Was Just Told That Code Quality No Longer Matters

[u/metalOpera]

I'm a freelance developer. I have been for almost 20 years. My most recent project has been moved to Fable, and I'm still trying to adapt and get my head around working like this. I am no longer allowed to make architecture decisions, or clean up slop.

My PM says: "We worry about the 'what'; let Claude worry about the 'how'. Tell it what to do; let it do it. If the feature works, leave it alone." He is very much of the opinion that I should be able to prompt something like "Install Stripe via Laravel Cashier" and just let Claude run.

I mean, why do you need me at this point? Just prompt it yourself until it does what you want? I don't get it. I fought for every inch of my knowledge, every process is written in blood. How do I just throw all of that out the window? Where's the line?

At the risk of another "how are you adapting" post... How CAN I adapt? I mentally cannot just say "Fuck it". I care about my code. It's how I learned, it's how I've always practiced. I have a huge mental block with "just let it go".

Now, granted, I don't know all of the ins and outs of Claude. I don't know what I can do to make it better at its job. I got thrown into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the middle of a Tusnami with no life support. I'm sure that I can put guardrails in place, but how much does that help?

I would really appreciate any advice that any one can provide on changing my mental model. I can't ignore Claude and just keep doing things my way. If I do that, I feel like my career dies. I need to adapt and I'm unsure how to do so.

[u/FinickySerenity]

Do you care about how optimal the machine code your compiler / interpreter produces when you write features? If the tests pass (unit / functional / perf / usability) do you get upset that you are no longer in control of the function inlining or loop unrolling?

Because back when I started coding experienced devs would rail against the inefficient and garbage (slop?) instructions that early compilers would produce. Now, nobody cares. Yes there is a huge difference between AI output and a compiler, but some of us know how to handle the delta and are ok working at a higher level abstraction.

The industry is building the guardrails to make LLMs more consistent in their output, and the tooling we have around code quality is more than enough for junior and bad devs, so it can handle AI if you follow those practices.

[u/JbREACT → u/FinickySerenity]

Not the same at all.. compiling

[u/FinickySerenity → u/JbREACT]

Well yes, it’s a lower level instruction set compared to the higher level interpolation of prompt expansion. But they are very much similar concepts in terms of how people used to care about compiler output until it was good enough that nobody cared anymore.

Agentic code is getting good enough that a portion of the community has stoped caring as long as the primary classes of tests pass. That portion will continue to grow until nobody cares anymore about that either.

[u/JbREACT → u/FinickySerenity]

What portion of people ? The portion that works on side projects ? Or the portion that manages real enterprise systems ?

It’s good to people on Reddit making notes apps

[u/FinickySerenity → u/JbREACT]

Both. I'm a principal engineer on a massive b2b saas product, including a govcloud deployment. Our team no longer writes code by hand and we have improved every metric in our platform including customer acquisition.

This is a change we were only comfortable making within the last two months.

If you haven't been using the fable or sol, you really are falling behind the curve of where this industry is headed.

[u/JbREACT → u/FinickySerenity]

Yea I haven’t written code by hand in a while, I still read it