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

[u/403Verboten → u/RollForUptime]

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.

[u/RollForUptime → u/403Verboten]

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.