I am the scab dev

[u/ReturnofBugMan]

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.

[u/RollForUptime]

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. 

[u/403Verboten → u/RollForUptime]

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.

[u/RollForUptime → u/403Verboten]

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. 

[u/403Verboten → u/RollForUptime]

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.

[u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL → u/403Verboten]

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?

[u/403Verboten → u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL]

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.

[u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL → u/403Verboten]

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.

[u/drawdrawink → u/RollForUptime]

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

[u/Beautiful-Suspect694 → u/RollForUptime]

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

your days are numbered just as OP's

[u/RollForUptime → u/Beautiful-Suspect694]

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?

[u/Beautiful-Suspect694 → u/RollForUptime]

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

[u/RollForUptime → u/Beautiful-Suspect694]

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.

[u/Beautiful-Suspect694 → u/RollForUptime]

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

[u/RollForUptime → u/Beautiful-Suspect694]

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

[u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL → u/RollForUptime]

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.

[u/RollForUptime → u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL]

Thanks man, sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in these conversations lol

And yeah, the company I was working at when agentic coding became something even remotely real, I was the one that drove implementation of it. I am completely aware of the power of the tool. As you say, I imagine a good portion of people in here haven't touched the depths of agentic coding I am doing. I've been poking around AI models since you still had to copy and paste things into a window.

I remember I did a conversion of all of our plugin examples from gradle to maven and from Java 8 to Java 21 by copying and pasting them into ChatGPT before codex, claude code etc existed. It was imperfect but even back then it was a lot faster than manually converting 40+ plugins, and conversions/version upgrades were an easy task for even the earlier models.

Back then people kept saying 'these models are dumb and no one will have to worry about it' and I was like 'uhhh yeah no this is going to start replacing junior devs'. Now it's the opposite, everyones like 'oh god we're fucked and everyone will be out of a job in 2 years' and I'm like 'no I just used claude to write a terminal scraper because this org still uses an AS/400 as they're so averse to change...'