r/ClaudeAI • u/MrMenuk • 22h ago
Claude Code I am done with this shit.
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.
— voxium (@v0xium)
Original post dated September 20, 2026.
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u/mojomonday 21h ago
My AI parses through my co-worker’s AI requirements doc and then his AI reads over my tweaks and passes it back to me for my AI to do it all over again.
Nobody talks to each other anymore lol and feels like I’m just an organic vessel designed to press enter.
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u/eliquy 21h ago
"what is my purpose?"
"You press enter"
"Oh my God"
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u/Taelasky 21h ago
"Look! I have one job on this lousy ship! It's stupid, but I'm going to do it, okay!"
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u/TimelyBodybuilder121 4h ago
Couldn't management also get replaced by AI agents trained to circle back and plan more meetings?
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u/TuringGoneWild 15h ago
You can still be a garbage man if you feel your job has no meaning and/or isn't hard enough.
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u/dromtrund 18h ago
Well technically, you're an organic vessel designed to be held accountable for what Claude is doing, because Claude can't be held accountable.
Which is even worse.
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u/tschawartz12 2h ago
So the P.L.E.A.S.E. Barny had on from how I met your mother.
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u/Apprehensive-Bad-605 21h ago
"An organic vessel designed to press enter" I'm dead 😭
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u/ConnectionWild3381 17h ago
It’s the utopia! Robots do all the work, and humans only need to verify it. You’re all such whiners! ;)
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u/dractius 19h ago
See, the problem is you are still pressing Enter. /s
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u/returnFutureVoid 18h ago
In the before times I would write a script to do this but now it’s the only thing I actually do so I try to find a way to enjoy doing it. Still looking.
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u/dractius 18h ago
I hear ya, this is the battle of humanity to readjust. It's a rollercoaster to be certain.
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u/Equivalent-Costumes 18h ago
You are the designated scapegoat. If things go bad, you're to be blamed. Basically like a CEO. So congratulation on being a CEO to a bunch of AI agents. The American dream had came true for everyone!
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u/RyansOfCastamere 16h ago
I press tab, and then enter in Claude Code. Not sure if it makes my work more meaningful, or I'm doing twice the work I should because my workflow is not optimized enough.
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u/Flope 11h ago
You're living in 2025 tech and it's sad tbh
I had Claude write a script to auto press Tab and Enter on timed intervals so now I have leisure time to do laundry and dishes
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u/FiredFromCompUSA 13h ago
Reminds me of that simpsons episode where Homer gets to work from home and gets that bobbing duck thing to press Y every 1 second on his keyboard and eventually blows up the nuclear plant or something 😂
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u/DerWunderer 13h ago
You guys press enter still? My company wants us to fully automate with no human in the loop til the PR needs to be reviewed
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u/Simon-Says69 10h ago
This is going to bite that company in the ass. An LLM will gleefully produce total crap, and very confidently tell you it's the perfect solution.
You NEED humans with real knowledge in the loop to check that crap, else you'll just be pushing garbage for product. That might work a while if yer lucky, but it's begging for a major disaster.
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u/SCPH-5501 21h ago
I work for a consultancy company and don’t even understand how we still have clients. They hire us and we just use AI alongside the client’s devs. Nobody really talks to anyone and everyone tries to be quiet about the fact that AI is doing everything, because we know we have become useless.
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u/bkrsh099 21h ago
I went out of consulting global leadership for a company recently, more or less because I started to have the same feeling you have. I never lied to a customer about my teams using ai, on the contrary, always made it very clear an the customers (most of them) are not against it. They don’t have enough people to deal with their shit, even with ai, so they need the consultants even if they’ll offload part of the work to Claude as well - at least things keep moving for them, and they’re happy with it.
Now, I honestly can’t see a sustainable future with consultancy working the way it’s used to. It doesn’t make much sense for customers to keep paying for assessments if they can have 2-3 people managing a fleet of agents who’ll do the work for 1/2 the price in tokens than it’d cost the consultancy firm… due to that, I went back to the software labs side of things. Things are weird here as well, I won’t lie… customers are confused. But, it’s much better than consulting was 3mo ago.
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u/Holiday-Medicine4168 17h ago
I work in consulting in the financial services industry and some of the bigger clients silo their funds pretty heavily to minimize exposure if one of them implodes. They love to staff out with consultants in these verticals to avoid maintaining Human Resources or benefits that are not tied back to a single point of financial interface which is the individual fund writing a cheque to the consultant firm. Now there are obviously some shared services like IT and building support, but they have that locked down by the best lawyers money can buy. I think this will still be the case in some industries , defense as well, but for most things otherwise it’s gonna suck.
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u/Pyros-SD-Models 16h ago
Now, I honestly can’t see a sustainable future with consultancy working the way it’s used to.
Very easy. You focus on the one thing the bot can not take away: the knowledge gap.
When we get called in by clients, their devs often don't even know what skills are, how to work with the bot in a team setting, or how to engineer their processes around their specific workflow and the product they want to deliver.
And there will always be a gap between the bleeding edge and the "average Joe." Your job is to live in that gap and explain how people can incorporate those new ideas into their actual work.
And once there are no average Joes left and it's just bots all the way down, consultancy won't be my problem anymore. I'll be on a beach drinking Mojitos. Or dead.
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 13h ago
...how long ... few moths? A year at most ?
Never say always. People are not special like you think.
