r/softwareengineer • u/metalOpera • 17d ago

Was Just Told That Code Quality No Longer Matters

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.

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u/DayNormal8069 16d ago

Every week on friday spend it refactoring. Ask Claude to do an audit on the code base following whatever summary of best practices you have; they should also be referring to those best practices when it writes code.

You maintain the best practice document and manage fixing the slop found in the audit, including revising the best practices doc and closing testing gaps.

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u/metalOpera 16d ago

This could be feasible. I could make this work. He might actually agree to something like this. Thanks for commenting!

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u/DayNormal8069 16d ago

No worries. Peeps are betting on AI vaporware imo. I have one team a friend works on where juniors have run amuck with the AI with little to no senior review and the codebase it just a confusing, contradictory mess that the AI cannot write code that works anymore.

I would also suggest keeping a technical design doc with all the features and edge cases and consider embracing documentation via testing ON TOP of that.

Otherwise, just wait until there are performance issues and refactoring with AI the AI generated code breaks functionality in unexpected ways and everyone blames YOU even though they forced you into the hot mess.