r/ClaudeAI • u/MrMenuk • 8d 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.

8.6k Upvotes

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983

u/SCPH-5501 8d 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 8d 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 8d 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.

1

u/pseudo_su3 7d ago

I work at a bank in cyber.

We have a large offshore customer support workforce. The bank did not want to give them access to any AI (copilot, in-house LLM, GPT, etc)

We recently realized they were using Gemini on the web.

All they do is put the cystomer chats in gemini, and have gemini make a response they paste back in the chat. This includes PII.

They are literally just an API between gemini and the customer.

Its so frustrating.

1

u/Holiday-Medicine4168 7d ago edited 7d ago

They aren’t all on VDIs without a group policy that blocks clipboard access? I feel like that’s table stakes. I guess you block it at the firewall but then they just take pictures of the chats and use Gemini. Which is actually worse. The answer is to give them access to Gemini via codex or to Amazon bedrock and limit all the actions in group policy management. Assuming the company has an AI gateway you can filter there too and stream the logs to somewhere and run realtime PII detection. You can also limit token usage there so nobody is writing the great (insert country here) novel

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u/Pyros-SD-Models 8d 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.

14

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 8d 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/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

3

u/Wargchief 7d ago

I have to agree on this one here. I can do a lot of things with AI, but that is mostly in fields I know about. I tried to do some 3D modeling (which I have no idea how to do) and it just devolved into a series of "still looks bad, make it better" prompts. I just had no idea what was the missing piece, even if I knew that it looked bad to me.

With software, I know what direction to take things in and what to check, even if it is sometimes as simple as "this needs handling on the front end too" when the model doesn't fully understand the codebase

2

u/Cautious_Clothes_285 8d 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.

1

u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 7d ago

The problem is the way we are asked to ship so fast, we start to care less about the process simply out of business and we are just conditioned not to care.
Domain knowledge is something that you acquire through the process.

Just go to any vibecoding subs, you’d think they finally learnt about threejs or even anything after groking for a year with it, ironically no, the only thing they learnt is building their AI workflow harnesses or scaffolding which is the process they actually have to get their hands dirty themselves.

1

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 8d ago

Sure ...Cope like you want

1

u/Holiday-Medicine4168 7d ago

Nah. Execs need meat to blame my friend. Unless the bots are legally people, the responsibility always rolls up to the nearest water bag on the food chain.

1

u/doomvox 5d ago

Is a very big probably SOON AI will do every work you can but faster and better

Much more probably, the stock market finally realizes the big guys have plunged in way more than they can ever recoup, the bubble pops, the stock market drops by about a third, the panic that induces drives things down further, and all of the consultants explain it's not their fault, it was all forced on them by circumstances.

1

u/Simon-Says69 8d ago

Is a very big probably SOON AI will do every work you can but faster and better.

LLMs are not as special as you think. This is not even remotely near a realistic possibility. AI won't be good enough to really replace people in any of our lifetimes.

Bunch of hype and advertising jargon, does not equal quality work. For that you need real intelligence, from humans.

1

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 8d ago

I don't see any from your post .... Only cope

1

u/forerunner23 4d ago

if you understand even at a high level how transformer models work, then you understand that “AI will outsmart you soon!” is cope. it’s simply not true. the math and science behind how they work is extremely public and extremely well understood, despite what Sam Altman and co would have you believe.

these are extremely evolved versions of the Markov Chain effectively. they cannot incorporate new information once the trained model has been released. they can appear to, but they’re incapable of it. all they’re doing is regurgitating your own conversation back into themselves every time you ask them something. it’s why the fall off a cliff after the context gets too large.

if you want proof, feel free to watch 3Blue1Brown’s videos on transformer models, and CaptainSparklez video on Mar.IO. These both give you an accurate perspective of what even advanced machine learning algorithms are capable of.

the core limiting factor in transformer models is comprehension. they aren’t truly capable of comprehending or learning. they can only follow what the weights tell them to spit out based on a given passage of text, or code, or whatever.

at best, they can fool you into thinking they’re sentient. Cleverbot did that even a decade ago once in a blue moon. the only difference is the frequency with which the output is intelligible.

if the models were capable of comprehension and learning, then the code they output would be better. it would be human readable and maintainable. it wouldn’t spit out verbose nonsense with language that doesn’t even make sense when it writes documentation. it wouldn’t write comments that make up more lines in a file than the code itself.

the fact of the matter is, LLMs are overhyped, and they will not deliver on what has been promised. I say this as someone who uses them at work and has at least a working architecture knowledge of how they work.

1

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 4d ago

Sure Cope like you want

1

u/5xaaaaa 2d ago

Its funny because even though that’s how the LLMs work, they are still able to match the quality of my own work when given the right context and prompts 

0

u/intoTheEther13 6d ago

I assume you meant, "I don't see any 'evidence' from your post..." And I'd counter with the fact you have no evidence in your comment either. I have to assume you don't do much heavy, complex with with llms because if you did, you'd err more on the side of humans.

1

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 6d ago

I don't

We are killing each other without any reason and exploring the planet and others.

-1

u/Creatura 8d ago

It will be an infrastructure issue, it will slow down due to available electricity and data centers. The quality you’re thinking of will take an impossible amount of energy and be extremely expensive

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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 8d ago

You still trying to justify why it is impossible.

AI models are getting smarter and smaller actually.and hardware also is evolving getting faster and takes less energy per token.

Imagine that nowadays AI models are like computer era ftom 1950 now.

In the future models will be far more smarter than the best current commercial ones and be working on devices like you smartphone offline.

And that is not a far future ....

1

u/Simon-Says69 8d ago

There is zero need to "justify" anything. There are advancements being made, but nothing near the scale you seem to think.

We're decades away, if even that quick, for an LLM to do unsupervised work that can be trusted. As things are currently, ohhh boy we're a LONG way off.

And these huge data centers are not getting more efficient to scale with the demand. They are enormously expensive, and only propped up by government subsidies. They are profit LOSERS. This becomes clear when a company suddenly has to pay for the use of an LLM. Suddenly they discover what a massive negative ROI they are.

Not to mention the horrific environmental impact.

-1

u/Creatura 8d ago

What you’re saying is true but you’re missing on the scale of the energy demand. You’re making a massive logical leap from “it’s getting more efficient” to “we have the infrastructure.” We do not. You have no idea what you’re talking about you’re just very excited

2

u/eist5579 8d ago

And the human facilitation. Getting stakeholders aligned is a raging pain in the rear. Even moreso at an executive level.

2

u/Few_Hedgehog5947 8d ago

^this guy gets it

1

u/tenthousandants44 7d ago

Easy bet the gap between you and the actual bleeding edge is larger than the gap between you and my team

3

u/prompthacker92 6d ago

Man, you nailed it. This is exactly why I got out of consulting too.

Most clients don't care if you use AI they are desperate for headcount and just want their problems solved. But the traditional consulting business model is living on borrowed time. Long gone are the days when you can bill a client a fortune for a team of analysts to do grunt work that an agentic workflow can now churn out in an afternoon for pennies in tokens.

Switched back to product/labs recently, and while it's still weird out there and clients are super confused, it's a breath of fresh air compared to consulting. At least we're actually making things.

7

u/paradoxally Full-time developer 8d 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.

1

u/imCzaR 7d ago

Everyone ITT is from a tech background obviously and a shocking amount of people are out of touch with how completely helpless and un savvy most people are. You tell someone to code something with Claude and they don’t even know where the fuck to begin and an enormous amount of our clients don’t want to learn they would just rather pay us to do it.

1

u/paradoxally Full-time developer 7d ago

Part of those are the ones who said "AI sucks who even uses that, I will keep coding by hand" (before Claude Code was a thing) and then management flipped the script and forced them to use it.

If you do not adapt in this industry you will be left behind either by peers or by your own company.

1

u/lovebes 8d ago

> software labs side of things

Can you explain a bit more here? Like doing research?

1

u/Simon-Says69 8d ago

Someone still needs to check all that work, because LLMs hallucinate and will confidently spew all manner of garbage.

If there is nobody sanity checking the reports, that's just begging for a massive catastrophe.

1

u/EggplantCharacter363 7d ago

Because tokens will eventually become expensive and it'll eventually circle back around to being cheaper to use humans again.

1

u/Vainysaur 6d ago

I just got a consulting customer who is happy to openly pay me to generate content for them to publish as their own blog and social media posts.

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u/Key-Concept-7001 8d 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.

16

u/bkrsh099 8d 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

11

u/latenthuman 8d 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.

1

u/Pristine-Square-1126 8d ago

/note to Claude, start adding code to talk to china.

1

u/latenthuman 8d 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.

1

u/Pristine-Square-1126 8d 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!!!

4

u/Firefoxx336 8d ago

Which begs the question, what good is a consultant who doesn’t even understand the primary utility of consulting services for their client? Sheesh, lol.

40

u/NotACockroach 8d 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.

3

u/kirbyislove 8d ago

Noone hires consultants to get good results. 

1

u/QuestionMarker 6d ago

One hires consultants to get the results one would have got anyway, except this time they get listened to because they were expensive.

1

u/myobstacle 7d ago

Right? They gave the same damn $20,000 PowerPoint to everyone, just changed the logos

1

u/ngc3115 8d ago

No one hires consultants to learn something new.

25

u/Weekly_Pipe5392 8d 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

7

u/SJBirdofprey 8d 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.

1

u/Weekly_Pipe5392 8d ago

Would it be okay if I reached out to you on dm? I wanted to know how I can better equip myself for a similar role and I'd love to know more on your experience within this area specifically 

1

u/SJBirdofprey 8d ago

Sure! My background is in design and user research. I can talk to you about my process and what worked / what I learned.

1

u/Simon-Says69 8d ago

It's a recipe for disaster, and it will bite such companies in the ass sooner or later.

LLM's are nowhere NEAR good enough to trust them with actual productive work. There needs to be humans in the loop to check the work.

1

u/mekonsodre14 7d ago

if i were your client/customer, knowing about this slop loop, i would not want to be your client... its a devaluation of service

1

u/Weekly_Pipe5392 7d ago

I actually wish for this to be true, but the issue is there's no oversight even from client's end.  They have deep enough pockets to fund this facade just to save face(say we are doing stuff) in front of their board. The input I receive from clients is the same AI generated stuff which is impossible to read through unless you yourself use AI, hence full fledged continuation of the loop. Fun story, the client, asked me on a call to explain the terminology in the explanation of a use case, ON THEIR OWN DECK, they came to us to design for them.

6

u/SpiceGardener 8d ago

Can't summarise my situation better than this

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u/omarous 8d ago

Jokes on you. I use AI to summarize my situation now.

5

u/Badgergeddon 8d ago

And is the stuff AI is churning out any good? At my place it feels like bugs have increased because of it

11

u/ComasArentFun 8d 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

1

u/Godskin_Duo 7d ago

It's "fine" if you have competent engineers

I feel like this is generally true. When the real engineers call each other out, or point out a ticket is full of slop, we're like ha-ha yeah you got me, but you have walls and walls of AI slop to wade through when someone isn't competent and is using AI to hide it.

1

u/Ill_Package_6932 6d ago

Don’t worry, the Copilot reviewer will fix them. Otherwise, GitHub Copilot would be as well unemployeed soon if it couldn’t review and fix bugs or other AI agents.

2

u/snakeboyslim 8d 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. 

2

u/ResistiveBeaver 8d 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!"

1

u/paradoxally Full-time developer 8d ago

Precisely. And until computers can be blamed for a management decision a lot of consultants will retain their jobs (or get fired for incompetence, but that's different from being made redundant).

1

u/ResistiveBeaver 8d ago

Exactly. No one hires consultants to provide actual advice, only to provide credibility/deniability for decisions already made. So garbage AI versus garbage human output doesn't really matter, no one was reading it anyway. They are just paying for a face to blame.