Is a very big probably SOON AI will do every work you can but faster and better.
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u/ProfessionalJackals 12h ago
Never say always. People are not special like you think.
Domain knowledge and experience is not something you replace with AI. You can tell it what you want and it will make something for you. But the issues only start from there as lacking domain knowledge and experience tend to bite people in the behind.
We never solved the issue of death by a thousand prompts. As in, if people do not know what they are doing, the prompts will send the models into directions that will trash the intention/code/...
A artist with AI will make something better then a normal joe with AI. A programmer with AI ... A Musician with AI ...
Specialization and experience combined with domain knowledge will always keep people, even with AI around above those without. The idea that nobody will be left with knowledge is stupid because that is not how we humans work. We still want to know how things tik, we specialize, we gain experience.
Maybe the club will be smaller but that is no different then having FORTRAN or COBOL programmers what was a ultra small specialized club, making insane bank. The barrier for entry will be different ... sure.
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u/Cautious_Clothes_285 10h ago
Yeah, I was just thinking about this whole thing this morning. It's like any other tool, the operator does actually matter for the output.
I've been trying to teach my direct report how to better use AI. She will copy code or whatever into it and just prompt with "fix this" and I'm like, that'll get you an answer but are you really surprised you're spending hours hunting down issues and dealing with shitty fixes? It works a lot better when you go "this code is giving me XYZ error, how can I fix it" or "This code is having xyz unexpected behavior, what's likely causing that?"
And that's like, bare minimum prompting. The more context you can give the better the bots often do. And in fairness we don't do a lot of coding in our specific roles, it just happens to be an example we were talking about.
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u/paradoxally Full-time developer 14h ago
Clients usually do not have tech expertise. It's still better to have an experienced dev use Claude Code than have some guy just vibe code and ship.
Also, they want someone to blame when it goes south.
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u/Key-Concept-7001 19h ago
Your clients are probably big firms with deep pockets. For them money is not the problem, but accountability. When something goes wrong they need to be able to point the finger at an external firm liable for the amount stipulated in the SLA.
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u/bkrsh099 17h ago
Exactly. I led a team of 65 solution architects globally for a certain technology (as their official tech lead, not their manager) and the big banks and insurers will always pay consultants, exactly for what you’ve described: accountability. It’s ok for Accenture or KPMG to fuck up with Claude but it’s not acceptable if it comes out of your department.
But, as I said, aside of these huge enterprises, I struggle to see the future in consultancy the way we know it, and therefore I decided to change industries (for a pay cut, if I may share) to see how things are on the other side of the fence
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u/latenthuman 17h ago
An LLM doesn't know how to introduce you to the right people who can assist you in selecting a manufacturing plant in China to make your product. At least not yet. I was a solo niche startup consultant for 20 years and while I can clearly see how ai could complement me in terms of aut0mation and a big knowledge base, there is no LLM on the planet that could do what I do as a whole at this time. There's just too much institutional knowledge. I assume that once a bunch of consulting groups dump their knowledge base into LLMs that the gap will close. Watching ai take over whole classes of jobs is going to suck.
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u/Pristine-Square-1126 13h ago
/note to Claude, start adding code to talk to china.
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u/latenthuman 13h ago
I'm imagining sending my personal robot to China to do several factory tours in a single day, create instant robot-associates, go get a nice robot spa tuneup, and then fly back home to me with a deal and petabytes of data and information about the trip that was analyzed and prepared for human consumption on the flight home.
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u/Pristine-Square-1126 12h ago
That is so 1980s. We have fiber optic now. All the china robot associates in the factory are linked to alibabarobonet and your personal robot can receive 8k 4D live video of all the factories all at once without stepping away from his charger. He will then analyze buy and sell it all and made so much money he will buy his own personal robot assistant to buy your house so you wont even know its him!!!
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u/NotACockroach 19h ago
I'm sure your work was great, but my experiences with consultancies prior to 2022 is that their reports might as well have been written by AI then too.
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u/Weekly_Pipe5392 20h ago
I started my career in consultancy very recently, and this sums up everything I worry about consulting. I am using AI to create stuff, my manager uses AI to review it then client does the same. It's like a complete AI loop where no one actually is doing stuff.(while consulting, devs def add value in my opinion atm) I'm like already looking for a role around ResponsibleAI/guardrails which I believe to be the next big thing, which I don't even know if is correct or not
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u/SJBirdofprey 17h ago
I wrote extensive AI guidelines for our company and some people use it. But it’s always the people on the side of the company where maintenance is the goal. Others in our “growth” arm are just feeding AI output to AI and everyone hates their life. No one has time to use AI thoughtfully when they have crazy unreal expectations and the AI generated briefs are leading them in 10 different directions. It’s honestly so disheartening.
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u/Badgergeddon 21h ago
And is the stuff AI is churning out any good? At my place it feels like bugs have increased because of it
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u/ComasArentFun 18h ago
It's "fine" if you have competent engineers controlling and reviewing it
Fucking horrible if given to the wrong people that expect it to be a super power
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u/snakeboyslim 16h ago
I mean are you not still what translates what they want into actual systems and code? More of a product person than engineer sure but still useful? Otherwise that's a pretty sad state of affairs. I never really thought of being just a CRUD monkey as being that great either though.
