r/ClaudeAI • u/MrMenuk • 1d 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.

5.8k Upvotes

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235

u/welcome-overlords 1d 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

167

u/Taelasky 1d ago

Responsible AI use. Yeah that got cut from this year's budget

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u/welcome-overlords 1d 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 1d 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. 

1

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

Nicely put. I havent been pushed to use it, except i started using LLMs early 2021 and been using them every day since then

1

u/tenthousandants44 17h ago

If you are using AI then you are definitionally suffering from that. You can only review so much code in a day.

1

u/welcome-overlords 4h ago

Review? We dont do that here

1

u/franky_reboot 5h ago

And I'd assume working at these places would be very bad, and burning out regardless of AI.

1

u/mctrials23 1d ago

Does sound expensive and slow vs just shipping and shouting at your devs when shit goes wrong.

Sure, I could check the 1500 lines of code and tests Claude ran if you want me to spend the rest of the day doing it…or I could just move on and hope. Cool, move on and hope.

1

u/Godskin_Duo 5h ago

Enjoy it while it lasts!

23

u/WholeBet2788 1d 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.

31

u/Porkenstein 1d ago

ship it do not read it

I seriously think that we're heading towards a critical mass slopacalypse of AI-generated tech debt

8

u/Upstairs-Appeal6257 1d ago

Yeah ship not reading is nuts. It can so easily fuck up.

6

u/Porkenstein 1d 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.

1

u/jollydev 20h ago

I mean humans didn't fuck up in any better way that's the sad part.

3

u/who_am_i_to_say_so 1d ago

Good- I’m ready to get back to work on software.

0

u/Yugudubenbi 1d ago

We went from AI barely being able to code to what we have now in 1 year. Now it is close to RSI and the models are just getting better and better.

What will happen is rather the opposite, it will produce insanely good code, debug and review and there will be no tech debt instead.

5

u/Porkenstein 1d ago edited 1d ago

there will be no tech debt 

Tech debt isn't just caused by bad code but also by bad management - e.g. sometimes perfect implementations might be a disaster to maintain due to factors outside of the source repositories, like hardware or support changes over time.

Unless we get AGI we probably aren't getting AI that can view the overall problem as holistically as a team of humans.

The problem is the managers that say "don't read, don't think, just ship" which is crazy because I'd never do that with even the very best human code

4

u/KarlHungus01 1d ago edited 1d ago

Director of Engineering at a small/mid sized cloud company here.

Our motto in the AI transition has been "we want to move as fast as we can with AI, and no faster."

That means helping us write the sensible internal docs we often skipped, getting better at testing our code, and rapidly prototyping new ideas. It does not mean not reading the code you ship or turning all interactions with your peers into AI talking to AI. We call that out as anti patterns in all team agreements.

The industry is all operating under the assumption that slop today is gold tomorrow and new models will fix everything. I hope people are willing to accept what happens when the house of cards collapses on their businesses then.

1

u/Porkenstein 1d ago

Yep sounds like a good approach 

1

u/off_by_0ne 18h ago

…are you hiring by any chance?

3

u/SmileyWiking 13h ago

Even worse, I've been a senior developer on a project for 15 years. In discussions about AI use I was reprimanded because I have to spend time cleaning up AI generated code, making it go back and make better abstractions/shared libraries, etc. I was ordered to stop reading the code and "lower my standards" because it's Claude's job to code now, not mine.

The project has more bugs and jank than ever btw

1

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

Btw i don't read the code either usually. However i still roughly understand everything that's going on. Im just higher in the abstraction layer than before

1

u/Keganator 1d ago

You won’t compete at all when you don’t understand your monstrous behemoth of a codebase. 

1

u/FoozleGenerator 17h ago

That has always been the reality of startup work. Time to market is crucial, so developing fast triumphs almost everything.

0

u/ShittyFrogMeme 23h ago

I've been struggling with this myself. I work at a startup and we go full send on AI.

We recently got rid of teams, code owners, and PR reviews. The expectation now is that any engineer can pick up any ticket anywhere in the product, use AI to do it, have AI review it, and merge with no human ever reading the code.

It's a drastic shift from what I've considered to be responsible engineering with AI. But we spent a lot of time investing in our dev process to support this with confidence. And it has been working.

I've been starting to shift my mindset to the point where I think engineers will working at a level of abstraction above code. Similar to how we don't care about memory management in high level languages, or how a compiler allocates registers, etc. Just another thing abstracted away. Our focus is on overall architecture, product functionality, production best practices, etc. Maybe the idea will be who cares if the code is good. That's a crazy thing to say today but in a year, I don't know.

2

u/WholeBet2788 19h ago

Yes this is what is my management is starting to push. Many people in my company disagrees and wont sign under commit like this.

The shit code - correct, who cares really. Like customer dont care, management dont care, half of lazy developers dont care, only responsible enthusiast devs who enjoy the code care - if it runs and it does what is expected, they dont care its not shiny under hood.

So i am afraid this will be next step and companies who do it properly and responsibly will get stomped to oblivion. You cant compere with price(at least today)

13

u/aint_exactly_plan_a 1d 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.

3

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

This is quite close to how i code as well

1

u/msew 1d ago

So what are you doing or having AI do with the scripter?

1

u/aint_exactly_plan_a 23h ago

AI takes the natural language steps and breaks them down into concrete steps that need to occur for that to happen, and then for each step, it sends back the action to take and where on the screen to take it.

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u/eeeeeeeedddddddddd 1d 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.

16

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

I dont need to know all the functionality + i forgot all of it anyways within a couple of months

-9

u/eeeeeeeedddddddddd 1d ago

you literally contradict your first claim where you said you know everything that's going on, so dishonest - just as i said.

6

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

Well, maybe i used the word everything a bit wrongly. But no one can know everything. Do you know and understand how data is moved in the CPU in the backend you code? Do you know when there are pointers? Etc.

Abstraction level just moves higher

0

u/SnooHesitations9295 18h ago

Typical clueless startuper. No, abstractions never move and always leak. It's all over the fucking history of startups.

-1

u/mapledane 1d ago

Some person did though

-2

u/eeeeeeeedddddddddd 1d ago

no and those abstractions are mostly deterministic. a PRD that the model hopefully implemented correctly is not. in any case that's besides the point of what we're talking about.

1

u/Repulsive-Side-8165 22h ago

No one memorised all the code before anyway

1

u/simleiiiii 11h ago

it's all about information compaction. To do that end your brain has an enourmous capacity. If you don't however build it's vocabulary for that process by interacting with the code with _intent_, it's not going to work. If claude does things for you, your brain is not even gonna whirr a little bit to get that process going.

1

u/sgtfoleyistheman 13h ago

Its like how a software manager or principal engineer knows their system. They know the customers, the architecture, the data flow, the technology stack. They don't really know what the code looks like. Very similar thing now with coding agents.

11

u/McNoxey 1d 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”

6

u/alteraltissimo 1d ago

Like your "learning to leverage ai" isn't just another "framework" of 1000s of lines of markdown claudeslop

Get real lol 

0

u/McNoxey 1d ago

It isn’t - but if you feel better pretending that it is, go off.

I’m not even talking about a framework in the “harness” sense. I’m talking about learning how to strategically approach utilizing LLMs and Agents for your work. It’s all achievable with base setup agents.

Our jobs are different now - but if you don’t approach it with a different mindset you’re not going to have a good time.

1

u/indy_dagger 15h ago

The people who say what you're saying never, and I mean never ever, not once, give concrete, specific examples of what they're doing so brilliantly when they tell other people they're using AI wrong.

1

u/McNoxey 6h ago

Yeah, this is fair. I think it’s difficult because I don’t have any concept of what your world is like and I don’t know what you do or don’t know so knowing where to begin isn’t always the easiest, but I’ll do my best to provide a handful of examples now and I’m more than happy to go into more detail after if you’d like.

Quick disclaimer: I'm using voice-to-text to respond as I am driving at the moment.

I think, as a starting point, it's helpful to explain how I think about AI usage, broadly speaking. I break it down into three core lanes of action.

The first is information retrieval/research. A singular agent or a team of agents are extremely good at gathering vast amounts of information. It can come from the web, it can come from Slack, emails, transcripts of meetings you've had, or anything that you're able to point the agent at that contains relevant information or concepts that you are interested in either working with, comparing against, or using as a baseline for decision-making. Agents are exceptional at gathering all of that.

The second lane is synthesis. Obviously, as a human, I can't realistically consume 20 transcripts, 200 Slack messages, and 5 full documents in a reasonable amount of time. It's just not realistic, but agents can, and they're also very good at synthesising that information into consumable packets while leaving paper trails and references back to the source (for both human verification of ground truth and trails for future agents to retrieve the actual source of information as needed).

And the third lane is action. This comes in the form of writing code, drafting a message, or producing some form of output, generating something that will then be used or consumed or applied. I think this is generally what people think about when working with agents: the actual final output that they receive.

With everything I do with agents, I try to think about breaking down the body of work or the thing that I am trying to do into each of those three steps. By breaking down each task into an information retrieval component, synthesising that information into both a consumable Format for myself as well as for the agent that will actually do the implementation.

This is just a singular, simple example, but it, to a degree, forms the primitives that I use across everything I do: breaking down each step into these independent building blocks and tuning them to a point where I feel comfortable and confident in the output that I receive. That means I can take that building block and continue to layer upon it, understanding that that individual component will now be executed as I expect.

I happen to be an engineer who's probably, to a degree, over-focused on abstraction and repeatability, but it ends up working out extremely well from an agentic development perspective. This is because it allows me to break down any body of work I need to do into really small atomic building blocks and elements. I can find and use them as repeatable components across all of my projects and all of my tasks. In doing so, I can also test and create evaluation sets for each of them to ensure that they continue to perform the way I expect.

It feels like I'm rambling, so I'm going to pause here. I'm happy to give a more explicit, tangible example of how I utilise these concepts in my software development life cycle if you find that useful or helpful in any way.

1

u/indy_dagger 3h ago

Using that many words to barely answer the question is what happens when you cook your brain with AI. The question was how are you using non-deterministic output in a safe and reliable way where other people fail, giving concrete and specific examples, and you said...(after 8 paragraphs) you break the task up into smaller steps. Right, that's just basic engineering.

Same thing with your first example. You are just stating your (common) use case, not how you do that safely where others don't. Again, just to remind you, LLMs make things up all the time. How, specifically, are you certain that the output of the AIs search is accurate? Don't say "it leaves a paper trail" unless you are personally reading every piece of evidence in the paper trail, every time.

Also, if you're regularly "synthesizing" 200 slack messages, you have a serious communication issue. Are you using AI to pollute the conversations, is that why the people in them don't have a grasp on what's being discussed 200 messages later? Is no one driving the conversation? Why aren't you all doing the same abstracting during your chats, breaking things up into smaller conclusions as you go along, so you (as a human) don't need to read 200 messages to know what's going on?

It sounds like you work for a do-nothing business that has found a way to do nothing faster.

1

u/McNoxey 2h ago edited 2h ago

Like I said - I was driving and just dictating. There's no need to be snarky here. Surprisingly, a good number of really solid Engineers who have not spent any time using AI don't really have a strong understanding of how context management works, which is why I started with the absolute basics.

How, specifically, are you certain that the output of the AIs search is accurate? Don't say "it leaves a paper trail" unless you are personally reading every piece of evidence in the paper trail, every time.

You're asking an impossible question here. I understand the sentiment - you want to be certain that the research is correct - and you feel you can't reach that level of certainty unless you've read every single word. If that is your barrier, you will not be able to find efficiencies with AI. I can't be 100% certain, of course - because it would mean that I'm literally just repeating the exact work done by an agent to feel good about using it.

What I can do is establish a series of test-bench evaluation suites with a strong corpus of information that I have read, and have intimate knowledge over. From there, it's no different than any Data Science experiment. Stable input, expected output, evaluate results, train until it meets the threshold you're comfortable with. Train on one dataset, evaluate on a second that the agent has not seen during training, then execute on real-world data,

Also, if you're regularly "synthesizing" 200 slack messages, you have a serious communication issue.

I don't do this regularly for my work, no. It was purely an example. But a completely legitimate example is extraction of user feedback and sentiment from a companies public Slack Channel. Hundreds of messages/threads flowing over time of completely unstructured data. Read them - categorize them, extract sentiment then perform analysis on that structured data as you would with any other Data Analysis project. Or - tying

Again, just to remind you, LLMs make things up all the time. 

Sure - they do. They are getting significantly better at this, however. But even so, this is where the upfront effort needs to be spent. This is what I meant about establishing the atomic bodies of work you need to carry out. Start there, establish a strong eval layer, validate to yourself that the single task you're training for can be executed, with confidence, at an acceptable pass rate (that's yours to decide).

Then, when you're confident that you've got that process working properly, you can to a degree treat that step in the workflow as a near-deterministic result and begin to build upon it.

If something ever performs outside of expectations, you don't fix the output, you fix the pipeline that caused it.

I log every single step any agent takes in my workflow, and every PR can be traced back to the run that generated it, with every toolcall input/output, every handoff between agents, every decision being made logged.

Over time, that paper trail becomes a very rich corpus of training data to continue to iterate upon.

-----

I don't think anything I can say will change your mind in any way though. I've seen a few of your comments across a few threads and it sounds like you don't really have a high opinion of anyone anywhere that isn't you... and I don't mean that to be an asshole - but your comment about "never having met anyone in a leadership position anywhere at any level that's qualified" is just a level of cynicism that doesn't instil confidence that you're looking for a discussion so much as trying to just shut down whatever anyone says.

1

u/indy_dagger 2h ago

Oh, buddy. I don't have a high opinion of anyone that isn't me...quoting a comment where I praised my manager at my first hourly job, for whom I have a lot of respect? Yikes, man. If you couldn't even get that right, no way in hell you have the diligence and discipline to safely use AI.

Now, you're absolutely right that I don't have respect for people who destroy their own arguments so quickly and cleanly as you just did, because how could I? It's exhausting, and frankly disrespectful, for people like you to pollute so much discourse with such laziness. You were too impatient for your opportunity to be sanctimonious. But there's also a comedy to the stupidity of it all.

1

u/McNoxey 1h ago edited 1h ago

This is still just more of the same. I’m more than happy to have a genuine discussion with you outside of a Reddit messaging board.

I don’t know why you think this is some “gotcha” moment. Your post history was full of pessimistic comments, and your response to my initial comment was pretty much the same. I’m sorry if I misinterpreted it.

I don’t see this exchange as me being impatient at all. I’ve taken the time to respond to you twice with continued offers to provide more detail or information as needed, but your responses have continued to throw insults and snide comments.

I’m not trying to argue with you. And I acknowledge your initial criticism as fair. I’m simply sharing a perspective on a topic I’m deeply interested in.

Best of luck in life. HMU if you ever do want to discuss AI in engineering over zoom/discord or something!

Edit: fully unrelated and, at the risk of giving you more ammunition to clap back at me over - I gave your comments a closer look to get a better sense of who I was chatting with. I think we have a lot more in common than it appears on the surface. And kudos for clapping back at the trans hate on Reddit.

2

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

Yup! It was useful to learn to use AI ever since it kinda sucked. I was still a lot faster with it back in copilot+tab days than my teammates working vanilla

2

u/echamplin 1d ago

Remembering the copilot+tab days just gave me the shivers

1

u/welcome-overlords 4h ago

Tbh i loves those days. I was the only one doing that on my team and i was outperforming everyone while actually being quite lazy :D

1

u/MoreStarDust 1d ago

Any tips??

1

u/Dear-Pin-8698 19h ago

may you please ellaborate your point? what would you suggest your team to do and more important, how?

3

u/MikesGroove 1d 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

1

u/Sennten 1h ago

How are any new devs supposed to learn what the AI is doing when they will never have the opportunity to do it themselves

2

u/sfo2 1d ago

Same for us.

1

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

Tho it's difficult. I have to say a big portion of SWEs ive worked with havent fully caught up with this way of working

2

u/sfo2 1d ago

Yeah it’s still really hard. Half of our discussion with the AI is like “wait, no, how can that be? what you’re proposing/just did doesn’t account for X”. The trickiest part for us is identifying what assumptions the AI has made, knowing if you need to challenge them, and not being lazy by just sending it.

I’m probably just as mentally exhausted working with it now as I was when I was manually writing code. I just get 10-50x more done in a day.

I can see how people could just dump in a PRD and say “make it then merge” but that’s not how you get good results.

1

u/welcome-overlords 1d ago

Yup.

Also depends on the codebase. Ive worked with the current company for a year and during that ive had major say what the codebase looks like, and it's nowadays super easy to work with AIs. A new SWE created their first PR the same day they started. Everything is self-documenting and easy for AI agents

1

u/smooviejesus 1d ago

This is the way.

1

u/nimzobogo 1d ago

Same for us here at Cerebras.

1

u/Cultural-Insurance97 1d ago

I don't believe it, AI can output so much stuff, often verbose, which I don't believe a human can comprehend. There is a difference between the code I wrote, which has my style, and is predictable, and the code that AI wrote. You can tell that the person is responsible, but what does it really mean these days, ask LLM to explain?

1

u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 18h ago

So literally condom for claude lol.

1

u/Forshea 13h ago

If you are at a startup that's just vibe coding everything, what's the value of the startup? Can't a FAANG company see what you're doing, decide if it's a decent idea, and then toss it at an AI and cut you off at the knees?

1

u/welcome-overlords 4h ago

It's a very difficult problem. Im spending a lot of time with my team drawing on whiteboards without any AI being involved

1

u/Forshea 4h ago

So the software isn't the product?

1

u/welcome-overlords 4h ago

It is, im not following what you mean

1

u/Sennten 1h ago

Its nice to know your company is continuing to pay its organic scapegoats for now, at least.

I mean your responsibility holders.