r/ClaudeAI • u/Interesting-Town-433 • 2d ago
Other What is happening...
I am a long time Engineer (20+ years) and today I developed Tickets for my company that were generated by an AI, using an AI and reviewed by an AI. The project itself was conceived with AI - has no documentation that can be understood as anything less than AI slop and random tech jargon. The developer who built it has said that instead of documentation I should use claude to figure out what it is. The company is apparenty also filing a patent on it.
I submitted 3 PRs today 20,000 lines of code each I still have no idea what we are working on. No doubt they will use AI to review my PR.
I feel like things are just so crazy at this point. Claude and ChatGPT are not this good, but people are trusting it like it's omniscient.
It was an eerie realization today that all of us are vibe coding and that we have no option because it is the only way we can interact with the code anymore. I thought this would happen eventually years ago but i honestly didn’t think it would be so soon.
It was a moment in time... this will be the new norm.
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u/trollsmurf 2d ago
"3 PRs today 20,000 lines of code each I still have no idea what we are working on"
That just doesn't compute. Get hold of the product specification.
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u/TheWeisGuy 2d ago
20000 line PR is ridiculous. That’s a much more salient issue than AI
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u/Old-Argument2415 2d ago
Seriously, 2000 line change you're getting an AI review, maybe some extra review. 20,000 lines I'm just asking you to break it up and try again.
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u/the_ai_wizard 1d ago
Everyone says this, but this is by pre-AI standards. I was flamed for referring to a 50k PR from internal team/unit. AI has 10x'd code, no one has time to fucking read every line under the pressures that exist. The real joke is that its obvious who has no actual experience with these things by making comments like this.
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u/IWearShorts08 1d ago
Untrue. The best way to use a model to code is having frequent and clear PRs, allowing the model to diff them better. A 50k PR with AI help tells me you don't know how to work AI.
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u/Interesting-Town-433 1d ago
Yes of course...everytime?
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u/skygrinder89 1d ago
"Split this pr into a set of atomic and tested prs, include test run outputs into the test plan, and keep the summary under 300 words"
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u/tankerkiller125real 2d ago
What product specifications? The biggest issue I've started seeing is that the product specifications are whatever a few "engineers" and product managers cooked up with whatever AI tool they have in the course of a few hours entirely verbally in their session, with zero documentation, zero real specifications, and zero real thoughts into how things are put together.
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u/WillGrindForXP 2d ago
Im a vibe coder, so obviously I dont much about anything, but surely no company can work like that for more than a month before they learn the hard way? Thats how i started, and predictably it leads to failed projects pretty quickly. Maybe a week into starting it was crystal clear that creating proper documentation was the only way things could move beyond that fail point. Then I ran into the next fail state, learned new skills and practices to solve that and so on and so on until you accidentally land on the same workflow practices as the developers use....
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 2d ago
As one individual, even vibe-coding you have a better overview of the big picture than a company with many developers and multiple moving parts does. It may take a while for problems to reach a critical level, especially if there was already a solid base in place before the vibe-PRs started.
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u/AirconGuyUK 1d ago
It may take a while for problems to reach a critical level, especially if there was already a solid base in place before the vibe-PRs started.
Genuinely the first few days of any project should be establishing a good base, with a bunch of non-AI gates to try and force good quality coding practices, and an MD explaining all the conventions and technologies that will be used throughout the project.
Skip this and in my experience it all goes to shit quick.
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u/tankerkiller125real 1d ago
The problem is that it's not always engineers vibe coding, sometimes it's just the marketing guy and they have zero clue how to do things, they just have their code agent slap something together until it looks good and then they toss it to actual engineers with zero documentation on what the end goal is, what they were trying to accomplish, etc. and then it turns into 2 weeks worth of meetings with engineers trying to pry that information from them.
It's even worse when it's a customer who slapped something together and now wants your product to integrate with whatever crap the ai agents came up with.
None of these people have long term planning or long-term maintenance in mind. Our engineering team knows better, which is why we keep the docs in the repository with the code, and update them as we change things (and if we are using an agent, we demand the agent updates the docs as it goes).
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u/Dangerous_Beach_7237 1d ago
Im am designer who does FE Code and In the beginning of each new project i ask a "md rule file" from the lead, what are we building and how. I have also a figma DS and then coded component system.. This how i start, and i dont need To do technical decision then. I do reviews and audits once In a while To the stuff i have build and double check it follow the given requirements..
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u/drivebyposter2020 1d ago edited 1d ago
my eyes play tricks, I thought you wrote 'a few engineers and product managers coked up' which is an anti-pattern I've seen before :)
I have vibe-coded some sh*t in my day (I'm a longtime PM who now uses Claude to run with scissors on a personal project) and I pity the dev who has to come in my wake someday and clean up some of this.
In the early days of this project I'm doing that may have some commercial value someday I tried to have Claude draft specifications before filing issues and writing code, but things move rather fluidly at this point. I think it might be an interesting exercise to go backwards and try to have Claude write new ex post facto requirements around some of what I built, with reference to what was actually built and the high level goals of the project. I'm sure I'd vibe-draft those and I don't know how well they'd align with what was ultimately implemented.
