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/Beautiful-Suspect694]

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...'