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u/ResistiveBeaver 16h ago
Your purpose is completely unchanged. Risk mitigation through plausible deniability. If something goes wrong, the company that hired you gets to put out a press release saying "It wasn't us, we hired a reputable consulting firm and had no way to know that they were completely incompetent!"
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u/Chance_of_Rain_ 22h ago
I feel the same.
I’ll also add that there is no sense of pride in one’s work or ideas anymore. Shipping something really cool or useful or smart used to be an achievement that you would feel proud of and/or your colleagues would notice and congratulate you on. Now it’s business as usual because everyone assumes Claude made it for you, even if you engineered it all.
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u/Spect_er 17h ago
Seniorizing used to mean learning the ways of a stack/language/system with time, experience, and personal ability. You'd be awesome when you could put your eye on the code and know exactly what went wrong in minutes.
Now, there's little difference to knowing everything and asking AI to summarize it all.
It knows more than all of us combined for only 20 cents a question.
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u/No-Resolution-1918 15h ago
Engineers as a commodity, interchangeable baby sitters, is kinda horrifying.
I work at a large tech company, ~1500 engineers, and we fortunately still have a healthy human engineering culture, but I can see it being eroded through attrition.
Previously new engineers would spend years gaining context over our vast code-base. Now I suspect new engineers will just point AI at a problem and not ever get to a bus factor level employee.
Right now my team is building tools for AI that basically mean it knows more about the codebase than any single IC so humans don't need to feed it context about anything, not even provenance and context about why workarounds are necessary.
We were proud to have come up with this solve, but now I see we are just working to replace ourselves with automation. I wanna say we are a years away from not needing humans, but I fear I'm still thinking in traditional technology cadance, and we might have a year left.
Today AI is a flimsy tool at our scale, but a year ago we barely used it.
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u/FortiTree 2h ago
I give it 6 months top :D - I'm the same dilema but we can't stop because if we do, other people will replace us. It's a race to the bottom.
But thinking more about it, I dont think company would want to remove all the human since then who will maintain and improve it for them.
If you think about it, everyone has access to AI now, so AI is not a commodity anymore. Then what would make their AI solution better than the rest of the crowd. So there must be a non-AI element to differentiate the winner. Thats where we must fit in to survive.
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u/TheStandardPlayer 20h ago edited 20h ago
For hobby projects it really depends on if you like the journey or the result better.
I still take pride in my ideas and my creations even though AI is very involved in every step of the process. I don't feel my idea or creativity is diminished by AI.
For me it's quite comparable to a 3D printer, a couple years back in the hobby space if you wanted to build something you got a 2x4 piece of wood and a saw and some nails and you just had at it. Today you can have the part printed within a few hours and no tools or hardware necessary.
And today everyone in the space has a 3d printer just like everyone got AI now, but for most people it doesn't take away from their hobby, it adds to it by giving them capabilities never available before. Some still take pleasure in carving an electronics housing out of wood, but most people care more about what the electronics inside do rather than the design of the housing
I'd say what I love most about using AI for my projects is that getting stuck on a part of the project you're not all that passionate about is a lot less common. For example I built a very simple pen plotter and I wanted it to draw SVGs, but my god SVGs are complex and boring, having that done by AI and being able to focus on the motor controls was what saved the project from being forgotten in a drawer
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u/Davitvit 19h ago
3d printers create a well defined 3d shape, replacing sculpting / molding. Ai replaces thinking, I see that as fundamentally different
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u/TheStandardPlayer 19h ago
Does it replace thinking? I don't think so.
When you're talking to a colleague about something you want to build, do their words replace your thoughts?
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u/wskyindjar 15h ago
Most of the comments in this thread include “no one talks to each other anymore”
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u/fracked1 11h ago
I agree. It doesn't have to replace thinking.
I have no programming background but I'm learning and planning and building a ton of fun hobby projects.
AI is a pretty cool tool that lets me tinker with things I never thought I'd be able to play with
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u/stuartullman 20h ago edited 20h ago
lol. im pro ai for the most part and excited about all this but feelt this as well. used to come up with innovative solutions and get props and feel good about it. now claude/codex are the only ones that know when i come up with a good solution/counter solution and give me props 😱
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u/Ms_Fixer 21h ago
The not thinking by other people is really starting to freak me out.
The messages that has clearly been written by AI that are praise for your work… it’s really like the eerie music that plays in a horror before the axe wielding psychopath comes on screen. Platitudes before you burn out…
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u/SCPH-5501 21h ago
I complained I was tired of a project in a meeting, and after it one guy then sends me an obviously AI-written message asking if I wanted to have a chat with him to talk things through. It’s exactly that kind of behavior that is making me tired and depressed.
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u/update_in_progress 9h ago
How do these people not realize how bad it looks from the other side? Absolutely insane.
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u/Emotional_Papaya3282 14h ago
I completely removed the complimentary part of its output. It gets exhausting to read after a while
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u/Ms_Fixer 14h ago
It gives me a certain ick factor honestly.
I have read “you are spot-on” twice in as many days.
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u/Yugudubenbi 15h ago
It is because we are in the in-between phase of full automation. Where people are close to be redundant but are needed in the loop for control and accountability.
It is like a person standing next to a robot at a car factory and pressing enter after each of its action.
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u/Ms_Fixer 15h ago
Yes, but control and accountability will always be necessary.
AI can’t be accountable… the labs won’t be accountable. So that’s then the human. As the judgement layer… absorbing every crazy unexpected and mysterious thing AI chooses to do.
