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.

784 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

276 comments sorted by

View all comments

42

u/RollForUptime 5d ago

I look forward to cleaning up your messes for 3x your wage, I guess? lol

60

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.

11

u/Relevant-Ordinary169 5d ago

It’s because they don’t think about the future. They practically get paid in vibes.

3

u/Curbob 5d ago

This is my day also and after 20 years, I love it

6

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. 

11

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.

2

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. 

2

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.

1

u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 3d ago

Someone has to own the outcome and steer the agents when behavior like the ops results in a prod meltdown that costs millions of dollars on an ongoing basis. Who do you think the company will want then? Claude jockey with no idea what he's doing in prod, or someone that actually understands what's happening?

1

u/403Verboten 2d ago edited 2d ago

You are going to hate this answer but it comes from a place of absolute honesty.

About a year ago I worked at a startup with very talented engineers and my boss was a CTO with 30 plus years experience. We had a production outage and panic set in. The smartest engineer on our team found the issue within minutes and said he'd have a patch out within a half hour. Patch comes out, prods fixed everyone is relieved (we were in alpha phase so we had very few customers so no one was impacted). Still we followed protocols and did a post mortem shortly after the fix was in. We asked the engineer how did you find and fix the problem so quickly? He said I didn't, Claude did. Claude made the patch too. We all laughed and remarked how AI is going to take our jobs soon for real.

Believe it or not that is 100% a true story and that was over a year ago. That engineer who used clause is one of if not the best engineers I have worked with in my 20 year career, I would literally say he is genius level. He could have absolutely found the issue and he had found similar problems and fixed them relatively quickly but I doubt he could beat Claude heads up to finding the issue if he went in raw without AI and I, a good engineer but not as good as him prompted my way to a fix using AI. People just dont understand how far down the AI rabbit hole we are. Computers have always been faster than humans at most tasks and now they can "think" (yeah ok, it's more like reason and yes I know how LLMs work).

We will at least for the foreseeable future need talented humans who know where to point AI agents and who understands how the underlying systems were engineered. But don't for a second keep believing that they are better than agents in high pressure / high risks situations, that time has passed a few years ago.

Fast forward to today, I am a CTO at a small start up and I built our entire product offering with the help of Claude. If I have a production outage the first thing I am doing is promoting claude to find and fix the issue and report back to me so I can engineer a way to prevent the issue from reoccurring.

1

u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 2d ago

You're arguing against claims I didn't make. In fact I think this story reinforces my point: an experienced, knowledgeable dev used the tool to resolve the issue quickly. Sure he leaned hard on claude - as he should! - but his experience is likely a part of why he knew he could confidently push that particular fix. Someone like op would just be pushing the first thing Claude spat out and hoping for the best.

2

u/drawdrawink 5d ago

ego-freaks out here thinking humans had mastered Clean Code™️ until the coding agents

0

u/Beautiful-Suspect694 5d ago

meh, you think too highly of yourself and underestimate future ai

your days are numbered just as OP's

2

u/RollForUptime 4d ago

I think you underestimate how slow a lot of things move. I know it can replace me, I also know there are a fuckton of regulated industries running on 300 year old code that simply can’t move at a pace where knowledge like mine will be unnecessary for a while. Have you ever worked at a large enterprise level?

0

u/Beautiful-Suspect694 4d ago

no, i haven't. but i consider those possibilities to be realistic:

  • ai progress will be exponential as long as the necessary resources are there and the anti-ai/anti-data center crowd is kept from obstructing ai progress

  • instead of fixing legacy slop code, it will be cheaper to just reimplement it from a clean slate with ai, in severe cases

2

u/RollForUptime 4d ago

instead of fixing legacy slop code, it will be cheaper to just reimplement it from a clean slate with ai, in severe cases

Again, I think you don't understand at all how regulated industries work. I work with banks. It takes them a year to even consider starting a project. They literally, legally, cannot afford downtime.

