To be honest, this is less about Claude Code per se (or any other coding agent) and more about business and corporate culture. In my experience, if you work at a company whose culture is to deliver as fast as possible, then this is ultimately what you get when those same managers start to realize we can also ship 10x faster (no matter the costs). The "Delivery Pressure" is very real in _some_ corporations, and I _believe_ things like Claude/Codex just accelerate this even more, which is what we're seeing in some places. In a fast-place industry, can you blame 'em?
Having worked in/with multiple agencies over the years - working with humans who don't care/are pressured to just ship was exactly what he describes.
For example, I collaborated together with an agency that was working on a popular regional banking app. I was on another project with them and at one point decided to check out what they were doing.
It was a clusterfuck, to say the least. Four developers, four different architectures in the same codebase. One doesn't really understand the others, so he just sticks to his part.
The seams between the ownership parts are full of hacks. Concurrency issues are dealt with via hacks, just make things global and poll to check them. Navigation issues were solved by basically just reseting the app back to homescreen.
Testing wasn't really a thing, and the tests that were there were mostly broken ages ago, and nobody cared enough to fix them.
Product didn't care much, designers would prototype a feature, then devs would implement it and wait until the backend is done, then fix things because they never really aligned on the specs. Sometimes, there would be no design review or QA and they would just ship, while sometimes the product person would jump in and test something because it's "an important feature".
Then I got asked to collab with them on another project. Huge customer, huge project, existing codebase. The codebase was so bad I just wrote it from scratch. It was Java written like it's C++. Backend was python code, not updated in years, quadratic scaling everywhere. At one point, the inital GET request was taking over 3 minutes. I took a look and ofc, they didn't even use indexes in the DB.
For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.
> For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.
I think in these contexts AI has an overall positive effect, because it's a bit like having a competent developer that can solve technical debt, albeit in a narrow form.
So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.
The downside of blindly using AI in software development is that the software becomes poorly defined. AI-generated logic can be arbitrary, and as the codebase grows, more rules and assumptions become unclear.
Idk about that. I work for myself and I cannot stand coding with LLMs. Even if it were faster (I have only noticed slowdowns long term when using them), the experience of arguing with a slot machine is far more stressful and soul-sucking than even the gnarliest bug.
Yes coorporate “ship as fast as possible” is draining, but that doesn’t mean LLC coding isn’t also to blame.
I freelance too and I have been struggling personally for a while for other reasons but I absolutely recognise this. I have only about eighty lines of code in production that I fully did not write (thanks Muse Glimmer).
The difference between corporate salaried programming and freelance programming is who is on the hook in a direct sense for the bug the LLM introduced, or for maintaining the massive pile of code or the cognitive burden of ownership.
My experience of freelancing is that most of the people I am competing against for the work care less about the code (and things like quality, security, appropriateness, user burden), are faster, are happy to nickle-and-dime the bill, will charge more to fix their own bugs, churn out meaningless requirements specs that they cannot stick to, and rely on lack of client knowledge to get through.
So there has always been a problem of competing against the slapdash; they always win the quote. I care about longer-term maintainability, cost control and quality, and I lose out because of it. (I'm often asked to maintain or finish the work of people who beat me to the quote and then failed; nowadays I say no.)
The problem is, those people now use LLMs. For the immediate future, LLMs may actually be improving their output, certainly at the prototype stage, and they will now be including one-shot, vibe-coded demos with their quotes.
So what is a freelancer who still has a sense of ethics to do?
The long bet is that those people who do not care for quality will still be disappointing their clients, but how do you avoid using LLMs while still getting, at least, back to where you were in competing with them?
I don’t freelance anymore, so I can’t give any freelancing advice. Although freelancing has always been fraught with offshoring, price arbitraging, and generally lower quality (not saying all freelancing, just that it was an issue when I was freelancing a decade ago).
I’m sure LLMs have only made it worse, possibly pushing it over an edge where hand coding as a freelancer is not viable. I do not know.
Personally, I tell myself that we’re in the lowest of the low at the moment. Either AI will get substantially better, or it will get substantially worse. The amount of debt the industry is loaded up with is not sustainable. Something is going to have to crack. I expect in another 2 years for things to “settle down” on some side of the fence, although which side I do not know.
My quipy advice though is to build something for yourself. Be the boss that doesn’t require AI. We need more builders behind products, more indie products built because they’re cool and the founder is passionate about the problem; not more business types and cash grabs.
> My quipy advice though is to build something for yourself.
This! Groups with strong software skills (like HN) miss how LLMs unblock people who previously were unable to build what they wanted because they lacked the software skills.
I know an ME at work who have begged software folks for a year to build specific software he wants and was getting a mix of "we are too busy", "it does not work this way" and quick prototypes that were not quite what he wanted. Then he spent his free cycles with Claude building what he wanted. It took some time and some iterations and it may be ugly under the hood, but he wowed many folks with different types of demos of our system. The view he presented resonated with many users. And he feels empowered how that he can build tools he wants to try himself and do some projects that before he had to beg for, himself.
The software is being disrupted and disruptions are painful. But maintaining the status quo of several big tech names controlling everything we do on most electronic devices and optimizing for the doomscrolling time is not a worthy goal either. My 2c.
> This! Groups with strong software skills (like HN) miss how LLMs unblock people who previously were unable to build what they wanted because they lacked the software skills.
That isn't me. I have the software skills. The problem is not lack of ability building complex stuff from scratch, I do it over and over again, and I have had my own products in the past.
The problem is that LLMs do not actually improve the psychology of sustainable lone freelancing, which is more burdened with the problem of actually owning the entire problem and its consequences than someone vibe-coding their fun ideas in the lunchtime safety of their salaried job or even a single developer within a corporate team setting (because they can quit and walk away when they hate it). If you're still getting paid as you fix it when it breaks after deployment, you're in a different world; it doesn't matter to me how empowering LLMs are in that context!
When you are up against people who are bluffing/bodging, or small agencies who think coding is just a little step up from web design, or over-extended hobby coders working in the evenings, LLMs have a very different set of impacts on your life. I can't just run an experiment with some LLM code and roll it out, because I have to face the customer directly and because nobody is going to pay me to fix it; I am not on a salary that allows that kind of experimentation.
So I am left trying to work out how to use LLMs to catch up with the above people who are, without losing control.
I love it, although in my experience, one needs very strict agent rules that tightly define how the AI should develop. The problem is that 1) these rules take a lot of effort to build and 2) AIs always overengineer, complicate, overstructure, overdesign… ;)
Yeah, body shops existed before AI came around and your job in one of those is literally just to churn through tickets and get them across the board as fast as possible. Pure production line stuff. AI comes in and turns that to 11.
If you're looking for a decent job with even an ounce of creativity then an agency/consultancy shop is rarely the place you want to be and I can't see it getting any better.
We went heavy on AI at my place of work, like many did, but not really to the level of being AI-pilled and orchestrating dozens of agents and shit like that. It's still a force multiplier if you just use AI to walk through something one task at a time and use the spare time in between to collaborate on bigger picture stuff and think a bit beyond the code alone.
I don't know about other companies, but my company was to a large extent turned into a bodyshop after we decided to go all in into AI. We laid off / reorganized away the team, then amped up the deadlines and promises, leaving the handful of survivors to cover up for so many features and tickets that we have no time to actually work on quality.
And in our twice-yearly self-improvement reports, we have to write how we can use AI further. To reach grade 4/4, you need to "trust" the AI.
Before you used to sometimes having more tech savy customers put out a VB or Delphi click demo over an weekend kind of effort, and then complain why is the delivery so expensive.
Now they do the same with AI agents.
And then people still think their developer jobs are safe.
When actually it should be software companies that should be worried. If you believe like some guys do that you can just point an LLM to any piece of software in the world and ask it to patch it / replicate it / maintain it with zero copyright repercussions, what is the point of software companies again?
Many are, and I already seen team sizes shrink thanks to AI tooling, on top of what was already happening with serverless and iPaaS low code/no code tooling.
However in many forums and blogposts still looks like that the "only happens to others" mentality is quite prevalent.
There was a a great one I replied to that was full of the capitalist talking points saying they dont believe in UBI or high wages for most workers (themselves excepted of course) while lamenting about how to feel motivated and keep chill about their future and I pointed out all the pressures they happily accept and endorse for other workers below them will soon apply to them with rent and bills pressure and low wages so they wont even have a motivation problem when the transition is complete
I imagine that, if you're in the US, it is seriously scary. Nobody is safe, not even in FAANG. Probably FAANG is the worst place to be now if you care about stability but it was never great before that (stack ranking, firing quotas, etc.). At least you had the idea that performance would keep you safe, but now it doesn't.
I'm not sure how much that translates in other countries where protections for workers are stronger and companies have different operating models. Not to say it's without trade-offs, you might feel safer over in Europe but you're never gonna see US-style compensation, and the concept of becoming a millionaire (and a new startup founder with ex-FAANG credentials) because you joined a startup at the right time is practically non-existent.
I know people working as programmers in germany, who don't even know what claude is. So there are areas left but I bet their numbers won't increase, but die out fast.