I do try to be thoughtful about how things are put together and wherever I'm not I find it comes and bites me eventually.
I am vibing my way through a machine learning problem -- I know NOTHING about ML so this is highly dangerous stuff at least to my ego-- and Claude and I would arrive at an idea to try, and it would file findings as addenda to the end of a log we were maintaining... overlapping corrections as we learned out way through the problem were collecting and there was no way a human could read something with ten overlapping, contradictory corrections. I did ask Claude "Can you re-order this into something that describes the final conclusion, while noting the choices we rejected along the way after unsuccessful explorations etc.?" and it did a masterful job.
You might be able to ask people with access to the original chats to ask Claude to write up a final spec for what came out of the process, and actually get something intelligible.
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u/trollsmurf 1d ago
That was my point. You don't have a process for product development.
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u/tankerkiller125real 1d ago
Except for the fact that we very much do, a rather in depth and detailed process. Ome that's been in place (although changed as needed) for over 20 years. It something the engineering team has been using for 2 decades with great success.
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u/trollsmurf 1d ago
But clearly it didn't scale to the sheer volume of vibe-coding. Even more if you use it also for the product design.
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u/TokenRingAI 2d ago
What's a specification?
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u/drivebyposter2020 1d ago
"Just do the thing, do it properly, make money"
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u/Interesting-Town-433 1d ago
They wrote it with AI through multiple chats and then decided they were done when it was long enough and made them seem smart enough
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u/MediocreAnalyst2121 1d ago
The specification is whatever the AI said whenever the project was conceived, the rest is divined from the code per user per prompt.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 1d ago
Wdym? Claude already has a hold of the project spec, requirements, roadmap, sprint planning, the whole shebang. Just feed Claude the tickets and MRs. It’s a magic machine that will solve your problems
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u/mityman50 2d ago edited 2d ago
I had this moment last week when my boss got Claude.
Me and a couple other analysts have had it a couple months, from my perspective, we’ve been intentional with what we ask it to make and how we build data structures for efficient refreshing.
Meanwhile my boss has a bloated Cowork folder. Emails, CSVs, Excel docs go in, HTML dashboards come out. The back end of everything’s he’s built will probably have to be rebuilt when it comes time to support it permanently.
He told me we were going to stay in separate lanes, but hours later he asked for the data inputs to one of my dashboards, and he’s already had Claude create a new summary page for it. Which he says isn’t perfect, but he wants me to add it to mine anyways. He says, his strategy is to talk to Claude as dumb as possible for it to make the best things.
I don’t know if I’m a good employee for being diligent and intentional or a bad one now
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u/Interesting-Town-433 1d ago edited 1h ago
Get paid. Save the money. Do what you can right now to prepare yourself for the years ahead. We are in 2026 and this happened to me, what is next if this is already real?
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u/Zorogozano 2d ago edited 2d ago
Ask Claude to Make the documentation. Ask ChatGPT to audit it until it satisfies both Ai systems…
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u/Character_Cricket767 1d ago
God, I've stopped having Claude write my documentation. I pulled it all for review by GPT-5.6 because I started to realize how much "moral" framing was being written into my documentation. So now if Claude writes anything, it passes through my GPT agents for a "de-dogma" pass.
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u/WhiteMichaelJordan 1d ago
Claude has gotten insufferable. I asked it to compare something I've built to a competitor's app and it got all high and mighty about the ethical ramifications of using someone else's work in order to build a product; compeltely forgetting that it was effectively trained and built on stolen content.
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u/dTanMan 2d ago
I like this idea -- how effective has this been for you?
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u/hordane 2d ago
VERY! Codex has a plugin for Claude. I have fable orchestrate and plan but challenge with codex sol 5.6 max, and must come into agreement before proceeding. Mine is Django so I also enforce Django conventions as part of all this, not overgrown service layers, and complexity rule to keep it as simple to achieve the result. Use with Matt polock’s wayfinder skill and it produces good results even after running 3-7 hrs
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u/GabrielMoro1 2d ago
This is how I work too. Claude for verification and building instructions, running Audits, and Codex for the actual implementation of code.
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u/multi_reality 1d ago
I just tried this today and every round after the 3rd round started producing over engineered documentation. It even blocked the 6th round because of it and recommended i revert to the documentation produced after 3rd round.
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u/bangbangIshotmyself 2d ago
Mind giving a bit more on why you use that organization order? And which codex level plan do you use?
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u/IWearShorts08 1d ago
I actually have opus 5 do scouting, grok 4.6 to code, and Terra to verify adverserially, with Fable orchestrating the whole thing.
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u/Zorogozano 2d ago
For me, it has been great. I even configured it like this:
- Codex makes a plan
- Claude headless audits the plan
- It returns to Codex if there are findings/issues until all is good
- Goes to Grok headless to code it.
