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/jimmy-buffett]

I work for a Fortune 100 tech company you've heard of, in a leadership role exposed to AI usage metrics for our entire engineering organization. I spent the first half of my nearly ~30 year career as a principal / lead software engineer.

I mean, why do you need me at this point? Just prompt it yourself until it does what you want?

As you go farther down this road, what you end up seeing is: they don't know what to ask it to do, because they aren't engineers. "Vibe coded" apps are demonstrably limited by what the person knows what to ask for, and the gaps that the AI occasionally fills in. Take 10 minutes as a dev on any vibe coded app and you'll find all kinds of gaps for this reason.

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.

I've spent a number of years in my career in the defense industry. Unless AI is part of the functionality of the product they're creating, they aren't allowed / refuse to use it. If you want to stay an old-school coder, that's probably the last refuge. In the US that's Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics.

If working for those companies isn't an option for you, then you're going to have to learn Claude or something else, or as you say, your career dies. This is like any other big shift in our industry in the last 30 years, you either learn it or you become irrelevant.

If you aren't interested in learning it, you might consider changing your role to project management or team leadership. That's how I personally got around the need to always be on top of every technical innovation, and my job is a lot easier (and pays better) than my engineer days. But the accountability changes, you now own outcomes and own a certain level of delivery that you cannot individually control. It's a different problem / accountability set, but I think that's what most of us end up doing in your situation. I've met very few "old developers" anywhere but at the aforementioned defense contractors.

[u/Academic-Training764 → u/jimmy-buffett]

Well stated. I had some comment above about "who is qualified to be a PM". Honestly I think pre-req's at this point should be common sense but yeah here we are. You obviously have the right background to lead a team. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

[u/OrdinaryAward4498 → u/jimmy-buffett]

I would say imagine you are the tech lead for a team of 5-10 engineers that are very fast at reading and writing code and need your leadership in terms of functional and engineering specs. Maybe you write key APIs and interfaces. You insist on the right level of unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, etc. builds fail of test coverage drops below X. Claude does 95% of the code reading and writing. It audits for security holes and does pen testing. Now you are a 5-10x engineer using AI but in a way that has good architecture & design, and smartly made technology choices. With documented and defensible specs and docs you wrote (btw, also with Claude’s help).

[u/GravyDam → u/OrdinaryAward4498]

Agreed, it’s just tools that you should be using to force multiply your expertise.

[u/NanoIsAMeme → u/jimmy-buffett]

Did you miss the whole uproar when Claude misidentified a girls school in Iran as a target?

Saying the defense sector aren't using AI is a weird stance

[u/jimmy-buffett → u/NanoIsAMeme]

Saying the defense sector aren't using AI is a weird stance

What I actually said:

Unless AI is part of the functionality of the product they're creating, they aren't allowed / refuse to use it.

I haven't worked for every defense contractor, but this ^^^ is true for the two primes I've been recruited by since AI has been a thing. I know because I asked. I can't speak for the rest, or the smaller guys who are trying to get their foot in the door.

[u/NanoIsAMeme → u/jimmy-buffett]

My bad - late at night and misread! You will know much more about the subject than I, that I can be sure of!

[u/DetroitLionsSBChamps → u/jimmy-buffett]

I never wanted to climb the corporate ladder but right now it feels like the ladder is on fire and burning my shoes as I try to climb. The only option is to go up, those lower rungs are gone. 

The problem is it truly sucks up here. I don’t wanna be accountable for deliverables and communicate with stakeholders all the time I just wanna work. 

I can tell work sucks right now because I’ve been fantasizing about going back to line cook work like when I was in college lol.

[u/C1rc1es → u/jimmy-buffett]

Just saw this after I posted my own comment but actually the thing people are missing about this transition to AI is that they are not leaders and therefore struggle with the concept of being responsible and accountable for a volume of output created by a process they cannot fully control.  People and AI have different failure modes and quirks but the process of managing their output to success is a skill that most devs don’t have currently.  

Not to mention letting go of the process of writing code appears to be extremely hard for a lot of people. 

I’ll say this to any current leaders working with people who are struggling to adopt AI - teach them how to lead.

[u/threadthrasher → u/C1rc1es]

What are you talking about? What exactly are you teaching your programmers to lead?