There is overemployment in software development right now and a correction is coming. Automation is just a part of it, because automated systems displace jobs and create new ones. The biggest problem, in my view, is that large swathes of software development jobs were created under ZIRP and subsidized by excess profits to suppress competition and shore up those excess profits.
Technology is a convenient escape goat and a lot of glue-code gigs were made possible by the market distortions I mentioned. But I do think a big correction is taking place and we may have passed the high water mark of employment in software development. Especially cushy jobs being overpaid to configure frameworks, as this sort of work is proving quite tractable for LLMs.
I do think there will be more opportunities in high skill software engineering created by the new tooling on both sides - demand for building and maintaining automated systems as well as dealing with the consequences security, reliability, etc, wise. At this level the industry has been short staffed for several years and that trend should intensify I believe. There is lots of money to be made in being very knowledgeable on fundamentals and detail oriented. That has been true for a while and it seems to me that it will be only more so for the foreseeable future.
It's very interesting that this has become such a dichotomy.
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
The enthusiasts are founders, executives and investors who don’t actually have to use AI to build products and therefore have a somewhat distant opinion about its real capabilities but will capture all gains from AI. They only build prototypes and rough drafts and don’t understand that AI makes the first 80% easier and the last 20% harder, and makes maintainability a nightmare where a codebase that’s gone through vibe coding for 3 months is like the equivalent of a 10 year old legacy codebase.
The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.
I am both. I am shipping multiple working projects per week in my hobby. It is liberating to have my own virtual dev team.
In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.
I can't find a very good comment from HN from a few months ago with this churn of AI posts, but the idea was quite right: there were tinkerers, who loved a problem solving process, and entrepreneurs, who don't care about the problem itself and beauty of a neat solution, but only the end products to sell.
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
I disagree hard.
I am a tinkerer wannabe entrepreneur and I'm having the time of my life.
I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.
Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.
I set it up long before these AI things was a thing...
But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...
The bias in this comparison is insane. “Tinkerer” is a pejorative, normally used to downplay one’s (own) ability or impact. It’s often used to mean “unserious” or “amateur”.
The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.
Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.
I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.
Since there is an entire AI community[0], claiming 135,000 members, that labels themselves 'tinkerers', any pejorative meaning in tinkerer is long gone. Probably in the same way as 'hacker' was once a rather pejorative term to the general public.
I've always though that about tinkering as in "being in love to work with inner working of things and understanding the internals, mastering stuff". Nothing pejorative.
Tinkering is more or less synonymous with dabbling, which is used more these days. Synonyms with tinkerer would be amateur, hobbiest, dabbler. There’s definitely an implied interest in how things work, but also strongly implies that one is not serious about what they’re doing.
More in line with your definition would be artisan or craftsman; although fwiw craftsman can have a negative slant in modern (American) English as some people use it in lieu of blue-collar workers.
I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.
We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.
Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.
The way I see it LLMs are accelerating trends that have been at play for a decade or two now.
I think we are seeing bloat accelerating and the boom will eventually go bust.
My hope is that from the ashes of the current boom/bust cycle we might actually get "software engineering" once the dust settles and society catches up with technology in terms of culture, regulations, education etc.
I think there is a middle ground too. Well organised Engineering and Product teams using AI efficiently whilst actually talking together and making decisions. Neither AI zealots, nor doom and gloom.
> On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Up until the last year the best developers were generally those who valued comprehension and wanted to really understand the libraries, code and infrastructure of their projects because that comprehension was what led to quality software.
Those who didn't care tended to ship buggy crap and weren't great devs.
In my experience those who didn't really care about deeply understanding the systems they were working on are loving AI. But those who did care are now literally unable comprehend the state of the codebase and are being forced to work in a way that's extremely unnatural to them.
I say this because I've personally struggled with this over the last year as I've was one of those people who spent a lot of time building comprehensive mental models for the systems I worked on. Now I just assume the AI understands and just do what I need to do to get whatever functionality I'm working on over the line. I don't like it and I've lost all technical interest in coding at this point, but it is what it is ultimately. Coding is no longer about comprehension, it's just about asking Claude to do something.
>You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Of course you can. "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong. Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time. If it all had to fit in one human's brain, it would quickly stunt the growth of civilization.
The fact that AI agents are really fast at generating code suddenly moves the bottleneck to the review step. The fact that AI agents are great at attacking computer systems moves the bottleneck to log analysis and triage. Neither of these are going to block forward progress for long. AI agents have to be reading the logs, because there are not enough human eyeballs to keep up. AI agents will be reviewing code soon enough, and they already are in high performing organizations.
If you don't have a clear mission to pursue with your tools, dissatisfaction is the next mandatory stop on your journey. You can change your tools as often as you want. If the mission is wrong it won't matter.
AI might be unique in that it can force a business into an inevitable failure state much faster than it would have experienced otherwise. From the perspective of long term economic activity, this might actually be a good thing. Most businesses will never be successful and this technology seems to be quite good at eliminating any ambiguity regarding that fact.
The real thing that is being tested here is the competence, discipline and focus of leadership. Executing well on AI in a team setting takes a lot of diplomacy and mentorship to get the nervous energy dealt with properly. Many failure modes with AI look like one lunatic employee going mad with a codex/claude subscription and slowly dragging everyone else into the cartoon fight dustball.
I had a meeting yesterday regarding deploying custom enterprise chatbot for a client wherein everyone was practically yelling over each other. We unanimously considered it an extremely productive call despite the chaos. I cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere. I like to believe the team I am working with is one of the better ones.
The dichotomy was inevitable. So-called AI offers to alleviate the requirement for programming competance. Hence it divides people into the incompetant, which it empowers, and the competants, which it disempowers.
I think the people who are into it are the people who before AI would throw up a pull request that was complete shit, expect everyone else to tell them what to fix, and somehow still keep their job.
We can work on harder problems at the frontier of the models knowledge.
I'm working on one such domain, and I find AI use helpful, but I still need to be incredibly astute.
We need a way to interleave our own notes into the source code.
It's like Bible study, everyone studies the same Bible, but everyone wants to have their own highlights and notes.
Some might say to use comments, but my Monday morning chain-of-thought doesn't belong in a comment.
I want a way to do literate coding. I want to interleave writings, and drawings, and editable code snippets that point to actual code in the code base -- and I want to see when those code snippets are stale, or have been edited by other developers (or agents).
I want a way to build up some artifact of my understanding that I control, that exists primarily to aid my understanding, and isn't constantly shifting as a thousand LLMs pass through the actual codebase changing everything.
The code used to be the canvas of the programmer. Now programmers have no canvas. They need a canvas. They can't understand things without a canvas to hold their thoughts.
>In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs.
Thing is that's the goal (owners/management), not an unwanted side effect (programmers perspective). You can't get rid of workers if you're still dependent on their thinking. This pain is seen as a necessary step towards the promised land of profitability without pesky salaries, demands for foosball tables and RSUs.
This will get pushed by the powers that be...code base quality & people's feelings be damned.
I find it wild companies were so ready to ship intellectual property to another company. I sort of thought they would experiment then use all the massive RAM on our Mac books to implement something more local we can use and keeps our stuff out of another companies hands but it was just Claude Claude Claude tokenmax tokenmax tokenmax.
FWIW I still think that future is likely, but at least three things hold this back (and I say as someone doing low-budget local LLM experiments)
1) the typical (non-Mac) PC architecture beige box isn't really ready for this; it's starting to change a bit, the new Nvidia laptop RTX chips might change it a little, and maybe the Ryzen AI/Strix Halo stuff will catch up, but I suspect the lack of unified VRAM in boring corporate machines is holding back routine corporate experimentation (since most corporate machines also have bare minimum GPUs)
2) frankly, the Apple Silicon architecture isn't truly ready for it either! Even with unified VRAM, memory bandwidth is limiting, and the processing power of the GPU holds back prompt processing for things like document analysis. So far the MoE models and the really small footprint dense models are lacking somewhat, though you can use them for some things (and the Mac is a much better pre-existing-machine playground for early experiments).
3) perhaps more importantly, the apparent progress of the cloud LLMs has persuaded corporate customers that what they are aiming for is increasing delegation rather than increasing developer capability (the former does not automatically lead to the latter)
Ever since software became a "prestige" career, attracting the former-would-be-dentists of the world, the entire field has been gatekeeping a lot of mediocre talent. Let's be honest.
If we're looking for a silver lining, AI is an equalizer and creates competition among the mediocre, driving salaries down. It's not all bad.
Oddly enough, I met a newly qualified dentist last year who said his parents had advised him not to get into software because AI was going to take all the jobs.
It's a significantly harder career, but less automatable.
I'm mediocre but it's not that I fear for my job being taken by someone better at AI than me (honestly I hate my job so much now I wouldn't care being forced into working in a grocery store). It's that the job has become absurd and anxiety inducing as I am not given the time to understand and build a mental picture of the code that AI is generating, and as the original post says "everyone is spending all day hitting enter" which is fucking true.
We are there. I’ve got fuck you money in the bank. I’m just kicking back waiting for the company to fail. It’s free money until then. Make up some shit and go back to doing other stuff.
They have lost money for the last two quarters, customer satisfaction is at an all time low, staff morale is gone, defects are piled up, costs are escalating on tokens and cloud, nothing is getting done but everyone thinks it is.