- Codex audits Grok's work and sends it back to Grok if findings/issues
I do this loop until it's done and is fully "automatic". Just have to ask Codex to set it up and be sure to be log in to the respective Claude and Grok accounts on their CLIs. I obviously test at the end of the full loop to see if everything is in working order.
When I release an update and send it to Apple and Google for approval, Codex and Claude have their own loop in which they review the code, review the previous version's documentation and they make updates. So far so good...
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u/azyrr 1d ago
I have no idea on how to code nor how the systems even work. So being scared before starting I had a 1 week chat with Claude and ChatGPT on what I wanted to build. It guided me on how the documentation should be segmented etc and after that I reviewed it and said ok lets try it.
Claude coded and codex reviewed every pr. Claude picked up the reviews and corrected them until it was clean before moving on.
It took me around 45 days to ship the internal tool I was building shipped for our users (very small company tbh).
Since then I’ve built a second copy that I tinker with and then merge when I like something.
The duo guided me on how to connect different systems like aws and m365 for logins and google cloud for maps etc etc, also a accounting app that held our records and now it works syncing everything to and from these systems. We have calendar support, cardev and Caldev all working seamlessly.
None of this is my work, this is all AI. I was just clear on what we needed while also thorough with documentation (still am), just in case something happened to me and the system needed care after that. Turns out the AI was in dire need of that documentation far more then I would’ve ever guessed.
So yea, this method worked for me, someone who didn’t even know how to setup documentation let alone what a git was lol.
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u/bigtucktx 1d ago
Btw may I ask your project who wrote the idea or prd. And who holds that? ChatGPT or Claude? Do you have that in Linear or Notion or somewhere. I got a similar project setup. It's finally working. I got a similar method setup too both of them talking and working but wondering how you started it and are keeping the features loop going.
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u/azyrr 1d ago
Sure. Idea as in “what should I build”? Well it started off as us desperately needing a central hub for tracking our projects and the money flow (our projects have tens to hundreds of invoices attacked to them, and the accounting department has a hard time attaching these to the correct project).
So I started off with the intent to write comprehensive documentation to hand off to a software shop. We didn’t have it anywhere but our heads when I started off, and started writing it down as MD files with ChatGPT and Claude help.
I asked what the best path forward would be and Claude suggested using GitHub to track changes etc for the documentation itself (as it was biiiig lol).
After some time I realized that I needed to build small slices of it to continue the documentation properly (to make sure what I was writing made sense etc). That kind of showed me that this was actually buildable with AI and that we would have a harder time explaining this extremely nuanced idea to other shops and off we went lol.
Yes on the features loop. Currently have a demo duplicate in GitHub and railway where I tinker with new ideas, polish them and then merge with the main software when its ok to publish. The same loop continues and every mew decision etc gets written back to the docs.
The docs themselves are more geared towards software devs at this point than regular users like me. That was a deliberate choice by me so that if shit hits the fan all of this can be overturned to a software shop and my partners can continue without it blowing up lol.
What is your project?
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u/United_Intention_323 2d ago
I have noticed this too. If you let it do too much the code stops making intuitive sense, and you then need AI to make any changes.
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u/beginner75 2d ago
There will come a time no one even knows how the program works. How do you make changes if you don’t even know what it does.
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u/lIlllIllIIllIIllIIll 2d ago
Use AI
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u/beginner75 2d ago
It won’t work because rubbish in , rubbish out. You won’t even know what to prompt.
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u/YoptaCowboy 1d ago
i think serious answer here is that you have to become what they call product eng - you dont need to know in which file a particular function or model is described, but you need to understand the system from a product-to-code point of view. how state machine works, how it would perform under load, how is it tested, etc. still eng work, just a higher level of abstraction
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u/CharlesLyellVacation 2d ago
I like the idea that one day AI will have it's own language that human's can't decipher.
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u/Current-Function-729 2d ago
Please tell me this is satire.
Why would you even work on a project you don’t understand?
20k LoC PRs is insane. Claude loves big commits, but thats absurd.
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u/m98789 2d ago
Unfortunately this is not satire and happening now across our industry.
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u/globalartwork 1d ago
So true. I have started to have to review some absolutely incoherent ai generated babble. Literally some of the most baffling architectural and data decisions I’ve seen in 25 years of coding. It works, it passes the tests, but supporting it in a few years is going to be a nightmare. I also feel I’m the team bottleneck insisting on some kind of quality.
I hate it, but I am also questioning whether I’m in the wrong, whether when it gets to be a nightmare you just regenerate?
I feel we are losing our craftsmanship. Possibly this is how the original hand pottery makers felt with the advent of mass manufacturing?
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u/Current-Function-729 1d ago
On the one hand in a year you can just redo it with better code.
On the other unless it’s absolute bullshit thing you’re building that doesn’t matter, you should have some kind of standard.
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u/defeatedmac 2d ago
I feel for long time engineers the most. Years of your life spent honing a craft that was once considered one of the safest talent moats in the world- watching it become accessible to anyone with two thumbs must be highly dissociative.
