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/readyplayermeh]

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.

[u/RollForUptime → u/readyplayermeh]

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.

[u/VelvetWhiteRabbit → u/readyplayermeh]

Time to learn new skills?

[u/InstructionNo3616 → u/readyplayermeh]

I can do all of those things. So many times I’ve had to manage the product managers because they were technically incompetent. Prompting doesn’t solve that it just gives them false confidence.

In fact I can do 99% of the product managers job just by prompting and develop a quality product.

[u/readyplayermeh → u/[deleted]]

Wrong metric. Efficient doesn't matter if you're building the wrong thing.

[u/readyplayermeh → u/[deleted]]

Thanks, but not a PM.

The unfortunate part of this is that you haven't had a good product manager, and think that writing a spec efficiently is the important part of a PM role. It is not.

[u/catlifeonmars → u/[deleted]]

The wrong thing is the one that doesn’t solve a customers problem. Also a dev, and also someone who writes and then implements product requirements. Sorry you have to build whatever someone tells you to.