Let it burn.
We need a total reset. The entire market is overblown, overhyped and sells things nobody needs. Layers and layers of stupid to get nothing done. It’s an extraction economy. I’ve seen people replace simple stuff like a spreadsheet with a cloud hosted vibe coded turd. What the fuck is wrong with people?!? Have we collectively forgotten simple and elegant solutions?
I agree. There is a lot of accumulated bloat and a lot of newly accreted bloat from the tools built to accelerate on the recent trends.
It seems to me that a big bust is about to follow the 15 year boom that started out as "web 2.0" and saw the rise of web app framework, "front end" development, "x as a service", start ups "pivoting" to software tooling creating bloat to tackle problems created by bloat etc.
A lot of jobs will be removed from the tech industry, I think. But the work in software development will be more interesting 5/10 years from now than it is now. Paid more in line with the rest of the economy and thus not attracting so many uninterested actors, and more aligned with market demand instead of driven by a labor oligopsony, held more to account once regulation catches up with technology etc. I think we might actually get "software engineering" after this.
As they say in scandinavia, there's no bad weather only bad clothes.
Suit up and brace yourself is all I can say. We should all be concerned in protecting our communities from the adjustment. Not in an doomerist way but you know prepare to weather a storm. I think it will be worse than 2008. But I also think that the next boom will be very very interesting and with a lot of great opportunities to advance humanity and technology.
The next turn of the spiral will always be higher and wider.
So if you want to go to see your favorite artist perform in a different city in six months time, you'll drive there today to get tickets?
There are many things which benefit from being digital, which aren't digitized enough. Usually this means third parties are making a lot of money by offering a platform until digitization happens.
If you sell any product or service to the public, these are generally the steps you go through to benefit from digitization:
1. No digital presence at all.
2. Digital presence through a third party which takes a 15%-25% cut of sales.
3. Digital presence through a SaaS which has a monthly fee.
4. Digital presence which you own yourself.
Step 3 and 4 are still very underserved markets, where customers could make massive savings or sales increase. And those who offer these solutions will profit.
Do you also understand that most people fucking hate to use computers? The only reason normal people use computers so much and even have their entire careers in front of computers is that those machines can perform tasks extremely efficiently.
In French a computer is called "an organizer". In Swedish it's called a "data machine". And with the Internet, it's also a communicator.
If you run a business, would you like to compute everything in your head and organize all your things in filing cabinets and have all your data on papers everywhere?
I wonder if having a good account plan, a good ruleset, and a nice graph of the entire platform would give me tremendous leverage with companies like that. Nothing beats a swarm of agents checking everything, running multiple probes, and finding the best solution for every problem, including generating all the questions stakeholders need to answer before proceeding.
I believe I would end up enjoying life more while everything gets solved through agentic development.
If I compare this with my previous companies (publicly valued companies), I would definitely be on vacation while still delivering perfect PRs and features in a matter of hours, instead of the 2-3 week timelines it took me and my team in the past.
Genuinely: how? Share some insights. So far I have seen anything exceeding about 2k lines of text in the context diverge. Meaning, throwing more LLM at it rapidly baloons the size at the expense of internal coherence. Things become stale, hallucinated, duplicated and outright faked. Only thing that works is constant manual intervention and pruning of the generated slop.
Not only these things are unable to find "best solution", they are unable to find any solution. Instead (especially for Opus) they seem optimized to convince user that the task is accomplished.
I crafted my own /investigate skill. Think of it as a version of /grill-me where you propose an investigation and dig into it until you come up with a spec backed by evidence.
My investigation skill can create one, two, or dozens of probes with benchmarks. Once you're confident in the solution, you can plan and author the investigation, then execute it phase by phase.
HR and the lawyers would tell you that it is all company property. Make any of it at work? Company property. Bring it into work to do company work, company property.
Whatever miracle maker you're talking about, if it exists, should be making you money so, it's either doing that, is a weird train hobby, or a delusion.
I'm still surprised sometimes at how rapidly I can prototype something. Is it always shippable? No. But something that would've taken me an amount of time I can't afford to is much quicker.
This past weekend I decided to build an iOS app as a personal project. Normally I wouldn't have the time to work on one like that but I was able to get a working POC that is actually usable for my trivial use case in a matter of hours.
For pure design space exploration that can be a victory, equivalent to sketching a UI on paper being faster than making it in HTML, but is that the work you're actually doing most of the time? Maybe for some people it is.
But none of that pays the bills. The context is entirely about how people get paid for this stuff and, that's turning it into a commodity, and saying that "my AI talks to their AI" is pretty close to saying "my job is redundant"
Because there's people who care about the craft, and there's people who don't.
I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.
Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood.
Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus.
Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.
Why are carpenters always the example in these arguments? I know a framing carpenter and I've never heard anyone whine more about their job than he does.
Construction was never the best metaphor for programming. The compiler constructs the code. Software dev is closer to building architecture than construction.
You're not the carpenter though, the code you wrote can rarely do things on its own, you need a toolchain or an interpreter, or something to run it with. Toolchains use your code as rough reference, turning you into a designer/architect. I don't endorse it when people fully offload development to LLMs, that's lazy and irresponsible, but how I see most devs use it (not the loud minority) it's just another tool in the arsenal. If it lets you skip the annoying steps and focus on the logic - excellent, great, I'm not great at Java, i don't know all of its built in APIs, I can ask an LLM that I need this and this API to communicate with C++ layer, perform the following logic, output the following logs, after which I can audit and validate the code to the best of my ability. Is that such a bad thing? Did a caveman with a stick reject the hammer and the axe?
Disingenuous analogy, because you're taking the work of a carpenter and then jumping all the way to a Star Trek style replicator, which is daft.
The jump from writing code by hand to having a machine learning algorithm compute code for you is not the same as that. We had tags, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, word suggestion (via dictionary), intellisense, enhanced auto-completions via snippets, natural language processing, language servers, etc. etc. throughout the decades and an LLM is still not a Star Trek style replicator.
Now, it might have taken a blacksmith a hell of a long time to work various kinds of metal to order, but then someone got the idea of creating a mould so you could make more of them at once. Then later on technology advances and you can now machine it to ridiculously high precision with CNC. Now the person who writes CNC code for a high precision part might not be the same person who has to work another metal part manually.
Did the machines do that or did they? And why exactly does that distinction matter? Half the code I write depends on stuff hundreds or thousands of others have built before me.
I think it depends on what you mean by "the craft".
I understand the sentiments, genuinely. I do miss the feelings of carefully crafting a great piece of code. There was a genuine sense of accomplishment there. I still get a sense of accomplishment from agentic development, but it's different. It feels more similar to when you've steered a team of people who are actually doing the work, and then the final product gets delivered. I never touched the actual work, but my input / steering / taste / direction / etc. was a big part of what was delivered. And now we have the solution that we wanted.
If you got into this field because you like to hand-write code, and that's what you view as your craft, then yeah, I think you probably are in a tough spot. There's always the opportunity to do that on your own time, just like I'm sure the vast majority of woodworkers today are doing it for fun, not as their profession.
But if you're in this field because you have a passion for building things that solve problems (you know, engineering), if that's what you view as your craft, I don't think there's any shortage of opportunities to practice your craft.
The hand-written code solves problems. Many of those are problems about how to write code. In your world, these are apparently invalidated as problems now, due to becoming less profitable: by "problem" you mean "profitable problem". Is chasing after profitable problems noble and special, I don't know, it serves demand, demand matters somewhat, fine then. But it's not the epitome of problem-solving.
> you have a passion for building things that solve problems
The AI hypers are more about “building things” than “solving problems”. When you analyze their comments and projects, they can barely articulate what the project’s purpose is about. Or even if it can be used by somebody else. It’s always about LoC, coding speed, and specs complexity.
Assume you have control over things. How do you make it not soul crushing? Even if you don’t have an incentive to produce as fast as you can, it’s still kinda sucks. Even if you take the time to carefully review the code produced etc.
What hurts the most is the loss of community. Yeah it was a job, but it was a fun, cozy job. We got to sit around and think about things together all day, and poke holes in each others arguments, and collaborate toward a solution. There was a deep level of camaraderie and satisfaction in "being in the trenches" with your colleagues. It's all gone now. Juniors don't have questions anymore. Seniors are siloed off in their own world of feature development. And product has just become meat proxies. I'm dealing with a huge amount of grief over this now as someone who's lifelong vocation and sense of identity is seemingly evaporating.
That whole thread feels like something out of Black Mirror. Especially the comment from Claude AI right under the OP’s post summarizing the thread. The dark humor of the juxtaposition of Claude AI’s harsh summarization of all the users’ pain….pure Black Mirror.
What are the implications of AI output not being copyrightable?
Can I just grab a copy of my company's vibe coded app and start selling it myself? What stops me? Not copyright law.
I suppose what really stops me is that power wins, and the company has more money and power than me, and so regardless of whatever the law says, my life will be fucked up good if I did copy their codebase.
Software development is not one thing. Some work like configuring frameworks is proving tractable to automation. But there's a lot more to software than writing glue code.