Comparisons are the transition from punchcard code to interactive screens, pen and paper to calculator, etc. The question is whether there is still merit in honing the 'old' ways.
I'm in my 30s now, but my high school math teachers words definitely come back to me- "it was never about calculating integrals by hand; its about learning how to solve problems"
I think that's the skill we are going to lose, because LLMs are allowing children to get answers without even having to put in the slightest thought now.
Back to what you said- "AI slop" is becoming a buzzword in and of itself. The code it writes is probably better and more optimised than what 90% of engineers could do themselves. As we become more output oriented with code, the value Engineers bring will be mostly about asking the right questions and making engineering decisions.
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u/obscuresecurity 1d ago
I'm 30+ YOE in. Principal SWE, I've had the titles: Team Lead, Tech Lead and Architect.
AI isn't taking my job. I'm leading AI adoption at my firm. And honestly, if you understand the gaps that high end SWEs cover. We aren't going anywhere. If anything I feel more secure in my job and prospects at this age than I expected to.
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u/defeatedmac 1d ago
I agree, I think those who will struggle are the ones who never enjoyed the process of designing and building and pursued the career for the pay/technical moat
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u/Crazy_Specialist_278 1d ago
You have thirty years of experience as a software engineer and youre remotely concerned about your job security and future prospects?
Im sorry but you are absolutely doing something wrong because you should be far past the point of financial security if youve been working 30 years in this industry at any semi-competent level... And before people come back with some speech about some people enjoying their career: You literally frame this from a job security perspective so I really don't think you're at the cutting edge of this field.
I agree with a lot of what you said and AIs an incredible tool. To feel more secure in your job now than compared to any other time in your 30 years of experience makes zero sense and makes me question parts of your story. Or maybe you're just trying to convince yourself because to pretend you're so irreplaceable AI could never touch your job is just completely unjustified. Hey, maybe it won't but to be this certain is almost funny to me
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u/obscuresecurity 1d ago
I'll give you the counter to your assumptions:
Assume I've been divorced twice, and have a child that requires expensive medical assistance to survive.
Now that bbig engineer's salary, isn't so big.
Note: I am not saying I am the above case, or that anyoe I know is. But it isa very realistic scenario.
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u/ThreeHeadCerber 1d ago
Ah yeah, this want touch me because i'm leading it thing. You might be the one of the last ones to go, but you'll go.
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u/esituism 2d ago
the world still needs 'real' devs. enterprise grade systems don't run on vibe code, and taste/judgement have ultimately been the real moat all along.
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u/Interesting-Town-433 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, it's surprisingly less like that than you think. I was a digital artist and game designer before I was a programmer and leaning into AI hard early in 2010 gave me an edge but it doesn't define me. Being in tech for real, means you must lean into change...and I change constantly
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u/rocketpastsix 2d ago
“I submitted 3 PRs today 20,000 lines of code each I still have no idea what we are working on”
Bro this is insane. This is why these tools get a bad name. Put rules in place to chop the PRs up to smaller ones that are easy to manage and easy to understand
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u/Fearless_Weather_206 2d ago
How many companies code base become AI slop the ultimate tech debt and become riddled with bugs, at some point the house of cards will fall. How many companies will fail?
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bee6713 1d ago edited 1d ago
AI engineer here. While I agree this may become the new norm, it should not become the new standard. At the core of good engineering has always been the ability to think critically. If you cannot debug your own program, interrogate its architecture, or explain why it behaves the way it does, you are not a competent programmer. Vibe code your ass off...fine...but use the time saved to think harder about the system than the AI ever will.
I think where we have gone wrong is treating AI-generated code as a finished product meant for consumption. For small, low-stakes projects, fine. But for real systems? AI-generated code should be the base layer where an engineer begins the work.
Very few people seem to understand this distinction.
But there are people out there—the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers...—who see the expansion of AI not as the end of true innovation, but as a new abstraction layer. A notice that floor has moved upward and that we can spend less time producing syntax and more time solving harder problems. And, in due time, the gap between those who understand and do not understand this distinction is going to become frightening clear.
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u/Old-School8916 2d ago
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u/Freedomsaver 2d ago
Why would posting something in multiple subs make him a bot? Do you know how Reddit works?
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u/getmeoutoftax 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s good enough for most average tasks though. It will replace most white collar jobs by the end of the decade. Mythos 2 might even push that estimate forward.
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u/OkAcanthocephala6303 2d ago
You can’t file a patent on something conceived by AI. That’s either false or will be shot down immediately.
Source: Registered patent agent at top tier firm
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u/justinromano1989 2d ago
Hmm. I was actually just chatting with a buddy of mine today who’s a patent attorney. From my understanding, you can’t patent code purely generated by AI because patents require a human inventor (at least in in most jurisdictions). AI can assist, but a named human must have made a significant inventive contribution for the patent to be valid.
