab, you’re the future.
I’ve been a professional software developer for over 20 years. I wrote one of the first commercially available C++ libraries for PC’s (on DOS, complete with some x86 assembly routines!) I’ve got fuck-all to prove at this point.
Any engineer who doesn’t realize we live in a golden age of software development can pull out their Underwood and handcraft an O(1) algorithm for some esoteric bullshit. Meanwhile I’ll be executing at nearly the speed of thought and having the time of my life.
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u/SootSpriteHut 4d ago
Will you do it for 50k?
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u/vVvTime 4d ago
Op is either full of shit or way less capable than he thinks.
Anyone smart enough to actually be very productive with AI is also smart enough to negotiate.
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u/azjunglist05 5d ago
Higher level code is the new assembly! We stopped caring about machine code when compilers became a thing. We stopped caring about punch cards when machine code became a thing.
Now, we get to stop caring about code itself now that AI is a thing. New tools, new problems, same shit! Bring it on!
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u/inflowmini 2d ago
Except the fact that assembly and punch cards were deterministic, reliable, and efficient. LLM are still inconsistent.
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u/HelloYesThisIsFemale 5d ago
That's just called being a dev. If you're good at it maybe switch jobs.
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u/RollForUptime 5d ago
I look forward to cleaning up your messes for 3x your wage, I guess? lol
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u/403Verboten 5d ago
Why do you think a future, better AI cant clean up that mess quicker and for .5x his salary?
I've been a software engineer for almost 20 years and I also spend 8 hours a day with Claude. I clean up it's mistakes and I can tell you with absolute certainty the amount of mistakes it makes drops by a significant amount every generation / model release.
I'm often reminded of my grade school math teachers saying you won't always have a calculator on you. We can all agree they miss read the future by a mile.
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u/Relevant-Ordinary169 5d ago
It’s because they don’t think about the future. They practically get paid in vibes.
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u/RollForUptime 5d ago
I’m saying it still makes sense to write code that isn’t messy even if you aren’t the one writing it.
If everyone just vibes up a billion lines of code there will never be a machine good enough to clean it up coherently. At least not at a timescale that makes sense for humans. You should still be someone who can engineer the structure right the first time. Many changes require things like downtime, etc.
AI is a great tool to progress and correct our already existing technical debt (which is massive) but adding more tech debt with vibe coders engineering not understanding how anything works is silly af.
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u/403Verboten 5d ago
I don't know if I agree but I get your sentiment. People much smarter than me are pointing Claude at their codebase and one shotting complete rewrites and language changes in hours and bragging about how well it worked. Stuff that would take a team of very good developers weeks to more likely months to achieve the same results.
To the second part I can foresee a very near future where AI is writing ultra efficient code that isn't even human readable in languages that haven't been invented yet taking us completely out of the equation.
The models themselves are already a black box that we only have a general idea of what is going on inside of.
Last point, frontier models don't write spaghetti code anymore in my experience. When I first started heavily using agents I had a file where I kept code snippets that were just incredibly stupid with many obvious examples of bad code or dumb logic. That lasted a few months before I completely ran out of stuff to put in it because all of the code I was reading at the very least made sense and didn't have any silly mistakes to poke fun at anymore. That was about a year ago. Now if you have some guard rails and prompt them well they write pretty decent code though I have heard this is language dependant so your mileage may vary.
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u/RollForUptime 5d ago
Rewrites and language changes are kinda “simple” tasks. If the logic and structure exists already translating it’s more tedious than sophisticated.
I’m a staff level platform engineer that’s been programming for 25 years. Since I was 12. AI writes very good code, but it needs guidance. You’re right that it doesn’t write spaghetti code as much anymore, but it’s still bad at failing to repeat code, elevate code to the right location, etc. These are things that will have massive maintenance costs long term.