We may never again have as many "software developers" as we did in early 2020s. That shift is sure to have severe economic, political, social, and cultural consequences.
I am especially interested in how the work in security, assurance, performance, and such hard problems will evolve in respect to the large amounts of LLM-generated code. I see a lot of opportunities there. Not in terms of how many people will be able to work on that but in terms of how much income those competent enough will command. Individuals and teams. There are some really interesting developments in spaces that have historically been shunned by the framework configuration crowd. It seems to me that the advocates of speed over quality in software development are about to be swallowed whole by the tide of code they unleashed.
> Or, as one user so poetically put it, you're just a condom between Claude and your production server getting fucked. Your only real job is to be the warm body they can blame when the AI slop inevitably breaks.
The other day I inherited a repo from someone that left the company. The first one to be almost fully vibe coded.
It's horrible. It's over engineered in every way. It follows a completely different pattern than the other repos. It adds 10 CLI options that don't have any use (why does Claude add --threads to everything). It's impossible to follow the flow of the code.
Of course, days after I inherited it, it broke so good luck to me fixing it I guess
Ironically, my first thought was how quickly this might be able to be re-written, in a sane way, …with the help of an LLM.
I find that if you pay a lot of human-in-the-loop attention to the design phase, LLMs can produce perfectly decent stuff.
They’re also good at writing tests. Lock in the (non-broken) behavior of the old app with tests. Then use those tests to re-create the app, except with a talented engineer (you) guiding the design this time.
I mean, I'm going to rebuild it. But with just a light AI usage. The point I'm trying to make is that. Ok, AI may have saved time coding it the first time. But building an unmaintainable codebase is going to make you pay that time back with interests
That's not true at all. One thing is not understanding the language in which it was written and a completely different one is that even though it was coded in a language that I have proficiency in, the code doesn't make sense. It's just poorly engineered
Agreed, but that is exactly the point. The mods believe that AI slop is the desired top content in their sub. It exemplifies what is wrong with AI-generated content, as it places people's comments secondary to the AI's summary.
> Some people are taking longer than others to realize that the job has changed. That's all that I see in these rants.
Some people are too quick to drink whatever kool-aid they’re served. That’s all I see in these tired excuses.
> It shouldn't be surprising that if you swim against the tide by doing things the old way, you are going to feel more burnt out because of it.
Better to swim against the tide than letting yourself get swept up in the current and drowning.
It no longer surprises me, but the profound lack of empathy shown by AI (or any other popular hype du jour) proponents is worrying. A large numbers of fellow humans are saying “this thing is negatively impacting my life” and the response is “lol, and you should be thankful”.
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
In the post, he had only been at the company for 2 weeks. Maybe they have a really bad on-boarding process and he just wasn't seeing the process clearly.
Surely it cant' be this bad, or a company would collapse?
If it’s B2B, the finance side (seller/customer) of the relationship can be totally different from the product side (developer/user). Evolution of the contract is often measured in quarters.
Read a rant about corporate Scrum hellholes before AI existed. Reddit and this site is full of them.
This is similar except mindlessly churning short tickets with no time to plan or think and producing crap has been replaced my mindlessly herding bots and producing crap. Management doesn’t care and just wants to push tickets is a constant.
I’ve seen the term “code grinding” for these environments and I saw that phrase as far back as the 2000s.
This isn’t a new type of workplace. I’m willing to believe AI has made it even more dull.
This company is not treating agent code generation as if it's out in the open. Why in the world would you work like this? It has nothing to do with management. If your coworker is just going to do agent review just share the fucking prompt and do it yourself like you would with any other tool. Jesus fucking christ.
> My company was recently acquired. My company was currently going through a platform modernization. The company that acquired us is also going through a platform modernization. They acquired us specifically to use our new platform. Our platform isn't even fully built yet. I'm doing 100% of the coding. I'm tasked with finishing the platform, migrating all my companies existing customers to the new platform, migrating the new company's existing customers to new platform all while continuing to sell to new customers. The company is pushing AI-first EVERYTHING. I'm not allowed to hire. The new company had 20+ people working on their platform. I'm now expected to do it with 5. I had to fight for those 5. They thought I should be able to do it with 1 engineer. They are cutting people 30% annually over the next 2 years. 200+ employees to ~60-70. And they are asking me if I'll be ready in Q1 or Q2 next year. Our product person gave AI the legacy code bases to generate a report of all features and gaps. I supposed to go through an HTML file that is easily 100+ pages long and a spreadsheet with 30 tabs and hundreds of rows each. I pushed back that it's not fit for human consumption and let's start with high level gaps and they're acting like I'm not a team player or something. It's ridiculous.
This is crazy. LLM usage has somehow convinced people that it's $999 for not just knowing where to place one nail, but for knowing where to place an almost infinite number of them. Disingenuous marketing by the big players does not help either.
> I'm not a team player or something. It's ridiculous.
This. In the past, when you could challenge a sloppy and rushed feature, done wrongly. You could steer people into better designs without adding much overhead. These days, if you try to challenge those no-reviews, ship-50k PRs daily, you instantly get labeled as AI-sceptic, someone who is afraid of change, afraid of loosing your job. I don't see a way out from this.
I think people should use even more of Claude to come up with system design. All the people I know use LLMs for generating code and slop documents. But not for ideas themselves. So the pattern I see is lots of code + lots of documents but built on system designs that are generated by humans without LLM oversight. They don't use it in the one place that matters the most!
Isn't it obvious? I know the parent jumped to the most extreme comparison which is sure to cause dozens of eye rolls. But the point is clear - the reason why some aspects of the modern world are getting worse is because it's filled with order-followers who will always do the thing that benefits them alone in the short-term. This is nothing new, but usually this disconnect was acknowledged by the people doing this as an imperfect bargain. But here they're going a step further, where the thought terminates not at "I follow orders because there is little choice" but "I follow orders because that makes me a good worker/subordinate/person".
Most doctors do what they do because they want to help people first and foremost. With rare exceptions, they're not opinionless husks who frame their existence with "I follow orders because it is my purpose" + "I do whatever makes me the most money".
To be honest, this is less about Claude Code per se (or any other coding agent) and more about business and corporate culture. In my experience, if you work at a company whose culture is to deliver as fast as possible, then this is ultimately what you get when those same managers start to realize we can also ship 10x faster (no matter the costs). The "Delivery Pressure" is very real in _some_ corporations, and I _believe_ things like Claude/Codex just accelerate this even more, which is what we're seeing in some places. In a fast-place industry, can you blame 'em?
Having worked in/with multiple agencies over the years - working with humans who don't care/are pressured to just ship was exactly what he describes.
For example, I collaborated together with an agency that was working on a popular regional banking app. I was on another project with them and at one point decided to check out what they were doing.
It was a clusterfuck, to say the least. Four developers, four different architectures in the same codebase. One doesn't really understand the others, so he just sticks to his part.
The seams between the ownership parts are full of hacks. Concurrency issues are dealt with via hacks, just make things global and poll to check them. Navigation issues were solved by basically just reseting the app back to homescreen. Testing wasn't really a thing, and the tests that were there were mostly broken ages ago, and nobody cared enough to fix them.
Product didn't care much, designers would prototype a feature, then devs would implement it and wait until the backend is done, then fix things because they never really aligned on the specs. Sometimes, there would be no design review or QA and they would just ship, while sometimes the product person would jump in and test something because it's "an important feature".
Then I got asked to collab with them on another project. Huge customer, huge project, existing codebase. The codebase was so bad I just wrote it from scratch. It was Java written like it's C++. Backend was python code, not updated in years, quadratic scaling everywhere. At one point, the inital GET request was taking over 3 minutes. I took a look and ofc, they didn't even use indexes in the DB.
For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.
> For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.
I think in these contexts AI has an overall positive effect, because it's a bit like having a competent developer that can solve technical debt, albeit in a narrow form.
So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.
The downside of blindly using AI in software development is that the software becomes poorly defined. AI-generated logic can be arbitrary, and as the codebase grows, more rules and assumptions become unclear.
Idk about that. I work for myself and I cannot stand coding with LLMs. Even if it were faster (I have only noticed slowdowns long term when using them), the experience of arguing with a slot machine is far more stressful and soul-sucking than even the gnarliest bug.
Yes coorporate “ship as fast as possible” is draining, but that doesn’t mean LLC coding isn’t also to blame.
I freelance too and I have been struggling personally for a while for other reasons but I absolutely recognise this. I have only about eighty lines of code in production that I fully did not write (thanks Muse Glimmer).
The difference between corporate salaried programming and freelance programming is who is on the hook in a direct sense for the bug the LLM introduced, or for maintaining the massive pile of code or the cognitive burden of ownership.
My experience of freelancing is that most of the people I am competing against for the work care less about the code (and things like quality, security, appropriateness, user burden), are faster, are happy to nickle-and-dime the bill, will charge more to fix their own bugs, churn out meaningless requirements specs that they cannot stick to, and rely on lack of client knowledge to get through.
So there has always been a problem of competing against the slapdash; they always win the quote. I care about longer-term maintainability, cost control and quality, and I lose out because of it. (I'm often asked to maintain or finish the work of people who beat me to the quote and then failed; nowadays I say no.)