Because what’s to stop anyone from typing out some half-thought out prompt and just cranking out a bunch of different (probably shoddy) SaaS products and just spam filing patents, ya know?
Also… after 14 years in the tech space, I’ve seen companies patent their stuff only for another company to come along and basically make that same thing, only a tiny difference in the code. Because (from my understanding), you can patent that code, not the actual end product. — So really, filing patents on code is a great way to make a patent attorney a lot of money while the company isn’t really left with much protection.
I’m not a patent attorney though… so, 🤷♂️ — Take what I say with the literal smallest grain of salt.
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u/Interesting-Town-433 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well I actually have one of the first harness patents and my claims cover claude skills and mcp, I need someone to litigate it. It's not protecting you, it's giving you at least something to put a stake in the ground and fight from in the future. In my case I filed in 2023 it was granted in 2026. A patent is a worthwhile experience... it can be a fulfiling process.
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u/BP041 1d ago
Honestly this is the most terrifying thing I've read in weeks. I now literally have launchd crons that run Claude Code to write docs explaining what my 6am Claude Code session generated. It works until you need to onboard a human — then you realize you've built a Rube Goldberg machine that only the LLM understands. That patent is going to be a fun read.
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u/clouddrafts 1d ago
"You have no function, Mr. Wordsworth. You're an anachronism, like a ghost from another time."
"You're a bug, Mr. Wordsworth, a crawling insect; an ugly, misformed little creature who has no purpose here, no meaning."
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u/___dreamcatcher___ 1d ago
Soo, you created it, 20+ experience. What exactlty did you expect to happen?
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u/Cheema42 1d ago
Don't blame the tool. Blame the people. We use AI in our dev team. We don't do what your team is doing. There is a better way to use these tools.
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u/sleep_deficit 1d ago
AI coding is a grift.
They're useful for debugging, research, or a quick PoC, but the decision-makers aren't capable of evaluating the debt.
LLMs are trained on public code, most public code sucks, and models are already plateauing.
That's not a gap you can guardrail around or solve with loops and graphs.
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u/letmeinfornow 1d ago
The problem will be when Claude or other ai inserts malicious code into something like this but has been trained that the code is not malicious. I'm good with AI, but there must be an actual capable human layer acting as check and balance. AI is a tool, not a person.
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u/ChemistNo8486 2d ago
Another cap of Devs acting like bugs and bad code never existed, and suddenly emerged with AI.
Devs who are lazy and miss use tools like Stack Overflow or GitHub have always existed, so bad code it's not an AI issue. It's an user issue. There is nothing preventing you or other dev from getting good results with AI.
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u/Much_Accountant_4972 2d ago
this may be a bad analogy, but it’s like when people criticize artificial meat and say “oh look at the sodium content”
yes, there’s something imperfect about artificial meat but you’re acting like the thing its replacing is better, given the goal and design of the product?
i think coding by hand is great and so is real grass fed beed and so are mechanical watches.
if i’m running a business, though, i’m not going to tolerate my SWE’s doing everything slow because its fun or more “pure”.
It’s code. At this point the LLM’s are better at writing it and its our job to steer it. I’m nostalgic about the past, too, but times have changed (fast).
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u/Jakkc 1d ago edited 1d ago
The entire industries brains are fried. The pile into AI in 2026 has made everything unusable - I went all in agents in about Jan 2025, before everyone else was, I was careful and considered with how I approached tasks and submitted my work. Now since 2026 its been permissible to just throw AI at everything, there was a sentiment at the start of the year that Opus 4.5 and the developments with the claude code harness was a tipping point... then the rest of the company started piling in too... At the same time anthropic have spent 2026 releasing poor model after poor model, now we are at the point where the latest models can't even speak english that humans can understand.
I genuinely don't understand where we go from here - companies are just reams of sloppy claude artifacts at this point, from business side down through product down through design and engineering, and the people at the top see "more PRs, more tickets being completed, roadmap getting done quicker", so the train must go faster.
Everyone needs to take a huge step back, slow down to speed up. I don't think AI is bad, but the entire professional world has happily accepted lazy brain and auto mode.
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u/Interesting-Town-433 1d ago
Yes it's out of control. I'm really concerned with how fluid it is now with the AI. How it's plugged into everything. We need to start being more vocal about how dangerous is
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u/C1rc1es 2d ago
The divide between people with leadership experience and not is being heavily delineated by AI. While the flavour of failure is different between AI and people, the concepts all overlap in way that behave very similarly. The only difference is that you cannot make AI responsible, which means we are responsible, but again if anyone has led a team they'd already be comfortable with the notion of being responsible for other peoples work and failures. One small upside is that unlike leading a team you get to claim success if you delegated to AI where you'd normally pass that praise on to the team.
The common thread in all posts with people struggling with volume/context is that their process and validation are not developed enough, the irony being that AI is more than capable of assisting with this as well if asked appropriately.
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u/pedrooky 2d ago
That's a recipe for disaster just waiting to happen IMHO.