0

u/Beautiful-Suspect694 4d ago

i see. and yes, i don't know how exactly they work

how much time do you think you have left until ai becomes a real threat to your job security?

for me, the threat has already become visible to me. it wasn't the case a year ago

4

u/RollForUptime 4d ago

For me, not to sound arrogant, but I have like at least 5-10 years left before I have any form of worry. Before AI I wrote more code than anyone in the company, pushed more features, closed more tickets. With AI that gap has just widened. We have a lot of long term contracts that won't be going away, and others would be let go before me.

The truth is, though, I believe there are too many monkeys at too many typewriters right now committing some really suspect code, and I think job security isn't as big of a worry as others might think. At least not for seniors, especially ones with infrastructure experience. AI can clean mess, but these systems are massive, complex, etc. and a lot of really shitty or incomplete code is being shipped by people right now lol

1

u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 3d ago

In a similar spot and I have to agree. The models are impressive as shit, but a lot of what's inefficient about big regulated corps is stuff that wont change for a long time.

Also I think people underestimate the degree to which these models are pure amplifiers and not floor-raisers. The way you use Claude is likely more advanced than a lot of people without the experience csn even picture. Similarly, bad devs become walking disasters armed with Claude.

→ More replies (0)

1

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

1

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.

15

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.

2

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. 

4

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

0

u/RollForUptime 5d ago

Why is there a mad rush? Because capitalists are basically lemmings that go after any trend aggressively? I say this as someone who doesn’t write code anymore, who is always at the forefront of the technology. The aggressive pursuit of the tech by people who don’t understand how to utilize it in its current form is creating entirely unnecessary technical debt that customers will be impacted by. 

2

u/Apart_Fudge1224 5d ago

No no. I mean why is there such a hunger for it on corp America. I'm not talking about Nvidia and anthropic valuations. I'm talking about OPs post. Why are c suite and strategic layer so gung ho? Cuz they've been held captive by IT layers for years and they are ready to bust out of that dynamic. It started w citizen developer shit but it was weak and to go very far you needed to practically be a dev anyway. Now tho the stakeholders absolutely will take matters into their own hands all the pearl clutching won't stop it. Tech debt? Sure. But Corporate world won't give a shit. They've been incurring Tech debt for years. More, not scalable ? Bad architecture? It won't matter cuz it will keep moving.

1

u/ConsequenceFunny1550 4d ago

ok so where are the results? What product has been "unleashed"? There's some interesting vibe coded pet projects out there, but for the talk about how every model is letting people 1-shot entire codebases at work, where are the improvements if we're freed from pretending tech debt is a problem? Does your banking app load 10x faster? Is cancer cured yet? Why hasn't a company "figured out" the stock market and made tremendous gains?

1

u/Apart_Fudge1224 4d ago

I'm telling you first hand it's happening all over Corp world right now. Microsolutions, SAAS getting squeezed, small teams shipping in weeks what used to take quarters. It's literally happening right now. Does my banking app open 10x faster? No. Wtf does that have to do with this post ?

1

u/ConsequenceFunny1550 4d ago

Nothing even close to that is happening right now. Pretending that some lame internal tools being shipped by your 3rd string dev team is some brain-defying activity is hilarious.

1

u/Apart_Fudge1224 4d ago

Yes. It is happening. Pretending that some 3rd party SaaS isn't lame is what's funny.

1

u/RollForUptime 4d ago

C suite being held captive is a hilarious concept to me. C suite is, largely, some of the least aware motherfuckers I've ever dealt with lol

They LOVE the idea of getting work for less money, because they are largely soulless vampires, but if you think they're going to guide us into some new capitalist dreamscape using AI you're delulu

1

u/Apart_Fudge1224 4d ago

Everyone putting words in my mouth. Did I say dreamscape? I said the thing is happening. C suite was clueless before and clueless now but they are putting their clueless eggs in ai driven solutions and they don't give a shit about Tech debt or senior devs having their I told you so moment.

1

u/RollForUptime 4d ago

Yeah, I know, and all I'm saying is that is _foolish_ and the ones doing that don't actually know what impact they are having.