The problem is, those people now use LLMs. For the immediate future, LLMs may actually be improving their output, certainly at the prototype stage, and they will now be including one-shot, vibe-coded demos with their quotes.
So what is a freelancer who still has a sense of ethics to do?
The long bet is that those people who do not care for quality will still be disappointing their clients, but how do you avoid using LLMs while still getting, at least, back to where you were in competing with them?
I don’t freelance anymore, so I can’t give any freelancing advice. Although freelancing has always been fraught with offshoring, price arbitraging, and generally lower quality (not saying all freelancing, just that it was an issue when I was freelancing a decade ago).
I’m sure LLMs have only made it worse, possibly pushing it over an edge where hand coding as a freelancer is not viable. I do not know.
Personally, I tell myself that we’re in the lowest of the low at the moment. Either AI will get substantially better, or it will get substantially worse. The amount of debt the industry is loaded up with is not sustainable. Something is going to have to crack. I expect in another 2 years for things to “settle down” on some side of the fence, although which side I do not know.
My quipy advice though is to build something for yourself. Be the boss that doesn’t require AI. We need more builders behind products, more indie products built because they’re cool and the founder is passionate about the problem; not more business types and cash grabs.
That’s all easier said than done though I know.
> My quipy advice though is to build something for yourself.
This! Groups with strong software skills (like HN) miss how LLMs unblock people who previously were unable to build what they wanted because they lacked the software skills.
I know an ME at work who have begged software folks for a year to build specific software he wants and was getting a mix of "we are too busy", "it does not work this way" and quick prototypes that were not quite what he wanted. Then he spent his free cycles with Claude building what he wanted. It took some time and some iterations and it may be ugly under the hood, but he wowed many folks with different types of demos of our system. The view he presented resonated with many users. And he feels empowered how that he can build tools he wants to try himself and do some projects that before he had to beg for, himself.
The software is being disrupted and disruptions are painful. But maintaining the status quo of several big tech names controlling everything we do on most electronic devices and optimizing for the doomscrolling time is not a worthy goal either. My 2c.
> This! Groups with strong software skills (like HN) miss how LLMs unblock people who previously were unable to build what they wanted because they lacked the software skills.
That isn't me. I have the software skills. The problem is not lack of ability building complex stuff from scratch, I do it over and over again, and I have had my own products in the past.
The problem is that LLMs do not actually improve the psychology of sustainable lone freelancing, which is more burdened with the problem of actually owning the entire problem and its consequences than someone vibe-coding their fun ideas in the lunchtime safety of their salaried job or even a single developer within a corporate team setting (because they can quit and walk away when they hate it). If you're still getting paid as you fix it when it breaks after deployment, you're in a different world; it doesn't matter to me how empowering LLMs are in that context!
When you are up against people who are bluffing/bodging, or small agencies who think coding is just a little step up from web design, or over-extended hobby coders working in the evenings, LLMs have a very different set of impacts on your life. I can't just run an experiment with some LLM code and roll it out, because I have to face the customer directly and because nobody is going to pay me to fix it; I am not on a salary that allows that kind of experimentation.
So I am left trying to work out how to use LLMs to catch up with the above people who are, without losing control.
I love it, although in my experience, one needs very strict agent rules that tightly define how the AI should develop. The problem is that 1) these rules take a lot of effort to build and 2) AIs always overengineer, complicate, overstructure, overdesign… ;)
Upvoted for "arguing with a slot machine"
Yeah, body shops existed before AI came around and your job in one of those is literally just to churn through tickets and get them across the board as fast as possible. Pure production line stuff. AI comes in and turns that to 11.
If you're looking for a decent job with even an ounce of creativity then an agency/consultancy shop is rarely the place you want to be and I can't see it getting any better.
We went heavy on AI at my place of work, like many did, but not really to the level of being AI-pilled and orchestrating dozens of agents and shit like that. It's still a force multiplier if you just use AI to walk through something one task at a time and use the spare time in between to collaborate on bigger picture stuff and think a bit beyond the code alone.
I don't know about other companies, but my company was to a large extent turned into a bodyshop after we decided to go all in into AI. We laid off / reorganized away the team, then amped up the deadlines and promises, leaving the handful of survivors to cover up for so many features and tickets that we have no time to actually work on quality.
And in our twice-yearly self-improvement reports, we have to write how we can use AI further. To reach grade 4/4, you need to "trust" the AI.
It is crazy in agency work now.
Before you used to sometimes having more tech savy customers put out a VB or Delphi click demo over an weekend kind of effort, and then complain why is the delivery so expensive.
Now they do the same with AI agents.
And then people still think their developer jobs are safe.
> And then people still think their developer jobs are safe.
From my experience, most developers are actually very anxious and scared about their future.
When actually it should be software companies that should be worried. If you believe like some guys do that you can just point an LLM to any piece of software in the world and ask it to patch it / replicate it / maintain it with zero copyright repercussions, what is the point of software companies again?
If you believe like some guys do that you can just point a camera at any painting in the world and replicate it, what is the point of painters again?
(i.e. the ability to copy existing things does not obsolete the need to be able to make new things)
Many are, and I already seen team sizes shrink thanks to AI tooling, on top of what was already happening with serverless and iPaaS low code/no code tooling.
However in many forums and blogposts still looks like that the "only happens to others" mentality is quite prevalent.
There was a a great one I replied to that was full of the capitalist talking points saying they dont believe in UBI or high wages for most workers (themselves excepted of course) while lamenting about how to feel motivated and keep chill about their future and I pointed out all the pressures they happily accept and endorse for other workers below them will soon apply to them with rent and bills pressure and low wages so they wont even have a motivation problem when the transition is complete
I imagine that, if you're in the US, it is seriously scary. Nobody is safe, not even in FAANG. Probably FAANG is the worst place to be now if you care about stability but it was never great before that (stack ranking, firing quotas, etc.). At least you had the idea that performance would keep you safe, but now it doesn't.
I'm not sure how much that translates in other countries where protections for workers are stronger and companies have different operating models. Not to say it's without trade-offs, you might feel safer over in Europe but you're never gonna see US-style compensation, and the concept of becoming a millionaire (and a new startup founder with ex-FAANG credentials) because you joined a startup at the right time is practically non-existent.
I know people working as programmers in germany, who don't even know what claude is. So there are areas left but I bet their numbers won't increase, but die out fast.
What do you reckon? We're screwed?
There is overemployment in software development right now and a correction is coming. Automation is just a part of it, because automated systems displace jobs and create new ones. The biggest problem, in my view, is that large swathes of software development jobs were created under ZIRP and subsidized by excess profits to suppress competition and shore up those excess profits.
Technology is a convenient escape goat and a lot of glue-code gigs were made possible by the market distortions I mentioned. But I do think a big correction is taking place and we may have passed the high water mark of employment in software development. Especially cushy jobs being overpaid to configure frameworks, as this sort of work is proving quite tractable for LLMs.
I do think there will be more opportunities in high skill software engineering created by the new tooling on both sides - demand for building and maintaining automated systems as well as dealing with the consequences security, reliability, etc, wise. At this level the industry has been short staffed for several years and that trend should intensify I believe. There is lots of money to be made in being very knowledgeable on fundamentals and detail oriented. That has been true for a while and it seems to me that it will be only more so for the foreseeable future.
Pace doesn't matter. Making things customers want does.
This is all going to end very badly--or very well, if you understand this basic rule of markets, which many managerial types don't.
It's very interesting that this has become such a dichotomy.
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
The enthusiasts are founders, executives and investors who don’t actually have to use AI to build products and therefore have a somewhat distant opinion about its real capabilities but will capture all gains from AI. They only build prototypes and rough drafts and don’t understand that AI makes the first 80% easier and the last 20% harder, and makes maintainability a nightmare where a codebase that’s gone through vibe coding for 3 months is like the equivalent of a 10 year old legacy codebase.
The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.
I am both. I am shipping multiple working projects per week in my hobby. It is liberating to have my own virtual dev team.
In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.
Is this a recipe for brain drain, where you'll lose actual programming skills and thinking ability?
Yes but also picking up different skills and thinking ability. I've accepted the old way is obsolete.
I can't find a very good comment from HN from a few months ago with this churn of AI posts, but the idea was quite right: there were tinkerers, who loved a problem solving process, and entrepreneurs, who don't care about the problem itself and beauty of a neat solution, but only the end products to sell.
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
I disagree hard. I am a tinkerer wannabe entrepreneur and I'm having the time of my life.
I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.
Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.
I set it up long before these AI things was a thing... But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...
The bias in this comparison is insane. “Tinkerer” is a pejorative, normally used to downplay one’s (own) ability or impact. It’s often used to mean “unserious” or “amateur”.
The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.
Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.
I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.
Since there is an entire AI community[0], claiming 135,000 members, that labels themselves 'tinkerers', any pejorative meaning in tinkerer is long gone. Probably in the same way as 'hacker' was once a rather pejorative term to the general public.
[0] https://aitinkerers.org/
My bad, I'm not a native English speaker.
I've always though that about tinkering as in "being in love to work with inner working of things and understanding the internals, mastering stuff". Nothing pejorative.