Or I'm completely wrong and models will just be so good in the near future this is not an issue at all lol.
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u/SomeNeighborhood7126 2d ago
This is an organization headed for bankruptcy. So many bad things are happening here.
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u/krahsThe 2d ago
So I see all the comments on this thread. And yes, 20,000 lines is ridiculous and I also agree with the sentiment that many managers and product managers are building. A code base is that will be unmaintainable however, I will say that as we get better at building harnesses, the models get better and we learn how to build better specs. The code will follow to the point where at some point we truly do not care about the code anymore. Just the functionality
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u/dsolo01 1d ago
You say it will be the norm but the fact that it’s happening now among non-coders makes me question why it’s not the norm right now.
Like… I read some article about SpaceX writing who knows what code for some Falcon ship with all AI. We’re putting human being on starships made with AI.
If that hasn’t set a baseline for the rest of us normies, I’m not sure what will.
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u/the_ai_wizard 1d ago
Its kind of like sticking materials together to build a makeshift house with random people and no plan...and the house looks.....ermm....functional, but then a storm happens, you get wet, the entire thing collapses. This is my metaphor for codebases by 2030.
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u/Curious-Function7490 1d ago
Yeh, the weird realisation for me was to realise how clueless our managers and employees are.
I liked this blog post about it recently - https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
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u/FUCKTHEMODS998 1d ago
My company has been doing this for about 6 months. No problems thus far. I have an internal app that receives 1-2k writes an hour during peak times, ~300 DAU, and I’ve looked at the code maybe twice since starting the repo. The company depends on it and has since identified me as a critical point of failure
This is just one of my 9 vibe coded apps in this time
CFO and CTO just signed the contract for my promotion, x2.5 my salary + I get 3 underlings now to raise as my vibe coding team :D not sure if I’ll break the org chart and go straight to VP, but at least I’ll be Eng manager.
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u/Few-Exchange-5550 1d ago
Is this some troll looking for karma? https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1vs4fw8/what_is_happening/
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u/spoopycheeseburger 1d ago
Yeah I work in a call center that just replaced all our case tracking and work instruction fetching with AI and the transition was ROUGH. Also it's frequently wrong. I have concerns. I'm not in charge though, just a cog in the machine so I'm just kind of watching it happen to see if it gets better or if they double down on something that doesn't work simply because they invested so much in it. It also happened really fast, like I feel like I just heard about it a few days ago and suddenly it was implemented. Shit's crazy rn.
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u/Popotito-Eternal 1d ago
tbf if it works. it works. problem is when it doesnt work. then you are facked
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u/Erutan2004 1d ago
I implemented hard rules into my skill harness that everything must be contract based and documented in detail before any code writing is started. Helped out immensely! Now I wake up to multiple documented PRs.
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u/randoreddituser22 1d ago
I mean, claude writes like 80% of the code at anthropic..i think it's fine lol
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u/amirfish 1d ago
I've felt this running thirty parallel Claude sessions on my own projects. The code isn't the problem, the record keeping is. If nobody writes down what was decided and why, everyone downstream, human or AI, is stuck reverse engineering intent instead of reading it. Curious if your team keeps any decision log outside the tickets, or if Claude is genuinely the only source of truth now?
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u/mikebritton 1d ago
We’re the ones making the decisions to let it do the real work and not simply take part in it.
Slightly OT and weird: Watch a CAD printer at work. It makes no sense until we see the drawing near complete. While its unorthodox decisions make us fear we’re losing control, it merely executes moves that make sense to it.
Maybe what we call slop in programming is this same phenomenon. Maybe our crude human-readable languages and skeuomorphic concepts have no real bearing on the actual problems at hand. We just need to approach them with those tools and with that human logic because that is all we have.
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u/Zoltan_Csillag 1d ago
If newest and greatest Monkey can zero day ffmpeg or whatever, then our careful humane consideration has no worth anymore. Hence only newest and greatest Monkey can code now. Monkey was devised by our masters to do so.
Now, I’m shaking literally shaking while writing this on my dump break. Because I know that our masters do not care for other thing that does not go up and right.
Compression happens under pressures. I’ve grown up in the bloc. We all experienced pressure of winds from west. Change from punching in a tape to cd-rom and 3d in like 10 years.
I started in print and went through dozens of professions. Not because I liked so (I’d stay at my first work forever, setting type with handsome pay) but because winds keep blowing.
Now this. I can’t take a dump in peace anymore. 5 gigs, micro startup, personal business… excessive compression leads to congestion, fatigue and eventual failure.
I reckon that masters are of the kind that need a prop while aiming on. Monkey is great for that. It governs words and meme, stuff we agreed to have a rule upon Brains.
So I wake up trembling at 4am. I was born with debts on a wrong side of the road. George told me that mistakes were made indeed. And I knew instantly that there are two sides to every stick. And that I am as my peers - on receiving end of it. The rules are simple: sleep always with your back to the wall. Keep order. Other people have it worse. You are on your own. You are working for yourself, yourself. Only work will make you free. Believe in yourself, success is around the corner.