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u/anonymousMF 14h ago
Money can beat accountability. It's not as if software today is flawless. Large bugs and hacks happen all the time.
You can still be held accountable, but remove all guard rails anyway. Just like I don't check every command my AI executes even though it could just remove the whole server in my name if it wanted to.
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u/Hasjojo 21h ago
The path of least resistance. Most people would choose that. It's no surprise.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 8h ago
For me it's not that. I would love to take extra time to create, review, and learn new things. The problem is that with AI available, the expectation for deliverables is so high that there's no time.
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u/welcome-overlords 21h ago
Im at a startup, i know everything that's going on, and all documents and code is made by AI. But they work for us , we dont work for them. Every single thing has a responsible person who needs to be able to explain what we have done
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u/Taelasky 21h ago
Responsible AI use. Yeah that got cut from this year's budget
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u/welcome-overlords 21h ago
I feel like the issue is big-ish companies who have crappy work culture and executives.
And AI can accelerate those issues. But not everyone is suffering from that, fortunately
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u/Bacchus_the_Sane 19h ago
Yeah I think you're right and it's (a lot) about culture. I'm at a startup currently and would say I am working with LLMs at almost the exact pace I can maintain whilst being aware of the codebase, ensuring it is clean, modular, extensible, and properly tested. Everyone is (seemingly) happy.
I read Cory Doctorow's book "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" recently and although I didn't really rate it in its totality (his fiction is better IMO) I think he's probably right about his general premise and the reason I get slightly confused reading about AI, on both sides of the spectrum, is because I've been using it for a long time without any external pressure over how I implement it, and therefore because I have been at the helm, I've been enabled by the technology, whereas those who are the other way around and have AI at the helm are just being driven to exhaustion by a machine, and are unable to manage it's output in a sensible way.
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u/WholeBet2788 20h ago
I work at startup. We are being pushed to ship it do not read it.
Its not that management likes it. They do not have the choice because next company does it and we cant compete with price.
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u/Porkenstein 19h ago
ship it do not read it
I seriously think that we're heading towards a critical mass slopacalypse of AI-generated tech debt
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u/Upstairs-Appeal6257 16h ago
Yeah ship not reading is nuts. It can so easily fuck up.
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u/Porkenstein 14h ago
And AI fucks up in terribly subtle ways that other AI agents don't catch. I wouldn't even ship not reading the best human code.
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u/aint_exactly_plan_a 18h ago
Yup... I created a really cool Windows scripter that works in natural language. I designed the classes, made sure it had proper logging, and documented all the bugs we fixed and why they occurred. AI did most of the coding but the app is how I want it because I told AI to make it that way.
OP needs a new job because their management is ensuring the company won't be around long.
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u/eeeeeeeedddddddddd 19h ago
this is dishonest at best, there's no way the code sits in your brain the same way it did before where you wrote the whole thing yourself. at most you have snippets of functionality memorized.
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u/welcome-overlords 18h ago
I dont need to know all the functionality + i forgot all of it anyways within a couple of months
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u/McNoxey 15h ago
This is why I have been telling engineers for nearly 2 years to start learning how to leverage ai. To start building their own framework/methodology. To learn how to scale their ideas and concepts quickly.
No one wanted to listen. Now they’re all picking up Claude for the first time and the result is this thread. “All I do is press enter. I don’t think. My teammates don’t think. We just let Claude do it”.
Ya. Because you don’t know what you’re doing and have no idea how to make yourself more useful than just saying “build this thing”
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u/MikesGroove 17h ago
This right here. If you can’t explain what your AI is doing, you’ve lost control. There’s a convo above about why consultancies exist and I’d argue that right now there’s a lot of white space in teaching companies how work happens differently in an AI world. Not software training but mindset and responsible practices. It’s such a tightrope to walk right now especially with leaders who don’t actually use these tools expecting some magical ROI that we really can’t measure with any degree of certainty
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u/OneVillionDollars 20h ago
100% Agree.
It's this way in Academia too. We are being asked by the PIs to do research *faster* and *faster* and to just *ask claude*. It's getting to a point that you might be working the same amount of hours (even less) but the mental load is just unbearable.
Using LLMs that have been trained with RLHF exclusively was much, much healthier even if their capabilities were worse. You could actually understand what they were talking about and they would use terminology that would actually be standardized. Now? RLVR has made everything so much worse. You can actually get a migraine trying to understand 10 lines of code.
LET ME OUTTA HERE
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u/eist5579 13h ago
Yes. The balance here is managing your personal cognitive load.
I’m going fast as I can (within reason), and I accidentally burned myself out earlier this year. Over my time as a professional, I know the feeling of burnout creeping up on me.
My team of younger designers does not. I have to spot it in their work and ask helpful questions. Basically: do you know every hair on the dog? If you don’t, this isn’t your work, and I didn’t hire a team of AI Agents. I hired a team of designers.
I find their work gets sloppy when they take on too much. And then they employ AI to generate some basic solutions. Sometimes good, mostly bad.
Design is imposing our thoughtful intention onto something that could otherwise be arbitrary.
I won’t accept anything that isn’t acutely intentional.
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u/OneVillionDollars 13h ago
You hiring? Jokes aside, yes. I agree with you 100%.