Tinkering is more or less synonymous with dabbling, which is used more these days. Synonyms with tinkerer would be amateur, hobbiest, dabbler. There’s definitely an implied interest in how things work, but also strongly implies that one is not serious about what they’re doing.
More in line with your definition would be artisan or craftsman; although fwiw craftsman can have a negative slant in modern (American) English as some people use it in lieu of blue-collar workers.
I think that tinkerers is the wrong term.
I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.
We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.
Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.
Also bad news for those of us who felt software quality was shit before LLMs.
Yes, I've concluded a few years ago that VC money has been really bad for software quality.
I'm not so sure, I love tinkering but mostly see the code as a means to an end.
AI lets me flesh out both hardware and software side projects quickly that I never had time for. Most of them are experiments that won't be shared.
It's nice to have Codex/Claude whip up an SPI DMA driver while I'm doing something more fun, for example.
The way I see it LLMs are accelerating trends that have been at play for a decade or two now.
I think we are seeing bloat accelerating and the boom will eventually go bust.
My hope is that from the ashes of the current boom/bust cycle we might actually get "software engineering" once the dust settles and society catches up with technology in terms of culture, regulations, education etc.
I think there is a middle ground too. Well organised Engineering and Product teams using AI efficiently whilst actually talking together and making decisions. Neither AI zealots, nor doom and gloom.
> On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Up until the last year the best developers were generally those who valued comprehension and wanted to really understand the libraries, code and infrastructure of their projects because that comprehension was what led to quality software.
Those who didn't care tended to ship buggy crap and weren't great devs.
In my experience those who didn't really care about deeply understanding the systems they were working on are loving AI. But those who did care are now literally unable comprehend the state of the codebase and are being forced to work in a way that's extremely unnatural to them.
I say this because I've personally struggled with this over the last year as I've was one of those people who spent a lot of time building comprehensive mental models for the systems I worked on. Now I just assume the AI understands and just do what I need to do to get whatever functionality I'm working on over the line. I don't like it and I've lost all technical interest in coding at this point, but it is what it is ultimately. Coding is no longer about comprehension, it's just about asking Claude to do something.
>You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Of course you can. "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong. Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time. If it all had to fit in one human's brain, it would quickly stunt the growth of civilization.
The fact that AI agents are really fast at generating code suddenly moves the bottleneck to the review step. The fact that AI agents are great at attacking computer systems moves the bottleneck to log analysis and triage. Neither of these are going to block forward progress for long. AI agents have to be reading the logs, because there are not enough human eyeballs to keep up. AI agents will be reviewing code soon enough, and they already are in high performing organizations.
> You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
That is the best thing I’ve read on this topic in a while.
> You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
... or never started caring about comprehension. In which case you are primary audience for the con trick of so-called AI.
I swing between both, daily it seems.
Most power tools have a dichotomy like this.
If you don't have a clear mission to pursue with your tools, dissatisfaction is the next mandatory stop on your journey. You can change your tools as often as you want. If the mission is wrong it won't matter.
AI might be unique in that it can force a business into an inevitable failure state much faster than it would have experienced otherwise. From the perspective of long term economic activity, this might actually be a good thing. Most businesses will never be successful and this technology seems to be quite good at eliminating any ambiguity regarding that fact.
The real thing that is being tested here is the competence, discipline and focus of leadership. Executing well on AI in a team setting takes a lot of diplomacy and mentorship to get the nervous energy dealt with properly. Many failure modes with AI look like one lunatic employee going mad with a codex/claude subscription and slowly dragging everyone else into the cartoon fight dustball.
I had a meeting yesterday regarding deploying custom enterprise chatbot for a client wherein everyone was practically yelling over each other. We unanimously considered it an extremely productive call despite the chaos. I cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere. I like to believe the team I am working with is one of the better ones.
The dichotomy was inevitable. So-called AI offers to alleviate the requirement for programming competance. Hence it divides people into the incompetant, which it empowers, and the competants, which it disempowers.
The real tragedy is the offer is false.
I think the people who are into it are the people who before AI would throw up a pull request that was complete shit, expect everyone else to tell them what to fix, and somehow still keep their job.
We can work on harder problems at the frontier of the models knowledge. I'm working on one such domain, and I find AI use helpful, but I still need to be incredibly astute.
Theres something ironic about the top comment being an AI summary of everything, so I don’t have think or synthesize a view for myself.
The top comment, yes, but not determined by user votes but rather by reddit deciding to shove more AI down its users' throats
I assume it's a bot the mods of that subreddit setup
We need a way to interleave our own notes into the source code.
It's like Bible study, everyone studies the same Bible, but everyone wants to have their own highlights and notes.
Some might say to use comments, but my Monday morning chain-of-thought doesn't belong in a comment.
I want a way to do literate coding. I want to interleave writings, and drawings, and editable code snippets that point to actual code in the code base -- and I want to see when those code snippets are stale, or have been edited by other developers (or agents).
I want a way to build up some artifact of my understanding that I control, that exists primarily to aid my understanding, and isn't constantly shifting as a thousand LLMs pass through the actual codebase changing everything.
The code used to be the canvas of the programmer. Now programmers have no canvas. They need a canvas. They can't understand things without a canvas to hold their thoughts.
>In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs.
Thing is that's the goal (owners/management), not an unwanted side effect (programmers perspective). You can't get rid of workers if you're still dependent on their thinking. This pain is seen as a necessary step towards the promised land of profitability without pesky salaries, demands for foosball tables and RSUs.
This will get pushed by the powers that be...code base quality & people's feelings be damned.
Brave new world...hold on.
I find it wild companies were so ready to ship intellectual property to another company. I sort of thought they would experiment then use all the massive RAM on our Mac books to implement something more local we can use and keeps our stuff out of another companies hands but it was just Claude Claude Claude tokenmax tokenmax tokenmax.
FWIW I still think that future is likely, but at least three things hold this back (and I say as someone doing low-budget local LLM experiments)
1) the typical (non-Mac) PC architecture beige box isn't really ready for this; it's starting to change a bit, the new Nvidia laptop RTX chips might change it a little, and maybe the Ryzen AI/Strix Halo stuff will catch up, but I suspect the lack of unified VRAM in boring corporate machines is holding back routine corporate experimentation (since most corporate machines also have bare minimum GPUs)
2) frankly, the Apple Silicon architecture isn't truly ready for it either! Even with unified VRAM, memory bandwidth is limiting, and the processing power of the GPU holds back prompt processing for things like document analysis. So far the MoE models and the really small footprint dense models are lacking somewhat, though you can use them for some things (and the Mac is a much better pre-existing-machine playground for early experiments).
3) perhaps more importantly, the apparent progress of the cloud LLMs has persuaded corporate customers that what they are aiming for is increasing delegation rather than increasing developer capability (the former does not automatically lead to the latter)
The first two will be fixed.
Ever since software became a "prestige" career, attracting the former-would-be-dentists of the world, the entire field has been gatekeeping a lot of mediocre talent. Let's be honest.
If we're looking for a silver lining, AI is an equalizer and creates competition among the mediocre, driving salaries down. It's not all bad.
Oddly enough, I met a newly qualified dentist last year who said his parents had advised him not to get into software because AI was going to take all the jobs.
It's a significantly harder career, but less automatable.
https://dentistry.co.uk/2024/08/01/robot-dentist-completes-f...
doesn't make sense timing-wise ... to train as a dentist takes longer than the LLM-hype has been around.
If I could get rid of AI I would be okay with salaries deflating still.
"...former-would-be-dentists of the world"
so.. What do you call a doctor who failed out of med school? A software dev?
I'm mediocre but it's not that I fear for my job being taken by someone better at AI than me (honestly I hate my job so much now I wouldn't care being forced into working in a grocery store). It's that the job has become absurd and anxiety inducing as I am not given the time to understand and build a mental picture of the code that AI is generating, and as the original post says "everyone is spending all day hitting enter" which is fucking true.
Sounds like it would have been a terrible place to work even before LLMs. And I bet they aren’t actually shipping much.
I don’t think the point of the submission is the top post, but the whole thread of agreement.
We are there. I’ve got fuck you money in the bank. I’m just kicking back waiting for the company to fail. It’s free money until then. Make up some shit and go back to doing other stuff.
They have lost money for the last two quarters, customer satisfaction is at an all time low, staff morale is gone, defects are piled up, costs are escalating on tokens and cloud, nothing is getting done but everyone thinks it is.
Let it burn.
We need a total reset. The entire market is overblown, overhyped and sells things nobody needs. Layers and layers of stupid to get nothing done. It’s an extraction economy. I’ve seen people replace simple stuff like a spreadsheet with a cloud hosted vibe coded turd. What the fuck is wrong with people?!? Have we collectively forgotten simple and elegant solutions?
I agree. There is a lot of accumulated bloat and a lot of newly accreted bloat from the tools built to accelerate on the recent trends.
It seems to me that a big bust is about to follow the 15 year boom that started out as "web 2.0" and saw the rise of web app framework, "front end" development, "x as a service", start ups "pivoting" to software tooling creating bloat to tackle problems created by bloat etc.
A lot of jobs will be removed from the tech industry, I think. But the work in software development will be more interesting 5/10 years from now than it is now. Paid more in line with the rest of the economy and thus not attracting so many uninterested actors, and more aligned with market demand instead of driven by a labor oligopsony, held more to account once regulation catches up with technology etc. I think we might actually get "software engineering" after this.
This has been my feeling in more optimistic moments for a few years, fingers crossed the adjustment isn't too brutal.
As they say in scandinavia, there's no bad weather only bad clothes.
Suit up and brace yourself is all I can say. We should all be concerned in protecting our communities from the adjustment. Not in an doomerist way but you know prepare to weather a storm. I think it will be worse than 2008. But I also think that the next boom will be very very interesting and with a lot of great opportunities to advance humanity and technology.
The next turn of the spiral will always be higher and wider.
The world is still massively under-digitized, even after decades of it being mainstream.
So there will always be value to be made and markets to serve.
We don’t have to move everything to the computer. Also that doesn’t mean the existing models and solutions don’t already fit.
So if you want to go to see your favorite artist perform in a different city in six months time, you'll drive there today to get tickets?
There are many things which benefit from being digital, which aren't digitized enough. Usually this means third parties are making a lot of money by offering a platform until digitization happens.
If you sell any product or service to the public, these are generally the steps you go through to benefit from digitization:
1. No digital presence at all.
2. Digital presence through a third party which takes a 15%-25% cut of sales.
3. Digital presence through a SaaS which has a monthly fee.
4. Digital presence which you own yourself.
Step 3 and 4 are still very underserved markets, where customers could make massive savings or sales increase. And those who offer these solutions will profit.
What you’re saying is there’s plenty of opportunity to leverage people’s pockets through moving to compute from your perspective.
My favourite artist is dead and I have CDs.
Thank you for understanding my example...
Do you also understand that most people fucking hate to use computers? The only reason normal people use computers so much and even have their entire careers in front of computers is that those machines can perform tasks extremely efficiently.
In French a computer is called "an organizer". In Swedish it's called a "data machine". And with the Internet, it's also a communicator.
If you run a business, would you like to compute everything in your head and organize all your things in filing cabinets and have all your data on papers everywhere?
I wonder if having a good account plan, a good ruleset, and a nice graph of the entire platform would give me tremendous leverage with companies like that. Nothing beats a swarm of agents checking everything, running multiple probes, and finding the best solution for every problem, including generating all the questions stakeholders need to answer before proceeding.
I believe I would end up enjoying life more while everything gets solved through agentic development.
If I compare this with my previous companies (publicly valued companies), I would definitely be on vacation while still delivering perfect PRs and features in a matter of hours, instead of the 2-3 week timelines it took me and my team in the past.
> and finding the best solution for every problem
Genuinely: how? Share some insights. So far I have seen anything exceeding about 2k lines of text in the context diverge. Meaning, throwing more LLM at it rapidly baloons the size at the expense of internal coherence. Things become stale, hallucinated, duplicated and outright faked. Only thing that works is constant manual intervention and pruning of the generated slop.
Not only these things are unable to find "best solution", they are unable to find any solution. Instead (especially for Opus) they seem optimized to convince user that the task is accomplished.
I crafted my own /investigate skill. Think of it as a version of /grill-me where you propose an investigation and dig into it until you come up with a spec backed by evidence.
My investigation skill can create one, two, or dozens of probes with benchmarks. Once you're confident in the solution, you can plan and author the investigation, then execute it phase by phase.
- Post https://www.minid.net/2026/7/14/how-to-automatise-with-ai
- GitHub repo with examples of skills and rules. https://github.com/meerita/monorepo-nextjs-golang-rust-pytho...
HR and the lawyers would tell you that it is all company property. Make any of it at work? Company property. Bring it into work to do company work, company property.
Whatever miracle maker you're talking about, if it exists, should be making you money so, it's either doing that, is a weird train hobby, or a delusion.
No sense of victory?
I'm still surprised sometimes at how rapidly I can prototype something. Is it always shippable? No. But something that would've taken me an amount of time I can't afford to is much quicker.
This past weekend I decided to build an iOS app as a personal project. Normally I wouldn't have the time to work on one like that but I was able to get a working POC that is actually usable for my trivial use case in a matter of hours.
I'd call that a victory.
For pure design space exploration that can be a victory, equivalent to sketching a UI on paper being faster than making it in HTML, but is that the work you're actually doing most of the time? Maybe for some people it is.
But none of that pays the bills. The context is entirely about how people get paid for this stuff and, that's turning it into a commodity, and saying that "my AI talks to their AI" is pretty close to saying "my job is redundant"
Because there's people who care about the craft, and there's people who don't.
I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.
Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood. Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus. Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.
Why are carpenters always the example in these arguments? I know a framing carpenter and I've never heard anyone whine more about their job than he does.
Construction was never the best metaphor for programming. The compiler constructs the code. Software dev is closer to building architecture than construction.
You're not the carpenter though, the code you wrote can rarely do things on its own, you need a toolchain or an interpreter, or something to run it with. Toolchains use your code as rough reference, turning you into a designer/architect. I don't endorse it when people fully offload development to LLMs, that's lazy and irresponsible, but how I see most devs use it (not the loud minority) it's just another tool in the arsenal. If it lets you skip the annoying steps and focus on the logic - excellent, great, I'm not great at Java, i don't know all of its built in APIs, I can ask an LLM that I need this and this API to communicate with C++ layer, perform the following logic, output the following logs, after which I can audit and validate the code to the best of my ability. Is that such a bad thing? Did a caveman with a stick reject the hammer and the axe?
Disingenuous analogy, because you're taking the work of a carpenter and then jumping all the way to a Star Trek style replicator, which is daft.
The jump from writing code by hand to having a machine learning algorithm compute code for you is not the same as that. We had tags, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, word suggestion (via dictionary), intellisense, enhanced auto-completions via snippets, natural language processing, language servers, etc. etc. throughout the decades and an LLM is still not a Star Trek style replicator.
Now, it might have taken a blacksmith a hell of a long time to work various kinds of metal to order, but then someone got the idea of creating a mould so you could make more of them at once. Then later on technology advances and you can now machine it to ridiculously high precision with CNC. Now the person who writes CNC code for a high precision part might not be the same person who has to work another metal part manually.
Did the machines do that or did they? And why exactly does that distinction matter? Half the code I write depends on stuff hundreds or thousands of others have built before me.
I think it depends on what you mean by "the craft".
I understand the sentiments, genuinely. I do miss the feelings of carefully crafting a great piece of code. There was a genuine sense of accomplishment there. I still get a sense of accomplishment from agentic development, but it's different. It feels more similar to when you've steered a team of people who are actually doing the work, and then the final product gets delivered. I never touched the actual work, but my input / steering / taste / direction / etc. was a big part of what was delivered. And now we have the solution that we wanted.
If you got into this field because you like to hand-write code, and that's what you view as your craft, then yeah, I think you probably are in a tough spot. There's always the opportunity to do that on your own time, just like I'm sure the vast majority of woodworkers today are doing it for fun, not as their profession.
But if you're in this field because you have a passion for building things that solve problems (you know, engineering), if that's what you view as your craft, I don't think there's any shortage of opportunities to practice your craft.
The hand-written code solves problems. Many of those are problems about how to write code. In your world, these are apparently invalidated as problems now, due to becoming less profitable: by "problem" you mean "profitable problem". Is chasing after profitable problems noble and special, I don't know, it serves demand, demand matters somewhat, fine then. But it's not the epitome of problem-solving.
> you have a passion for building things that solve problems
The AI hypers are more about “building things” than “solving problems”. When you analyze their comments and projects, they can barely articulate what the project’s purpose is about. Or even if it can be used by somebody else. It’s always about LoC, coding speed, and specs complexity.
I always wonder what is the ratio of these projects that do "solve problems" and that appear to "solve problem" and that do not "solve problems"...
Most of times people would say the do solve them. Still I might or might not be right that quite often they do not in reality.
You're talking about a very niche group out of all the devs using AI, which is the majority of developers.
Assume you have control over things. How do you make it not soul crushing? Even if you don’t have an incentive to produce as fast as you can, it’s still kinda sucks. Even if you take the time to carefully review the code produced etc.
What hurts the most is the loss of community. Yeah it was a job, but it was a fun, cozy job. We got to sit around and think about things together all day, and poke holes in each others arguments, and collaborate toward a solution. There was a deep level of camaraderie and satisfaction in "being in the trenches" with your colleagues. It's all gone now. Juniors don't have questions anymore. Seniors are siloed off in their own world of feature development. And product has just become meat proxies. I'm dealing with a huge amount of grief over this now as someone who's lifelong vocation and sense of identity is seemingly evaporating.
Agree, I don’t buy the doom and gloom that coding is dead and all our jobs are going away (some will).
But the damage that LLMs have done to the social aspect of work is horrible. Beyond horrible.
That whole thread feels like something out of Black Mirror. Especially the comment from Claude AI right under the OP’s post summarizing the thread. The dark humor of the juxtaposition of Claude AI’s harsh summarization of all the users’ pain….pure Black Mirror.
What are the implications of AI output not being copyrightable?
Can I just grab a copy of my company's vibe coded app and start selling it myself? What stops me? Not copyright law.
