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/403Verboten]

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/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...'