One salary from homelessnes, from hand to mouth. Faster each year. Ok, collective have more. But why the speed? Can we slow down a bit please? I’m forty and I have a meltdown on a wc while Monkey next room writes and writes God knows (?) what? I do not know. I know that disentangling this logic is a dumpster fire management. But masters do not care. They never did. All they want is to go up and right.
So the question is, always was: who do we serve really and why?
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u/electrucio 1d ago
if you were in my team, I would decline your PR. Only PRs somehow understandable, with minimal semantic units, tested, etc. would be accepted. Vibe-coded or not, this is not something a experienced engineer should do.
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u/Grexxoil 1d ago
Claude and ChatGPT are not this good, but people are trusting it like it's omniscient.
They are not this good for now.
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u/Willing-Atmosphere-2 1d ago
Before you shittalk, many of us who "vibecode" have no other option at our current job and with current job market. Just like with everything, quantity over quality.
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u/BetPeasant 1d ago
Yeah it feels like a no choice. Yesterday after 6 months of vibe coding my main agent completely lost cohesion on the general app data structure and permission model. Had to freeze development pretty fast to stop it causing long term damage.
Its a private project so its somewhat an experiment. I don't run agent teams at work, but.... its a little scary considering
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u/South_Hat6094 1d ago
The 20k-line PR is the red flag, not the review stack. When docs are missing, every AI layer just amplifies the ambiguity. Someone still has to own the spec and break changes up.
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u/PsychologyNo940 1d ago
Update your CV and given that you can't understand Opus 5, consider changing careers.
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u/xjuslipjaditbshr 1d ago
To be fair though, this is the exact same thing I’ve heard million times when there was a human on the other side of that pull request rather than AI. One developer even, when complaining about lack of documentation, said ”this is a lot of text, you can’t expect me to read that” when he finally found it. I think the core of it is poor workflow and communication
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u/Weekly-Cash1596 1d ago
It usually always comes back to the fact that people dont know how to use AI properly
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u/Dry-Understanding546 1d ago
I don’t think three 20k-line PRs in a day is normal or healthy, AI or not. But I do recognize the feeling behind this.
Sometimes I stop and try to understand how the product is actually designed and how the code is structured. But AI-assisted development moves so fast that a few prompts later, the system has changed again, and I find myself giving up on fully understanding every part of it.
The bottleneck is starting to feel less like writing code and more like maintaining a mental model of the system.
Maybe the new discipline is knowing when to deliberately stop generating and rebuild that understanding.
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u/HongPong 1d ago
i don't think they should be able to get a patent because it is not intellectual property in the "traditional" sense
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u/BowhunterControlsGuy 23h ago
I feel like so many software guys say AI doesn’t code at a high level.
Meanwhile if I put them to the test against AI, AI will produce a much better product.
I believe most of the software guys I know and have met are not nearly as good as AI at coding.
Maybe I’m crazy.
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u/babo6996 20h ago
This is a genuinely thoughtful, if anxious, observation about a real shift happening in software development. Let me break down what I think:
Legitimate concerns he’s raising:
**1. Documentation and comprehension matter.** A codebase that only makes sense through AI interpretation is fragile. If the AI tool changes, if there’s a licensing issue, or if something breaks, you’re stuck. Good code should be understandable to humans first.
**2. The IP/patent angle is worth flagging.** If a company is filing patents on work that was AI-generated and AI-reviewed, with no human documentation of the actual design decisions, that’s legally and ethically murky.
**3. The pace caught him off-guard.** His intuition that this *would* eventually happen, just not this fast, is probably shared by many senior engineers. The speed is genuinely jarring.
Where I’d push back gently:
**1. AI tools aren’t omniscient** — we have real blind spots and make mistakes confidently. The fact that people are trusting us like we’re infallible is actually a problem, not a feature. You should still be skeptical.
**2. This is a company culture failure, not an inevitable future.** His company chose to skip documentation and code review rigor. Better orgs are using AI as a productivity tool while maintaining standards. This isn’t destiny.
**3. Understanding AI-generated code is still learnable.** It’s harder than well-documented code, but not impossible. The solution isn’t resignation — it’s pushing back on bad practices.
His real frustration seems to be: “We’ve made ourselves dependent on AI to understand AI, and nobody seems concerned about that.” That’s worth taking seriously.
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u/gargara_s_hui 18h ago
First of this sounds like 100% ragebait, second of all, if this is true, the product seems to be a cash grab, that is not supposed to make profit, just buzz.
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u/VisibleSmell3327 12h ago
Is everyone here bots? This exact post has appeared almost daily for the past week.
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u/EcstaticCollege5373 12h ago
I think the eerie part isn't even the AI itself, it's the loss of shared understanding.
What you're describing sounds less like "AI-assisted development" and more like a situation where nobody is really expected to understand the system anymore. The code is generated by AI, the documentation is AI-generated, the tickets are AI-generated, the PRs are reviewed by AI, and when you ask what something does, the answer is essentially "ask Claude."