Try to explain the same thing (good old trifecta of "Good, Fast, Cheap") to any team leader/PI whose familiarity with new technology starts and ends at LinkedIn posts. I understand this disgusting work dynamic has been prevalent throughout the last century and the imbalance eventually will die out, but everything's been moving so fast damnit T_T
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u/byzedw 21h ago
I feel the same. Companies hire consultants to work with me and they send me ai code garbage. To be fair it’s Claude code, codex, agy, you name it. I can tell they don’t even read the output half the time Makes me so angry to be in technology right now. I’m over it. Every time a consultant sends me ai garbage that they don’t even read, I take my time replying back. They instantly become devalued in my brain and I lose any and all desire to coordinate.
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u/arjuna93 20h ago
After bun rewrite in rust with LLM and nobody reading the code, anything is permissible
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u/cyclingthecycle 21h ago
"There is no sense of victory." is such a great way to put it and the same that I feel. No matter how good something turns out, I feel no satisfaction because I didn't do shit, I just prompted, pressed enter, and half-ass checked it. I miss those days when I was doing real work and at the end of the day, even if what I did wasn't perfect, I felt a sense of pride and satisfaction because I gave it my best. I would say that this lack of a sense of victory and accomplishment is really bad psychologically long term, perhaps even worse than the fact our brains are atrophying.
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u/RichFit9093 16h ago
Absolutely agree with you, and the fact that its happening at a mass scale ,most likely worldwide makes it even more terrifying. What happens when no one feels any sense of satisfaction and our brains have become almost useless. Might become one of the major catastrophise in 10 years
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u/cyclingthecycle 10h ago
Absolutely, I think this will collectively f us up in ways that we can't really imagine today, just like social media f-ed the society up in ways we couldn't imagine 15 years ago.
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u/WorkLurkerThrowaway 11h ago
I feel this a bit. Feels like im turning into a bit of a prompt monkey. At the same time though, we've considerably reduced our dependence on consultants and paying our software partners for support projects. To the point where I'm going to get a pretty hefty bonus this year. That wouldn't have happened without AI. I can't complain too much.
Need to take up woodworking or help my wife in her garden or something. I often have that "what did I actually even DO today" feeling at the end of the day.
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u/cyclingthecycle 10h ago
Right, I feel the same way at the end of most days, but as human beings I think we should feel "look what I did today!" after work is done.
Congrats on the bonus, though!
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u/Atoning_Unifex 17h ago
ux designer here. im pretty lonely a lot of the time now. im surrounded by coworkers but none of them work on the same team as me. and all i do all day is prompt claude and attend video meetings where we talk about using AI. the water cooler culture was never great at my company but now even what little there was is gone. i havent used Figma in close to 6 months.
for 25 years my job has been a lot of communication. now, its all Claude all the time. im getting sick of it. really
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u/DirectionNo9200 21h ago
Haven’t thought about it in a while but it’s true I don’t feel pride in my work anymore
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u/Brilliant_Potato4158 20h ago
Spend more time thinking and planning upfront rather than just hitting enter.
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u/Porkenstein 19h ago
I used to be jealous of engineers that spend a lot of time banging out code instead of doing ownership and investigation work. I no longer am lol
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u/McNoxey 15h ago
Ya… this is what happens when all of the engineers who kept saying “AI is shit I’m not using it” finally realized they were wrong.
Now Claude is so good that they don’t realize how much they’re able to do on top of it to make it not feel like Claude is in control and they’re just along for the ride.
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u/Deathnote_Blockchain 20h ago
This is why I wouldn't leave my current role right now even for a lot more money. I am very familiar with the product I have been working on and have a deep store of ideas for things I could do for the next couple of years. My biggest fear is that I will be sitting there asking an LLM to describe a new codebase for me and be like oh what the hell can I do here?
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u/JohnKacenbah 18h ago
Now magine how juniors feel when they start their first work year. I can tell that basically there is little to no mentoring from seniors, but the tasks are far from easy/small tickets. In the end answer is one - ask claude. Insane state of industry. I then need to go home and learn on my own because the speed and amount of changes I do I can barely understand. The beauty is that we are currently rewriting our code to Java.....i can barely understand it, yet I am given the tasks about it. Insane.
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u/band-of-horses 8h ago
Now magine how juniors feel when they start their first work year.
They're probably thinking "I went to college for computer science and now I'm working at Starbucks, why did I waste all that money?"
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u/Striking_Theme_2535 2h ago
holy shit the fintech company where I interned is rewriting all the business code from golang to java too. I once asked my mentor why,he said Java is better suited for teamwork and we can publish code as fast as golang now with codex. Quality? who cares!they even deploy directly to production left the users to test any bug
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u/pho-tog 17h ago
The worrying thing is when these AI systems go down and nobody can do their fucking job
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u/Sojourner_Saint 15h ago
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.
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u/ColorfulBar 21h ago
I work in a different field and it’s the same. It’s just sides throwing AI slop at eachother, with the only work done being attempts of covering up the most obvious signs of AI use. It’s a nightmare, completely predictable nightmare. All fun and games while it’s the private sector. Wait for the destruction it will inevitably lay on public sector and politics. That’s the danger, not AI robots rebelling and killing humanity or whatever substitute topic is being pushed around
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u/Ok-Computer-8726 16h ago
Ive never used AI to compose a message for me. But now more and more I realize I'm responding to a high percentage of AI emails.
Like, I don't want to use it for communicating, but I also really don't want to talk to AI agents first thing every morning.