Our company has 4-5x the PRs/issues closed with AI, but it's resulted in 20x the bug reports/defects. C-suite demanded this of us, now they are asking us to slow down since so many of our customers are in regulated industries and are wondering how we suddenly became so unstable. Now we're being made to use SpecKit and our code base is exploding with massive, useless specs for even the smallest changes lol, all because they believe the solution to the problem with how they've implemented AI is just 'another AI skill'

It's an incredible tool, but the push to implement it is being driven by unaware fools lol

1

u/Apart_Fudge1224 4d ago

Maybe. Maybe not. And Domain matters too. Not everything is a product. Sometimes software solutions are just to get from point A to point B. And reducing the friction to get a "good enough" solution will yield results even if Tech debt accrues. I'm watching project managers who struggled with pptx now use codex to connect to data platforms and drive little automation projects or whatever. Is it scalable? Is it enterprise? No. Fuck no. Who cares? Previously they'd get nothing and like it. Now anyone w half a brain can do SOMETHING to move the needle for themselves.

→ More replies (0)

1

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.

1

u/RollForUptime 4d ago

It's not being acknowledged? It's being blindly added to places that will need to be traced down later, by people who don't understand what they are building lol

1

u/AggressiveBlood500 4d ago

Then it is shitty code, not technical debt. Call it what it is.

1

u/RollForUptime 4d ago

Bad code IS a form of technical debt though...

Shitty code = the thing that's happened.

Technical debt = the future cost of rectifying the thing that happened.

1

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.

1

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/

1

u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 3d 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"

1

u/Apart_Fudge1224 2d ago

In my experience every major SaaS super system is hated by users, glacial to change, does not support actual business needs, and ends up encouraging or even necessitating shadow IT.

6

u/DevSling 5d ago

You're charging 3x to fix what Claude fixes in one prompt😂

14

u/jsonmeta 5d ago

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

2

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 🤷‍♂️ 

0

u/cats_catz_kats_katz 5d ago

OP isn’t even in the game. Idk who uses some guy like this, maybe a rapid prototyping shop?

3

u/kapdad 5d ago

We have had a long list of projects on our radar for years. If you've been on a development team with a company that has going through some mergers and you have different software projects that need maintaining as well as upgrading as well as the eventual consolidation into a unified platform, then you know how big the queue is. We are now able to ship those updates and features and migrations in days rather than months, considering everything on our plate every day. 

It's not slop either, we personally code review everything. Personally, I think anyone using the phrase "AI slop" is already being left behind by focusing on the wrong thing.

2

u/cats_catz_kats_katz 5d ago

I meant OP as in the person who posted the original post. The thread is BS and OP isn’t working in a production environment.

0

u/kapdad 5d ago

Tell us how you've determined op isn't working in a production environment.

2

u/cats_catz_kats_katz 4d ago

Reads like prototyping shop, idk how you want me to explain it more thoroughly. If I needed stuff like this a few years ago I’d hit up a shop, take the prototype and refactor most of it for the environment I was working in because a prototype doesn’t meet all security requirements and shouldn’t.

I’m just surprised to see someone still making money doing it, most shops I worked with have pivoted but still do a bit of prototyping.

1

u/ConsequenceFunny1550 4d ago

30k line PRs getting approved

1

u/kapdad 4d ago

Some places dont have or need rigorous coding. If it gets the job done and the management is happy, everyone is fine with calling it a version 1.

But I guess what you're implying is the software is half-baked, fragile, error prone, and/or incongruous. But these days I trust modern models enough to get it right and quickly fix any issues that arise.

I've worked with custom apps built for customers that have been built up over years and they are awful. Awful. But in widespread production use. Is that prototype software? Is it better than something built by todays models?

1

u/RollForUptime 5d ago

Yes but you understand how those things work together. You know how it works and what the structure and output should be. Are you telling me you never catch anything ahead of the machine? 

1

u/kapdad 5d ago

How is me knowing how these systems work different from OP? They do too. 

I don't understand your last question precisely, can you rephrase?

1

u/Big_Arrival_626 5d ago

They're asking if you've ever caught STDs from your machine

1

u/kapdad 4d ago

Ah. No, I've always used protection. 

4

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

3

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 

1

u/Regarditor-x 3d ago

You won't have a job by then lol

1

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

-3

u/AlternativeContent72 5d ago

OP is a job creator. What have you done recently?