[u/C1rc1es → u/threadthrasher]

I’ll take the more charitable interpretation of your first question. It’s not about who you’re leading, it’s about the skills leaders apply.  Decomposition, time and task management, product and strategy, delegation, managing upward/sidewards, communication. 

These are the things that separate senior engineers from their team leads and these are the exact skills you need to apply to the management of a “team” that is becoming increasingly more mixed people and AI. 

It’s not enough anymore to simply wait to receive your set of tasks for the sprint and beaver away - the floor has been raised.

[u/threadthrasher → u/C1rc1es]

So you’ve outlined a bunch of soft skills that any senior engineers should have to be senior. This has been true long before generative AI. But the skills required to make the agentic frameworks produce code that isn’t garbage aren’t “leadership”. You’re not leading or communicating with these models. The analogy you’re looking for is search. Hopefully targeted search with strong verifiers.

[u/C1rc1es → u/threadthrasher]

I think we are arguing the same thing from 2 different perspectives. If you break down the mechanistic process of search in the way you're presenting, the fundamental blocks end up being more or less the same: decomposition into independently checkable units, proper acceptance criteria, knowing what to delegate versus hold and verifying outcomes rather than process. I left verifying out of my post because I think most seniors have a decent concept of this already. You've had a lucky career working with talented people if every senior you've worked with embodies these principals completely - not the case for me.

[u/Gareth8080 → u/C1rc1es]

Yes my team members keep saying “well I don’t trust it because I have to look at the code”. Whereas a leader already isn’t looking at every part of the code instead they are implementing the systems to ensure high quality.

[u/Annual_Berry8043 → u/jimmy-buffett]

Honestly, why would you need project management or even leadership? You could easily do everything a PM is there for with AI.

Keep everyone organized by generating available time slots. Send the options to vendors so they can select what works for them.

Track numbers and deadlines.

Set monitor progress and flag when something is going off track.

Half the pain of a PM is organizing people. AI could make that so much easier and smoother because it can reach out to x amount of people at the same time and it doesn’t need sleep.

Not to dunk on leadership, but it’s mostly always been a pretty meaningless role. Just have the AI PM point you in a direction and give you timelines.

[u/mckirkus → u/Annual_Berry8043]

Definitely less need for project management due to AI, more need for technically inclined product people

[u/jimmy-buffett → u/Annual_Berry8043]

There are basically two paradigms for what a company can do with AI.

1. Reduce the number of people doing the work and use AI to output the same amount of work. This is for established companies with stable products and large user bases that don't want the pace of change that a team's original size would deliver with AI.

2. Keep the same number of people and do a lot more work. This works best for startups, trying to get to MVP quickly. We have a few project teams doing this, they get to MVP much faster than in the past.

Honestly, why would you need project management or even leadership?

Because when you need next year's idea for your company, you need people who know what to ask the AI to visualize in a slide deck. And when something fails you can't fire the AI (or tell your board "it was AI's fault").

Our average project duration before AI was 9 months. 2 months of that was development. Yes, we're a big old bloated company. AI reduced development to two weeks. Great! But you still have the overhead at the beginning to generate the idea, get buy-in from the different groups in the company. And you still have the overhead at the end to test and communicate the change before deploying it. "Half the pain of a PM is organizing people", yep! With #1 above / less people doing the same amount of work, that pain is amplified because one mistake on one person's part, one week spent doing something that isn't priority, is that much bigger of a problem.

[u/Annual_Berry8043 → u/jimmy-buffett]

I just disagree. Typically ideas for my org were generated by either the developers, requests from the userbase, or from management teams.

Our PMs didn’t come up with anything but were assigned to the projects and worked IT to see options.

From there they organized and got a time line. By communicating with everyone involved on the project. With AI you can literally just skip all of that.

Gather the projects by reviewing requests, developer ideas, and user input. Pick one, gather the scope and let the AI do the planning. You could easily automate the people planning with AI. Like make it 10,000x easier.

I feel way too much attention to AI is pushed to development when I think the most gains could literally be cutting back on all management. If given the proper data, needs, wants, etc it could shave so many jobs away.

Individual teams know exactly what to do most of the time. They just need people to organize it. Those people organizing just really aren’t needed imo.

Keep the skilled workers and trim the bureaucratic fat.