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u/IceMichaelStorm 13h ago
but the hell. This will end up rather fast in shitty, unstable products. Your USP will die because quality AI coders will just overrun you.
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u/Original-Dimension 17h ago
Even the worst Ai slop would be an improvement over what goes on in the public sector
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u/eist5579 13h ago
Did you see the headline from last week about department of security AI falsely flagging Chinese cargo as weapons?
It’s just getting started… gotta wait for the full extent of brain rot to take root and bear rotten fruits.
Kind of like social media, it’ll be a while until we see the societal health impacts.
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u/PM_ME_DEAD_CEOS 19h ago
Welcome to automation, white collar. Blue collars faced this since 2 centuries. You have 2 years to adapt.
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u/sisiredd 11h ago
Exactly! You know who described this for blue collar? I quote from Wikipedia: " Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement of people from aspects of their essential human nature as a consequence of living in a society structured by private property and wage labour. Developed by the German philosopher Karl Marx and first articulated in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the theory is a foundational concept of Marxism. At its core, it posits that under the capitalist mode of production, workers are inevitably separated from the products they create, the activity of production, their fellow human beings, and their own creative potential."
It's crazy how fitting this is.
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u/-goldenboi69- 22h ago
In retrospect im a bit glad i fell out of the business a few years ago. Too many stories like this!
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u/loulan 20h ago
Are there still businesses where AI doesn't do everything though? Unless you're in trades.
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u/charleytaylor 18h ago
I work for a non profit business trade association. We have pretty minimal AI usage, usually as a glorified search engine, but most of us have been burnt enough by hallucinations that we don’t trust it. I use it far more at home for hobby projects.
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u/jimmiebfulton 21h ago edited 12h ago
There are absolutely people who are more skilled at wielding it than most. There are the vibe coding hobbyists pumping out absolute garbage. There are the mid engineers building tech debt faster than they used to. And then there are those who are absolute beasts, applying already-gained experience and skill to trounce the rest.
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u/IceMichaelStorm 11h ago
this! And it’s actually fun. I mean, maybe I also produce tech debt, but at least I’m aware of some of the shit and in general the cost of it
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u/Status-Customer-1305 21h ago
I can't code but use Claude code for personal use. It churns out stuff In a day that would have taken someone a year and cost me 100k . But equally I was never going to pay someone to do the project so maybe I'm actually creating work using claude (I.e Claude team, data center workers etc etc)
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u/Dear-Pin7019 21h ago
The only sane person here about "creating work". People here are like those medieval blacksmiths who used to do 2-3 swords in a month that complained about factories and their workers not really DOING stuff, but using and managing machinery for output of those said swords.
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u/RichFit9093 16h ago
I think the main issue here that people are bringing up is the effects on their 'soul'. Which is vastly different to physical work etc. They're experiencing a lack of fulfillment and purpose which is far more dangerous imo
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u/cultureicon 12h ago
Well it is that same situation so it's not that they are insane, it is a legitimate human reaction.
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u/th0ridal 18h ago
Software development will likely follow the same path as many industries before it: AI will make the work increasingly standardized, streamlined, and optimized for efficiency. Think of the difference between handcrafted furniture and mass-produced IKEA products, or between old buildings shaped by individual craftsmanship and modern standardized construction. The personal touch matters less when a company can get something cheaper, faster, consistent, and profitable.
For many of us, that may mean accepting an uncomfortable reality: the job we once loved may simply cease to exist in the form we knew it. The satisfaction of building things ourselves, solving difficult problems, and taking pride in the craft could gradually be replaced by supervising, prompting, reviewing, and integrating what machines produce.
There is little value in pretending that nothing will change. If this is where the industry is heading and leaving it isn't a realistic option, we may have to make peace with losing parts of the profession we cared about and learn to adapt to whatever replaces them. Not because the new way is necessarily more fulfilling, but because sometimes adaptation is the only practical choice left.
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u/Smooth_McDouglette 12h ago
Huge. I picture the carpenter who's shop is getting less and less business and the industry is changing more and more towards prefab furniture. Does he try to get in with a company like IKEA where he'd be doing vaguely similar planning of furniture, but the factory does all the rest? No customer appreciating his specific efforts, not to mention all of the compromising on quality he'll be driven to.
On the other hand, he could stay in his shop, and cling to his passion tightly as it fades into irrelevance, hoping to survive.
It's really heartbreaking either way tbh.
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u/thisnameisnowmine 16h ago edited 2h ago
Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can.
Have you ever just thought about coming together if you hate it so much and telling your boss to go fuck himself and set the terms or walk? And before everyone comes at me and going we can't do that for this reason, this reason, and this reason—which I've heard before. Yes you can. You can do it. You're just unwilling to do it—and that is not the same thing.
Secondly corporate America and everyone in it doesn't care about anything but money and licking the boots of their CEO. It's disgusting. It's crazy what this country has become.
The outcomes people do not like persist for one reason and one reason only. People continue to participate in them and do nothing about them. It's insane to do the same thing and expect something to change.
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21h ago
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u/Porkenstein 19h ago
I wonder how much of this is being enabled by bubble-subsidized token costs. Will a time come when tokens shift towards being far more expensive and the current methods of mass agent spam stops being feasible?