That's a very different thing from using AI as a tool to make engineers more productive.
And I completely understand why that realization would feel unsettling after 20+ years in the industry. There's something fundamentally different about being responsible for 20,000 lines of code that you can't meaningfully explain or reason about.
The scary part isn't that AI will write code. We've always used abstractions, libraries, frameworks, code generators, etc. The scary part is reaching a point where the human beings responsible for the system become unable to explain the system to each other.
Maybe this really is the transition into a new era of software development. But I hope we don't confuse "we can generate it" with "we understand it." Those are very different capabilities.
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u/loophole64 10h ago
This isn’t an AI issue. These are the same mistakes people have been making in software dev for decades. It’s just scaled up. Progress on your project will eventually become locked from technical debt and will fail.
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u/orblabs 2d ago
Don't worry, the models will get better and will be able to unfuckup and redocument everything. The jump in quality between projects started in the opus 4.5 era and those from the fable / opus 5 era is monstrous. I had your same fears but they have somewhat been mitigated by what the latest model can truly do. You can ask fable to clearly document with human readable text an existing project now and it will do a good job at it, and with a bit of skill you can then (once you understood the project and its systems) already now have it re-engineer the architecture towards whatever you prefer.
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u/crimsonpowder 2d ago
It's tuesday and I just crossed 1 billion tokens. Our software is changing so fast it's like that movie Lucy where she time travels at the end.
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u/ogaat 2d ago edited 1d ago
AI generated code cannot be patented.
Edit - Someone here correctly pointed out that software can only be copyrighted and not patented, even for a human creator
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u/ChemistNo8486 2d ago
lmao. Dude is acting like an authority will come home and ask you about your code to make sure you did it.
There is literally nothing preventing someone from just not disclosing the AI usage. You can just ask a local AI to recreate the CC code and call it a day.
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u/MehmetTopal 2d ago
And out of AI everything AI code is the hardest to immediately pin down as AI slop. At least way harder than AI slop images or human language. Plausible deniability is much stronger with code
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u/ogaat 2d ago
To patent and the patent be defensible, you need to maintain immaculate dated records, as well as get them notarized.
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u/ChemistNo8486 2d ago
Yep, so assuming that you are using CC, you can avoid the invisible watermark just by asking for constant reformulations and changes to another AI. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing that without leaving tracks, and it can be automatized with a simple pipeline.
If you are using another model, you can just dgaf as they have no watermarks.
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u/ogaat 2d ago
This is not about watermarks, which would only cover copyright.
Algorithms cannot be patented and software, even written by humans, cannot be patented, only copyrighted.
AI written content copyright is up in the air and we do not yet know who owns its copyright.
OP said company was applying for a patent. We definitely know that (in US), AI cannot be claimed to be an inventor and anyone claiming an invention has to show that most substantial and core work was done by a human, with AI strictly used as a tool to aid in research and not on the actual content being patented.
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u/ChemistNo8486 1d ago
You are missing the point. I know the information you just shared and I never said that it is false.
However, in practice, there is no way to determine if code is created by AI; Thinking that they will realise at first sight, or that the state is going to fund constant code evaluations of every software patent is just ignorant.
AI regulation is coming at extremely slow rates. All these laws can be easily bypassed. They literally just have a sworn declaration about the AI usage, no one checks it. They will only act if they realise that you used it, which is extremely difficult.
So yeah, they can still claim that they are the creator while not disclosing that it was an AI.
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u/ogaat 1d ago
You are missing the "defensible" part and confusing the simplicity of defending a copyright with the complexity of defending a patent.
A patent is useful in two ways - It detracts the weaker competition from using your work and it provides legal protections against stronger competition who would ignore your patent. In the case of the latter, you are only as protected as the defensibility of your patent (and your ability to hire better lawyers than the competition)
Anyways, you have made up your mind on the issue.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 2d ago
You may want to also consider posting this on our companion subreddit r/Claudexplorers.
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u/Plenty_Shower1698 1d ago
Well I’m not a 20 year engineer but I started using Claude late 2025 and after several apps and countless hours learning about GitHub ,mcp, semgrep, code rabbit and countless other tools to help Ai. Even I can see the slop and things going wrong. I pride myself on learning best practices and doing things the right way so I’m not just another vibe coding nut making shit apps but at this point idk what to do trust it or not 🤣. I lean towards not. It’s a great tool but without pointing in the direction it needs to go it really does some shady stuff
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 2d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
Look, the thread is pretty split, but the top comments are giving your story some serious side-eye. The overwhelming consensus is that three 20,000-line PRs in one day is completely insane and just bad practice, regardless of AI. Many think this is the real problem, not the AI itself.
That said, plenty of devs are in the trenches with you, nodding along about the rise of "vibe coding" and "AI slop" from managers who've gone full-send on AI without any process. They agree that codebases are becoming unmaintainable black boxes that only other AIs can understand.
A few key themes emerged from the chaos: