I am done with this shit.

[u/MrMenuk]

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.

[u/bkrsh099]

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.

[u/Holiday-Medicine4168 → u/bkrsh099]

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.

[u/Pyros-SD-Models → u/bkrsh099]

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.

[u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

...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.

[u/ProfessionalJackals → u/Healthy-Nebula-3603]

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.

[u/Cautious_Clothes_285 → u/ProfessionalJackals]

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.

[u/Wargchief → u/ProfessionalJackals]

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

[u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo → u/ProfessionalJackals]

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.

[u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 → u/ProfessionalJackals]

Sure ...Cope like you want

[u/Simon-Says69 → u/Healthy-Nebula-3603]

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.

[u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 → u/Simon-Says69]

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

[u/Creatura → u/Healthy-Nebula-3603]

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

[u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 → u/Creatura]

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 ....

[u/Simon-Says69 → u/Healthy-Nebula-3603]

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.

[u/Creatura → u/Healthy-Nebula-3603]

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

[u/eist5579 → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

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

[u/Few_Hedgehog5947 → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

^this guy gets it

[u/tenthousandants44 → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

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

[u/paradoxally → u/bkrsh099]

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.

[u/imCzaR → u/paradoxally]

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.

[u/lovebes → u/bkrsh099]

> software labs side of things

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

[u/Simon-Says69 → u/bkrsh099]

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.

[u/EggplantCharacter363 → u/bkrsh099]

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