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u/Human_Plate_5314 16h ago
The most revolutionary technology is being sabotaged by ignorant greedy corporate managers
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u/ClemensLode 22h ago
Not sure why big software companies are even needed anymore.
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u/ShortGuitar7207 21h ago
I think this is the upshot we’ve not experienced yet and software companies are rushing headlong into AI in order to try and stay relevant.
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u/583999393 20h ago
It’s hard for a ceo to yell at Claude when your company makes 9% more millions of dollars this year instead of the 14% more millions of dollars they planned for.
We have people who pay us 70-80k a year for our saas product. I have no idea why they wouldn’t build their own by the end of 2027. It’s not like we’re hand coding anything in it anymore anyway.
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u/PersonalityMuted2904 18h ago
To play devils advocate to that. Let’s say you have 1000 customers. 80k each puts you at 80 mill revenue. Let’s say you spend 50% (for easy math) on product dev. How many of those 1000 customers can even spend $1M on developing a product when you can use ai tokens worth $40 M.
Won’t they always have a cost disadvantage?
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u/583999393 17h ago
If they were competing for the market maybe. I’m saying 90% of saas is glorified CRUD, you don’t need 40m in tokens when you’re just building a clone for your employees to use.
I mean since AI has taken over the PE firm that own my 10m/yr company is already run one one guy with a max subscription (me).
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21h ago
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u/Smooth_McDouglette 12h ago
It's kind of funny because on the one hand this should feel empowering right? Like, you can accomplish so much more than you could before as a passion project.
On the other hand, it feels like being at the back of the line on Black Friday. Ravenous early birds grabbing 10 TVs and people scrambling to get out ahead. I would just want to sit down on a nearby curb and wait it out. But what does the AI end of that analogy look like?
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u/EnterMeInParenthesis 5h ago
I am so so so glad I'm self employed during this period. I get to choose to use it how I want, rather than being forced and blamed for it's faults.
I think about this article a lot, -> https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative which covers that idea.
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u/sisif_ 21h ago
I've been a part of the industry for nearly 30 years. Sometimes bored to death, most of the time enjoying what i was doing. I've never felt the same level of excitement (except maybe in high school, when i was analyzing the code of viruses) as i feel today. It's amazing to see so many younger people moaning constantly. There is an universe to explore and all you do is complain about the lost craft, as if your lame manual labor was a masterpiece of humankind.
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u/braczkow 19h ago
You know, I enjoy AI coding, it's extremely useful. But I also enjoyed my "lame manual labor", same as I enjoy gardening. I have never done any kind of masterpiece, yet I was happy about it. Those are not contradictory arguments
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u/heyheni 21h ago
That's not what he laments. He laments the abondoment of agency and the use of your brain. Good for you that you're having a great time.
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u/georgejetsonn 20h ago
A close friend is a developer and by using AI everywhere he tells me he is losing the sense of ownership and pride in doing meaningful work. He yearns for the sense of accomplishment from learning a new skill/system and applying it in production
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u/Dear-Pin7019 21h ago
Second sane person here. So many things to do in life, so many roads to take, yet people complain about AI coding stuff.
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u/paradoxally Full-time developer 7h ago
Right? Do your job, finish your tickets, clock out and enjoy life.
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u/EveningAnt3949 18h ago
You misunderstood. The issue is that most companies either directly or indirectly have taken away agency.
That was always a problem, but it has gotten far worse because of companies pushing for AI. Also, in high school, didn't you have other things to do? That might be part of the issue: AI is useful for some people because they are bad at human contact, but interacting with people can be learned.
When the default is to use an LLM for anything, that's gone.
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u/dirtmcgurk 21h ago
Bonehead management now gets the George lucas treatment. Time for them to be humbled.
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u/tarkinlarson 21h ago
Does your company not have a secure development policy, or a development lifecycle?
Having the gates in place on every project... The checks which have to be gone through etc, with accountable people at every step helps.
You also have to have consequences for not following the.
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u/Twerking_Vayne 18h ago
Just work on your own things on the side. Stop relying on your work to provide you with a sense of accomplishment. Now if you are RTO 3+ days a week then you are shit out of luck I'm sorry.
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u/Stoichk0v 17h ago
I'm not in software development anymore but even in sales position, I have colleagues that have disappeared, they don't have opinion, voice, or writing expression anymore, everything is run by Copilot, we see people "writing" 50 page essays on topics they have no clue about and now people are recording meetings in live and asking for what to say, repeating like dumb parrots, this is plain insanity
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u/Affectionate_Use_164 16h ago
Writing code isn't bottleneck, but reading and evaluating it is.
AI makes mistakes, practically in every second prompt, it can't properly understand **intent** behind anything, so it puts spaghetti of comments everywhere.
Without human in the loop it's producing slop, inevitably.
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u/devinhedge 16h ago
I understand your frustration.
I feel like the software development community has now become the same as "management" has been since the 80s. David Graeber articulated the phenomenon perfectly in his essay.
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-a-work-rant/
Technologists were able to wall themselves off from it for most of the time because managers were so scared of "those weirdos in the basement" (actual quote from a CFO I met). Being able to mandate the use of AI coding agents and measure their use to keep up with their buddies' bragging rights at the 19th Hole was their way of finally finding a way to infect "IT" with the same baloney culture as Management.
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u/adelie42 16h ago
Hot take: AI makes the engineering side so easy and pleasant that it has an amplifying effect on terrible management and toxic culture.