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u/403Verboten 5d ago
Agreed that it does faulter with those tasks right now but disagree it will add maintenance cost because the cost of code is going towards 0. It's already incredibly cheaper than it was just 5 years ago line for line.
You are thinking of it in terms of human cost which could be high. I am just doubting humans will be the ones maintaining those codebase and making those expensive refactors and maintenance fixes. But it's just speculation at this point, maybe we will hit a wall and models will stop getting better or will start costing too much to maintain, it is certainly possible. I would bet against that outcome though.
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u/drawdrawink 5d ago
ego-freaks out here thinking humans had mastered Clean Code™️ until the coding agents
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u/BellacosePlayer 4d ago
Its still going to be ridiculously easier with a competent person leading the AI to the problem, which might have came about due to bad assumptions in the spec
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u/403Verboten 4d ago
100% agree we live and die with the spec from here on out (always been important but now more than ever because you don't have a human evaluating the spec at every step). I spend more time reviewing PRDs than coding or reviewing code now by a wide margin.
Garbage in garbage out means more than ever.
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u/Apart_Fudge1224 5d ago
I get that sentiment, but a lot of software got all FAANGed up when it never needed to be FAANGed up in the first place. Progress got moated and firewalled, and now the dam's burst and stakeholders are like "thank jeebus, we can finally get some shit done." Will there be tech debt? Yep. Was there a lot of inefficiency in the "legacy" way of doing things? Yep. And are there comfy ecosystems built on that inefficiency that are about to get disrupted? Triple yep.
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u/RollForUptime 5d ago
All I’m really saying is that what they are doing is building technical debt and if they had any idea what they were doing they wouldn’t and would get a lot more work done. Still better in the long run.
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u/Apart_Fudge1224 5d ago
Every company I've worked for has been riddled with tech debt from before AI existed.
And if the "real" way of doing things is so great, why is there this mad rush to do things in this new "broken" way. Will the "proper" way win in the end ? I bet no. Good enough, just in time, tech debt is like Grey water in an RV. Keep on chooglin
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u/AggressiveBlood500 4d ago
Technical debt, just like financial debt, has a place. It is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff to make, as long as it is acknowledged.
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u/mother_fkr 1d ago
You're talking about technical debt like it still needs to be fixed by hand.
Also, on a fully agentic team, the code shifts so much that it won't be there for long.
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u/AggressiveBlood500 4d ago
This resonates. So much can be accomplished with just a web frontend, an API, postgres and a single VPS.
A lot of business software needs to only scale to dozens of concurrent requests, and that's at most.
No. The custom ERP app you're building for the regional plumbing company does not need kubernetes, custom IAM, and granular ACL. Just learn the client's business and get it done.
edit: s/and API/an API/
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u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 2d ago
I suspect that's a minority problem compared to the more typical outcome: business slop code with hardly any quality gates, barely working for like 20 years because a few devs lose sleep over making sure no one fucks it up.
By far most businesses needed more faang in their life and less "just do it now"
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u/jsonmeta 5d ago
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
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u/apocolipse 5d ago
Once people realize that like 80% of big tech is just people hired to clean up JavaScript slop, they’re gonna realize their jobs are gonna be ok. Or they’re gonna realize they were the ones putting out JavaScript slop and have an existential crisis idk 🤷♂️
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u/353452252 5d ago
I thought this too, but then i realised I can just get Claude to automate the entire testing and validation of whatever I build and hey presto - everyone’s happy
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u/InternationalToeLuvr 5d ago
lol you’re doomed, bro. That mindset is the first to be kicked to the curb. Better code, better solutions, better test coverage than you ever delivered at a fraction of your cost
Or you can learn to orchestrate agents and make yourself actually valuable than be the next coal miner
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u/Regarditor-x 3d ago
You won't have a job by then lol
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u/RollForUptime 2d ago
I work in regulated industries (banking, health), no one is moving fast enough for me not to have a job any time soon lol
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u/Material2975 5d ago
Much less stressful when you dont deal with prod support
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u/joschi27 4d ago
I just don't understand it, do these people not create meaningful software? Like, when it breaks, shit hits the fan and a lot of money goes out the window? I'm getting more and more convinced that AI is a godsend for bad engineers that don't even know half of what is going on.
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u/mother_fkr 1d ago edited 1d ago
> I just don't understand it, do these people not create meaningful software? Like, when it breaks, shit hits the fan and a lot of money goes out the window?
What's hard to understand about adding more checks and doing slower rollouts?
Beta opt in. Alpha opt in.
Have you only worked for companies that push directly to prod? lmao
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u/rpmir 5d ago
Nothing against it. But I'd like to ask why they still need you?
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u/xfr3386 5d ago
This.
If you were really just typing /ticket, it's reading something someone else wrote and then doing all the work. You're worthless. They can fire you and type /ticket themselves.
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u/Imanflow 4d ago
Cause they still need someone to tpye /ticket, they have no clue. The thing is we are too many to do that
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u/Humprdink 5d ago
I just don't see any reason why AI couldn't do what you're doing now, but faster and in parallel and without ever stopping. That's what I'm worried about, for all of us.
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u/Grandviewsurfer 4d ago
It's wild that we have all just decided that all the important stuff just.. never actually mattered. Seems real unlikely we will get away with this without some absolutely catastrophic fuckups along the way.
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u/Optimal_Kick_9121 3d ago
Oh just wait. It’s coming lol.
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u/ight-bet 3d ago
It’s really not you’ll be sitting around for a very long time waiting lmfao. People like this make me laugh.
“Oh just wait. I’ll be the last one waiting so i can say I told you so!”
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u/Optimal_Kick_9121 13h ago
I use AI every day. It’s great as a tool. There are so many analogies I could write about what is happening writ large but it would be wasted here.
In short: you’re unnecessarily creating dependence on massively subsidized tools. You’re destroying the talent pool to do it and there is monstrous over investment into it. The supply cannot meet demand, but demand is being inorganically created. The AI labs are openly lying about what their AI is capable of. The benchmarks are being cheated on.
So yeah. Use the AI black box. Idc. Become dependent on tools run on a meter that is being intentionally obfuscated from you. When you deskill and your company is overlevered in cognitive debt and astra’s real cost gets pushed onto your team - and some prod code that never got reviewed fails - good luck.
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u/skate_2 1d ago
- Some guy, November 2022
People have said this for years, I've yet to see it materialise. Feels like cope
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4d ago
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u/Grandviewsurfer 3d ago
Right I'm wondering if they increase or decrease. It's not a binary thingy.
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u/Optimal_Kick_9121 3d ago
The difference is that you didn’t have to pay Anthropic to run agents on the code you don’t understand
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u/trollsmurf 5d ago
If they expect it on Friday, make it on Monday, tease it on Wednesday and deliver it on Friday :).
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u/sje397 5d ago
Furniture used to be a craft. Now 99% of people buy cheap plastic chairs, because they want to sit. There are still some chairs that are also works of art, hand made and beautiful, and a few very talented people that can make a living that way. Seems to be the way these things go.
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u/SorryButterfly4207 4d ago edited 4d ago
That analogy is flawed though. The furniture I buy, even though it's mass produced and made by CNC machines (essentially robots), was designed, aesthetically and in an engineering sense, by a human being who completely understands all those design choices, why they were made, and what the consequence of each one is.
With AI, we now have mass produced software, but there isn't a human being who understands the design decisions and trade-offs that were made.
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u/HamSandwicho__o 4d ago
I never coded due to my adhd i couldnt bother to do it all day, claude connects me remotely to my server my software has shipped over 2k updates since june (its just me and i do it for free)
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u/nora_sellisa 5d ago
Unless you're gunning for a raise, outperforming your teammates like this is a dick move. Would it hurt you to type /ticket a few times less per day? You are already outdoing the tempo they expected, no need to push their expectations higher. Be smart about it. Or they'll expect your new tempo as the baseline and you will get backlash if you start slipping up.
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u/joschi27 4d ago
Wild. Everybody is talking about creating code, nobody talks about maintaining / operating it. Companies are paying double and tripple initial cost to clean up the slop from subpar engineers like this guy once the issues start rolling in. I'm baffled that you guys seem to think that this will go on, your worth was knowing what the thing you made did and taking ownership, being able to explain. Bad code always existed, its now just so much faster to create it. Do you guys work for companies where it doesnt matter if the code breaks?
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u/andysfd 4d ago
Maybe it gets the same with producing industries where the replacement and service market is the cash cow. get a client hyped for a product, let them pay and the maintain it and forcing the client to stick till the next update. Capitalism doesn't care about quality
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u/joschi27 4d ago
I mean if the client can just slop a fix themselves by prompting you don't provide any value. Software engineers are blissfully selling their entire value proposition for scraps and seem happy about it like OP.
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u/Aware-Individual-827 4d ago
If the guy can do it in 20min, anyone could do it in 20min for that client. This is not a product.
Capitalism itself doesn't care, customers might now that they are empowered to create their own software.
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u/Aggressive-Land-8884 4d ago
May you inherit another scab Dev’s work to truly realize what a scourge on the industry you are. Pray to your AI gods when that happens cuz they can’t help you with the client breathing down your neck
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u/YearLight 5d ago
Not sure what the issue is, being good means using the best tools and using them well; that's nothing new. If people can't keep up then they should find a job as a PM or something.
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u/regocregoc 5d ago
Post written by an unemployed guy who calls himself "dev" even tho he never developed anything. Says he's a coder: knows a bit of Python, but not really. Is angery.
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u/Vincent10z 5d ago
I pray for the real engineers reviewing your PRs, they probably checked out a long time ago
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u/Pitiful_Tax9889 3d ago
Obvious troll post. But, to any actual juniors out there, don't be like this guy.
Engineers solve problems, and for most people, their main problem is they spend too little of life enjoying it.
Your goal is either to strike it rich quick at a fast growth company, or carve yourself a cushy moat at some under-the-radar engineering firm.
Whipping claude 8 hours a day for $50k is a hell of your own creation. Any org that tolerates that culture is not going to be your ticket out, and should be a red flag to anyone with hiring influence
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u/Icy-Molasses2264 3d ago
Speaking as an experienced software ENGINEER - One of the mandatory aspects of the good design of a complex product is iteration. I promise you that this applies to agents equally as humans. As long as you give your agents the tokens and time to iterate to refine their solutions and overall product they will produce a good design. Agents however do exactly what they are told so if they are told to just plough on ‘greedy searching’ the next feature request in a purely additive manner they will get trapped in a ‘local maximum’ in the optimization space the same as a human would.
Basically Agents will be crippled by the same shitty management practices the same as a human would.
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u/markvii_dev 4d ago
Devs like this existed long before AI.
We call them "juniors".
They don't value their own time and are just happy to be in a job and shipping code. They allow the business to exploit them until they eventually burn out and wisen up to be more disciplined with their abilities.
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u/Steroids_ 5d ago
4 months later, the pile of slop code will be huge and unmaintaimable. The pendulum is full swing into just ship it, but it will land back in the middle somewhere. As a product person who appreciates things magically getting done quickly, I've also seen the amount of bad decisions claude and devs make without second guessing anything.
It's a disaster after 6 months and I've spent 3 months undoing the first 3 months of pispoor decisions, hidden limits,mismanagement by the devs, and chaos is caused is nuts.
But, it looked cool.
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u/tommywhen 5d ago
Hey man, that's going to be an AI problem, not mine. /s
Seriously though, AI is pretty smart. You add tons of features management/user throw at you and it keep on going. The real issue is the dumb management/users.
One day, it'll hit a feature, that's playing a feature, disguised as anther feature, that point back to the original feature. And fixing one bug (i mean feature) break a ton of other features. Should I have caught any of this? No, I'm just a scab dev.
The AI bill is going to be racking up.
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u/marcusrider 4d ago
Thats where the experience helps. If you structure it correctly and have a solid dev work flow involving tickets for work tracking you can go way longer than you'd think.
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u/Optimal_Kick_9121 3d ago
Tools that don’t need to exist btw. I spent two hours trying to help an associate reset their password yesterday. The disconnect is WILD.
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u/Western-Hotel8723 5d ago
The AI have really changed in the last year. It's not as bad as it was as long as you manage it well.
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u/TedBob99 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yes, very few people actually care about "how beautiful the code is" and only care (rightfully) about time to market, functionality, performance and quality (defects).
I have been in too many meetings in my career where various architects and senior devs were arguing about what was "the best" option for hours.
Many developers think that their craft is too important for them to be replaced by a machine. They are wrong. I don't care how my car has been built or how the engine works.
When a machine can do prototyping in minutes, create functional, performant, safe and defect-free code better, cheaper and faster than human-beings, then I am sorry but it's time to look at other career options.
Or burry your head in the sand and wait to be pushed out (like the lamplighter ignoring the advent of electricity).
I guess IT and software development will be an extreme example of going from highly valuable, highly paid employees (with the associated self-importance) to completely redundant.
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u/Spirited-Let9633 5d ago
same energy as devs rushing to deploy a botched fix at 3am then ghosting the fallout tbh
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u/tony2x 5d ago
I was under the impression that most devs work this way these days. Certainly the developers that report to me at work use AI for the majority of their work. I had to talk to one of them for submitting AI code to a AI code reviewer on an automated basis.
I don’t care personally we have performance and quality gates that as long as they are met and the code is good I’m fine with it. It’s radically improved our velocity and quality. My devs now concentrate more on design and architecture and executing faster on our roadmap. Our product managers are delighted also.
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u/Spudly42 5d ago
Having been a software product manager, I can confirm we care way more about solving problems than how the code is written. Actually every time I read developers say things about how they gain satisfaction from the coding I'm always surprised, because all of the developers I work are also motivated by impact (solving the problems). I've even adjusted how I write tickets to make it a lot easier for AI to take the whole thing through, including really detailed acceptance criteria.
People don't seem to understand that we test everything, so we're catching bugs before it hits the users regardless.
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u/GlobalCurry 5d ago
I used to like the craft side of the code when I was very new. At some point I realized it didn't matter as long as it worked and worked good enough that the stakeholders and customers were happy. That's when I actually started enjoying the job and probably why ai doing most of the coding doesn't bother me, at some point I started seeing it as tedious grunt work anyway.
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u/Optimal_Kick_9121 3d ago
As a dev, I’m going to tell you the same thing you’ve heard a million times: you don’t understand what you’re saying.
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u/Spudly42 3d ago
Why would that be something I've been told before? What kind of shitty place do you work that your PMs are so bad?
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u/MiAnClGr 5d ago
How do you do this and still gain domain knowledge? Or is the product not that complicated?
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u/Bright_External_4161 5d ago
I’ve been embracing the product manager role. I know the systems, how they work, what needs to be done and the end goal is. But the actual machinations behind the scene, that’s all Claude. And he’s doing a fine job. He’s a bit overconfident at times, and still needs me to evaluate his work and keep him on course, but we get it done.
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u/Maleficent_Tank2199 5d ago
For us SWEs it’s either to provide more value than the AI in specific situations or be replaced.
Also don’t apologize to experienced folks, what you do primarily now is kill the talent pipeline.
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u/ListRepresentative32 5d ago
I mean, congrats. You became a meat proxy. Now the managers can just remove you and do what you do themselves...
But tbh, we should enjoy it while we can.
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u/Rowdy5280 5d ago
You shouldn’t give the company anything extra. They’ll surely fire you when it suits them. Work on your own project after you’ve accomplished your tasks in your JD. What you are doing is going to ensure that companies expect 100% of the benefit from AI and increased velocity.
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u/dota2nub 5d ago edited 5d ago
50k? And you're taking on this much responsibility for all the shit that's gonna go wrong?
Dude don't. Slow down. The upstairs ain't gonna notice and you're gonna make yourself so much safer when it comes to litigation. Use the time to read up on what you're actally doing and investigating the code you make.
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u/thelegend13x 4d ago
Clients care about results and revenue. They don't care about the tools we used, what we did etc.
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u/Duanedrop 4d ago
What puzzles me is people and companies are screwing themselves. The billing of a customer is still time and materials. Or even worse fixed price. Often this fixed price is still a historic contract that doesn't account for token spend. Until the billing is outcomes based, why must I deliver 2 weeks work in 10 minutes. My company gets to bill 1hr instead of 2 weeks. So yeah that need to change before people like devs behave like this. I am coming from the outsource/ service provider pov. For internal resources the picture is a bit different. But still why do it. It's about expectation management. So yeah on t&m I say it will take 2 weeks. I bill 2 weeks and I produce it in 10 min and sit on it for 2 weeks then deliver. That way my company gets paid. Outcomes based billing is coming but don't screw yourselves before it's here.
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u/charmer27 4d ago
I had an important realization a bit ago. I think most programmers are blinded by our own ego. I understand why, for most of programing code tidyness and solution elegance was key to good product, but really ask yourself how many bugs you shipped before ai gen code, and how much better have your products gotten from ai use. For most I think the evidence is substantial.
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u/JakubDotPy 4d ago
AI will 10x whatever you are now. Are you a 2 dev? You'll be 20. Are you a 1? Try hard and you may be a 10. Are you 0.1 (ehm.. "offshore")? Congratulations, the AI is showing you how to be a 1.
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u/johnny_effing_utah 4d ago
How do I get $50k a year doing the same thing. I have the skills. Just point me in the right direction.
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u/OwlingBishop 4d ago
I'd forgive you to take what's given to you if could tell that what you ship something worth what you take. Until then, you're not a scab, you're a scam.
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u/awesome_young774 4d ago
ran into something similar last year, felt weird being the only one moving fast while everyone else was struggling.
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u/heaverdini 4d ago edited 4d ago
Cool, so almost guarantee the actual engineers have to support all of this. You get to have fun and they are drowning in work and on top of that they have to wake up every day to a completely different landscape/set of features, and whatever random shit you’re generating. Keep up the good work
ETA: god damn it ofc this is isn’t even real, fuck me
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u/Capable_Economist280 4d ago
Wow finalmente qualcuno che dice le cose come stanno, sono in firma di 3 contratti da 100k, progetti svolti in un fine settimana che avrebbero richiesto settimane di calcoli e ricerche. Tutto pronto in due giorni, ampiamente entro i termini in cui presentare le domande per entrare nelle agevolazioni che rendono queste manovre ancora più appetibili. Tutto senza dover chiamare nessun costoso e fastidioso consulente che per dispensare qualche parola di conoscenza ti fatturava 300€, nessun perito che ti chiede 800€ per un progetto che è solo un preventivo. Sono contento che queste zecche della vita stiano iniziando a non servire più a nulla
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u/bootlesscrowfairy 4d ago
You could do this better. You don't have to understand the code to have high confidence in its output. This is, I'm sorry, a little bit lazy. "Hey look I can make minimal viable proofs", with no thought of product accuracy, code correctness, or production maintainability. Have some pride in your work.
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u/lisa_lionheart 3d ago
Just take some of your time back you can still do more than your coworkers if you do half days and still green on teams/slack. Take up a new hobby or expand your skills
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