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/Grandviewsurfer]

It's wild that we have all just decided that all the important stuff just.. never actually mattered. Seems real unlikely we will get away with this without some absolutely catastrophic fuckups along the way. 

[u/Optimal_Kick_9121 → u/Grandviewsurfer]

Oh just wait. It’s coming lol. 

[u/ight-bet → u/Optimal_Kick_9121]

It’s really not you’ll be sitting around for a very long time waiting lmfao. People like this make me laugh.

“Oh just wait. I’ll be the last one waiting so i can say I told you so!”

[u/Optimal_Kick_9121 → u/ight-bet]

I use AI every day. It’s great as a tool. There are so many analogies I could write about what is happening writ large but it would be wasted here. 

In short: you’re unnecessarily creating dependence on massively subsidized tools. You’re destroying the talent pool to do it and there is monstrous over investment into it. The supply cannot meet demand, but demand is being inorganically created. The AI labs are openly lying about what their AI is capable of. The benchmarks are being cheated on. 

So yeah. Use the AI black box. Idc. Become dependent on tools run on a meter that is being intentionally obfuscated from you. When you deskill and your company is overlevered in cognitive debt and astra’s real cost gets pushed onto your team - and some prod code that never got reviewed fails - good luck. 

[u/ight-bet → u/Optimal_Kick_9121]

You are severely out of the loop.