I suppose what really stops me is that power wins, and the company has more money and power than me, and so regardless of whatever the law says, my life will be fucked up good if I did copy their codebase.
All of this to avoid the reality that experience and expertise are a thing that can't be easily commoditized.
mmm, but software products _have been_ commoditized. Especially the bloated ones that are just a fluffy bunny attached to a CRUD.
We're watching in real time the conditions that created the Luddites.
Software development is not one thing. Some work like configuring frameworks is proving tractable to automation. But there's a lot more to software than writing glue code.
We may never again have as many "software developers" as we did in early 2020s. That shift is sure to have severe economic, political, social, and cultural consequences.
I am especially interested in how the work in security, assurance, performance, and such hard problems will evolve in respect to the large amounts of LLM-generated code. I see a lot of opportunities there. Not in terms of how many people will be able to work on that but in terms of how much income those competent enough will command. Individuals and teams. There are some really interesting developments in spaces that have historically been shunned by the framework configuration crowd. It seems to me that the advocates of speed over quality in software development are about to be swallowed whole by the tide of code they unleashed.
Building frontier LLMs and coding agents isn't easy either
What does building those have to do with my point?
> Or, as one user so poetically put it, you're just a condom between Claude and your production server getting fucked. Your only real job is to be the warm body they can blame when the AI slop inevitably breaks.
The other day I inherited a repo from someone that left the company. The first one to be almost fully vibe coded.
It's horrible. It's over engineered in every way. It follows a completely different pattern than the other repos. It adds 10 CLI options that don't have any use (why does Claude add --threads to everything). It's impossible to follow the flow of the code. Of course, days after I inherited it, it broke so good luck to me fixing it I guess
Ironically, my first thought was how quickly this might be able to be re-written, in a sane way, …with the help of an LLM.
I find that if you pay a lot of human-in-the-loop attention to the design phase, LLMs can produce perfectly decent stuff.
They’re also good at writing tests. Lock in the (non-broken) behavior of the old app with tests. Then use those tests to re-create the app, except with a talented engineer (you) guiding the design this time.
What's to stop you from rebuilding it yourself to improve the structure? Why couldn't you vibe code it better?
I mean, I'm going to rebuild it. But with just a light AI usage. The point I'm trying to make is that. Ok, AI may have saved time coding it the first time. But building an unmaintainable codebase is going to make you pay that time back with interests
It is like inheriting Assembly codebase written by a compiler.
You will not edit Assembly in this.
Claude will have to edit it and Claude will not whine.
That's not true at all. One thing is not understanding the language in which it was written and a completely different one is that even though it was coded in a language that I have proficiency in, the code doesn't make sense. It's just poorly engineered
I refuse to keep adding shit to the pile
This sounds like it's gonna explode in our faces, tbh.
That is an impressive level of tone-deafness to see an automatic AI-generated summary of comments as the top comment on the thread.
That's a default bot in that subreddit, it's there for all posts. I get your criticism but I don't think this was done deliberately.
Agreed, but that is exactly the point. The mods believe that AI slop is the desired top content in their sub. It exemplifies what is wrong with AI-generated content, as it places people's comments secondary to the AI's summary.
Not going to lie, I thought that was the point.
the reddit claudebot summary at the top is chefs kiss level of irony.
Some people are taking longer than others to realize that the job has changed. That's all that I see in these rants.
It shouldn't be surprising that if you swim against the tide by doing things the old way, you are going to feel more burnt out because of it.
> Some people are taking longer than others to realize that the job has changed. That's all that I see in these rants.
Some people are too quick to drink whatever kool-aid they’re served. That’s all I see in these tired excuses.
> It shouldn't be surprising that if you swim against the tide by doing things the old way, you are going to feel more burnt out because of it.
Better to swim against the tide than letting yourself get swept up in the current and drowning.
It no longer surprises me, but the profound lack of empathy shown by AI (or any other popular hype du jour) proponents is worrying. A large numbers of fellow humans are saying “this thing is negatively impacting my life” and the response is “lol, and you should be thankful”.
The original post on X/Twitter is here: https://x.com/v0xium/status/2101526107128529120
https://xxcancel.com/v0xium/status/2101526107128529120
Alternative nitter frontend: https://xcopy.uk/v0xium/status/2101526107128529120
Alternative copy/paste of the tweet/Xcretion:
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
You know the reddit post that is the subject of discission already did what you did, right?
In the post, he had only been at the company for 2 weeks. Maybe they have a really bad on-boarding process and he just wasn't seeing the process clearly.
Surely it cant' be this bad, or a company would collapse?
I think we'd all be surprised how bad most software is within businesses, and they somehow still run.
If it’s B2B, the finance side (seller/customer) of the relationship can be totally different from the product side (developer/user). Evolution of the contract is often measured in quarters.
Nice. A Claude bot summarises the comments of people complaining about Claude so you don't have to read them!
Read a rant about corporate Scrum hellholes before AI existed. Reddit and this site is full of them.
This is similar except mindlessly churning short tickets with no time to plan or think and producing crap has been replaced my mindlessly herding bots and producing crap. Management doesn’t care and just wants to push tickets is a constant.
I’ve seen the term “code grinding” for these environments and I saw that phrase as far back as the 2000s.
This isn’t a new type of workplace. I’m willing to believe AI has made it even more dull.
This company is not treating agent code generation as if it's out in the open. Why in the world would you work like this? It has nothing to do with management. If your coworker is just going to do agent review just share the fucking prompt and do it yourself like you would with any other tool. Jesus fucking christ.
Any reddit noscript/basic HTML frontend alternative?
I was taken immediately here https://safereddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wm5c21/i_am_done...
I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
> My company was recently acquired. My company was currently going through a platform modernization. The company that acquired us is also going through a platform modernization. They acquired us specifically to use our new platform. Our platform isn't even fully built yet. I'm doing 100% of the coding. I'm tasked with finishing the platform, migrating all my companies existing customers to the new platform, migrating the new company's existing customers to new platform all while continuing to sell to new customers. The company is pushing AI-first EVERYTHING. I'm not allowed to hire. The new company had 20+ people working on their platform. I'm now expected to do it with 5. I had to fight for those 5. They thought I should be able to do it with 1 engineer. They are cutting people 30% annually over the next 2 years. 200+ employees to ~60-70. And they are asking me if I'll be ready in Q1 or Q2 next year. Our product person gave AI the legacy code bases to generate a report of all features and gaps. I supposed to go through an HTML file that is easily 100+ pages long and a spreadsheet with 30 tabs and hundreds of rows each. I pushed back that it's not fit for human consumption and let's start with high level gaps and they're acting like I'm not a team player or something. It's ridiculous.
This is crazy. LLM usage has somehow convinced people that it's $999 for not just knowing where to place one nail, but for knowing where to place an almost infinite number of them. Disingenuous marketing by the big players does not help either.
> I'm not a team player or something. It's ridiculous.
This. In the past, when you could challenge a sloppy and rushed feature, done wrongly. You could steer people into better designs without adding much overhead. These days, if you try to challenge those no-reviews, ship-50k PRs daily, you instantly get labeled as AI-sceptic, someone who is afraid of change, afraid of loosing your job. I don't see a way out from this.
> They thought I should be able to do it with 1 engineer.
Imagine a world where they only employ 1 engineer instead of 5, and so the 4 unemployed engineers just build 4 competitors by Q1 next year.
I think people should use even more of Claude to come up with system design. All the people I know use LLMs for generating code and slop documents. But not for ideas themselves. So the pattern I see is lots of code + lots of documents but built on system designs that are generated by humans without LLM oversight. They don't use it in the one place that matters the most!
Learn to be a plumber! Lol
What we really need is people building houses. Unfortunately the economy will collapse if we make housing affordable.
I do what I am expected to do and get paid for doing it.
The question: “what is your purpose?”
Valid answer, I guess, though some might wish for a deeper connection to life than a mechanical, subservient existence.
> though some might wish for a deeper connection to life than a mechanical, subservient existence.
That’s what I do with my $300k when I get off work
desperately but it doesn't seem to be on the cards.
> I do what I am expected to do and get paid for doing it.
I would like to point out to you that Auschwitz guards had the same argument
I can think of a few critical differences here
The Nazis should have rewritten the death camps in Rust
Godwin's Law in one step. New record!
The difference is that some companies expect people to push back on dumb stuff.
What is this comment meant to imply?
Isn't it obvious? I know the parent jumped to the most extreme comparison which is sure to cause dozens of eye rolls. But the point is clear - the reason why some aspects of the modern world are getting worse is because it's filled with order-followers who will always do the thing that benefits them alone in the short-term. This is nothing new, but usually this disconnect was acknowledged by the people doing this as an imperfect bargain. But here they're going a step further, where the thought terminates not at "I follow orders because there is little choice" but "I follow orders because that makes me a good worker/subordinate/person".
I would like to point out doctors have the same argument. Doctors are literally Hitler. Q.E.D.
Most doctors do what they do because they want to help people first and foremost. With rare exceptions, they're not opinionless husks who frame their existence with "I follow orders because it is my purpose" + "I do whatever makes me the most money".
Well this is what the people wanted, so.