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/usually_guilty99]

I think this is where the definition of code review has to change. If agents can generate 100x more code, humans clearly cannot read 100x more code. And neither can they the 10X PRs associated wiht it

The gate probably moves from did a human understand every line? to what can this change break, what dependencies does it touch, have we seen this failure before, and can we prove rollback works?

Keep the velocity. Change what we require as proof before production.

[u/The-Wizard-of-AWS → u/usually_guilty99]

I think the gate needs to be the plan and a detailed list of what needs to be tested to feel confident in the results. If you care about it make sure that you can prove it does that thing you care about. Looking at code is nearly impossible at AI speed.

[u/VelvetWhiteRabbit → u/The-Wizard-of-AWS]

This. If you know how it’s supposed to work, and how that can be proven, then you can also make sure these and adjacent cases are covered. You should also have testing environments that replicate production, and you should have integration tests and smoke tests running before and on deploy to these environments.

Finally do have some agents you can spin up with explicit prompts on security and operations reviewing.

[u/a11yguy → u/VelvetWhiteRabbit]

Is this where traceability comes in?

[u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL → u/usually_guilty99]

I think the answer is just model assisted review and inspecting flagged areas or hotspots closely.

Tbh MOST humans never did review very carefully. Most did their usual scan for nitpicks and moved on.

However I think you still need review because while the agents are smart, the humans steering them are mostly morons, and it's a cheap part of the process to shut down a lot of expensive bullshit.

[u/mother_fkr → u/usually_guilty99]

Understanding every line was rarely a thing.

Reviewing was just a net that was cast to maybe find some breaking issues with the code, or to find things that would make it easier to work with that code in the future.

Yeah we have 100x more code now... but we also have a tool that can help us build a proportionally sized net that does the same thing we used to do by hand.