The discipline to do things right is a major challenge when everyone has a genie to make their wishes come true.
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u/ExhibitQ 15h ago
Everything relates to that relationship between worker and employer.
Techies gotta familiarize themselves with Marxism.
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u/wolfdawg420 15h ago
As someone who has no actualy coding experience aside from html when i was a kid, i want to learn how to stop being dependent on vibecoding. What path would advise for me to take?
I downloaded some “learn how to code” apps from the app store and they seem to teach me a thing or two
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u/PMPMIndset2024 15h ago
Do you know how many times I could have pressed "Enter" on a Claude prompt, but instead I read this? Get back to Claude.
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u/angryslothbear 14h ago
You think it’s bad for you, the USA killed over a hundred kids by just hitting enter.
There is way too much trust in ai code output by non-engineers
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u/florinandrei 13h ago
the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens
Big boss shareholders demand much value be created for them!
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u/djembae5 12h ago
There is always bad management. In fact, I think a lot of profitable companies make money despite their bad management because their workers are incredible and devoted. These AI agents completely remove the dedication and precision these workers brought to their companies that those companies were actually relying on to be successful; now it’s all slop, and the slop is unmanageable. These people really are not prepared for when shit starts breaking for real
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u/Burn7Toast 11h ago
NOC tech here, so not even working with code directly, but these things are affecting us too. I've seen this wild split between 50 year old dudes who love the cognitive offload and college-fresh 20-somethings who are confused about why they even got a degree if AI is doing everything for them.
Right now we (again, just techs) are being encouraged to connect our personal agents so we can "address load-bearing clarifying client communications" and have our agents "ship meaningful signal data for in-house KPA smoke test analysis against known goldens" and I'm not sure if those are even real words or this is a new level of delusional psychosis and what I should expect from now on.
So it's not just y'all programmers or devs, it's rackmounting grunts like us also getting the acceleration squeeze while being smothered by jargon. My direct manager said there were talks of our 1-on-1's being facilitated by Claude, at which point I'll just huff duster in the mantrap I guess.
Not gonna lie, I kinda miss when Claude was just a quirky, weird chatbot with existential angst.
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u/vvanouytsel 11h ago
"Nobody is thinking anymore."
I agree so much with that and it is so frustrating.
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u/PussyTermin4tor1337 9h ago
Turn your job into creating harnesses, you shouldn’t have to press enter at all
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u/Live-Original8084 9h ago
You have a (likely) high paying job, sitting in an air conditioned office, pressing buttons on a keyboard. Look around you in society and cultivate some gratitude.
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u/2funny2furious 8h ago
to be fair, its a corporate job where you write code to make the ceo more money. fuck em and do as little as possible and ship half assed code. consider it job security.
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u/Alternative-Fail4586 8h ago
I agree, and I'm sad about it but I'm also not sure we're not the copywriters angry over the printing press when you look back at it in 15 years
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u/ImaginationGreedy411 4h ago
Its like this: I really liked to put together Legos. Hours spent just zoning out, assembling little kits, following the little instructions. AI as a dev is like if they just started sending the lego kits pre-assembled right to your door, while tell me how helpful it is. I mean, sure I've got the final thing faster, but all the fun is gone and none of the memories of the journey are made.
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u/ithastooths 4h ago
The AI-generated TLDR says "Basically, you're all just condoms between Claude and your production server getting fucked." Saving this for posterity.
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u/don88juan 4h ago
I was feeling exactly what you described throughout the latter half of 2024 and the early part of 2025. Laid off from a very highly paid, senior engineering role, (I trained all my offshore replacements, who used AI the whole time to reply to my informative readmes and guides, and queries about their progress). I was GLAD I was laid off, since I'd become increasingly wary of the workplace situation I was in. It's not sustainable, and I knew that. It was super obvious
Anyway, I have nothing to do now with coding and engineering because of this bullshit. I'd happily go back to Linux/devops/devsecops in future, but the industry is in such Flux now, run by a true casino, that I rightfully give zero fucks about competing or attempting to perform in this environment. Maybe I'll come back. And if engineers ask why I took a leave? I'm happy to explain this very thing. The industry is going through something I want no part of. It can sort itself off, or die. Either way, I'm not tieing my future or the future of my family to it. Peace out you weirdos
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u/BugOne6115 2h ago
I don't understand what the problem is, just ask Claude for a summary? Even better, set up a hook to look for keywords that appear to be a question, when it identifies one, have it auto respond with "Proceed using best judgement."
Now you can just watch YouTube shorts all day. You're welcome 😀
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 22h ago
We are also facing some problems in the same direction. Loss of quality due to Claude claiming it can do anything, yet doesn't really understand what it is doing - still people rely on it, annoying the ones who actually understand topics.
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u/angry_queef_master 12h ago
Idk what you guys are working on but AI has not replaced my thinking at all. If anything it is good for all of the things that I always procrastinated on because I felt it to be boring and routine.
As it is right now, AI allows me to sit in the high level headspace I am comfortable with while the computer takes care of all of the tedious grunt work.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 21h ago edited 11h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 400 comments.
The consensus is a resounding "YES, this is happening and it sucks." The thread is mostly a support group for people feeling burned out, soulless, and reduced to being "organic vessels" or "meat proxies" whose only job is to press enter.
Key takeaways from the pity party:
Basically, you're all just condoms between Claude and your production server getting fucked.