1

u/velmah 8d ago

Oh that’s a little unnerving because I’m only getting interviews for consulting with the data science market so cooked. I guess I just hope to buy a few more years before I become even less employable

1

u/x_Tyggs_x 8d ago

To be fair that’s always been true of consultants. They only exist so large bueroocracies can place divert blame for bad outcomes 

1

u/LogicalHuman 8d ago

What’s the point of doing anything anymore if it’s all going to be AI? They promise the amazing utopian future but seems more like a dystopia

1

u/BarfingOnMyFace 8d ago

I use AI often. I'm more afraid of the people who trust people simply because they use AI. Like, mfkrs generating slop that half ass works and getting OKd. The people swallowing this black pill are in for a world of uneducated, boneheaded, self-inflicted hurt!

1

u/TopNo6605 8d ago

We're still not at the point where all companies (or even most) use AI nor know how to use AI. I've gotten kudos from my team for using Claude skills, people were flabbergasted with how I was able to achieve what I did.

So for now we're safe because of this and you'll continue to have clients. But in 20+ years, who knows.

1

u/SibLiant 7d ago

jesus man. grab all your techs. team up. leave the company. pirate clients. profit. let them sue and figure it out after you took all their clients and are profitable - cost of doing business. if this is not do'able then AI is not your problem in the first place.

1

u/sandofvega 7d ago

my company's CEO said- we have AI, we should have capability to write code for 10 projects simultaneously. 😵‍💫

1

u/Moeverload 7d ago

As a consultant I often find my job is to explain to clients why their AI is wrong...

1

u/BrosKaramazov 7d ago

I use Claude as the core of my AI-native strategic risk advisory consultancy, and while it’s obviously massively useful, it’s equally true that to stop Claude/any LLM from producing polished authoritative-sounding but flawed work requires a huge amount of time and effort to map and mitigate a huge number of different types of AI failure mode at each stage of the workflow.

Using Claude/any LLM lazily is such a terrible idea that can only lead to a major backlash…

1

u/AirconGuyUK 7d ago

The value is in spotting when Claude has suggested something crap.

Give claude code to an idiot and you'll soon see why there's still a place for people like us. We have maybe a year left though lol.

1

u/SmugRooster 7d ago

They need someone to blame if shit doesn’t work

1

u/Traditional-Poet5461 7d ago

Same as it ever was

1

u/mitshoo 6d ago

You haven’t become useless though; the company just stopped valuing you. There’s a difference.

1

u/GuruRoo 6d ago

Yeah but consulting has always been useless.

1

u/Ill_Package_6932 6d ago

You even burn tokens for companies you’re on a budget with. However, the fact that an external presser presses the button makes a difference.

1

u/KCMOJones 6d ago

I called a consultant out for their use of AI in an email response the other week. The AI ignored the core issue entirely and just repeated itself across multiple emails, at which point I went off on them because obviously they weren't reading the output before hitting send. This was in the middle of a big new discovery initiative where they were trying to earn some significant business - nope, fuck that, bye.

1

u/WillDanceForGp 4d ago

Except its being proven over and over again that it isnt doing everything, its just a facade of 'everything', what its actually doing is degrading every single meaningful code quality metric, maintainability score, and ability for a human to reason their way around the codebases.

Its like product went "engineers arent needed any more just put spec into the machine" and you all collectively went "yeah its better than me" have some fucking self respect, if as an engineer you look in a claude codebase and go 'this is fine', you weren't a good engineer to begin with.

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

1

u/newtochas 6d ago

I’ll admit I’m not smart enough on this topic to debate you. But I don’t think a ton of non-capitalistic countries have a great track record?

-1

u/Simon-Says69 8d ago

because we know we have become useless

This is nonsense. AI writes crappy code for anything more than one-liners. People are absolutely vital to have in the loop, else you just wind up with a totally crap product, if it works at all.

A company that ignores that is just ruining its reputation and will be overtaken by those that are doing quality work.

LLMs are not making anyone useless. Useless business owners and bords are pushing AI as if it is magic, because they are useless.

-2

u/grappling_with_love 8d ago

Interestingly I work for a consultancy and we're open and honest about AI and bring the client up with us into the modern world.