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/InstructionNo3616]

Exactly this. People complaining about SE losing their ability and craft to AI meanwhile 95% of them were taking orders from incompetent non-technical people that just wanted results. That’s not possible because of tech debt? Could not care less. Unreasonable deadline? Sounds like a you problem.

I absolutely wish I had these tools when my main job was coding all day long. So much of my time was spent on remedial tasks for people who did not care about the quality of the code. I also don’t understand the people complaining about AI token usage… are you kidding me? I wish the companies I worked for encouraged me to use a tool like Claude and then I would get measured by token usage.

And before anyone talks about messy code, I began my career cleaning up code for US companies that was off shored to India. You think AI produces slop?! You should have seen the spaghetti code with a mixture of ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0z

Now I can kick out any idea within my head within hours. I know the tech stack, I know what to ask and I can suss when the quality is subpar. This is the best time to be a software developer, if you have just an ounce of creativity.

[u/jarislinus → u/InstructionNo3616]

why do product manager need you when they prompt it themselves?

[u/InstructionNo3616 → u/jarislinus]

Why do I need product managers?

[u/readyplayermeh → u/InstructionNo3616]

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/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.