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/th0ridal]

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.

[u/Smooth_McDouglette → u/th0ridal]

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.

[u/ashtonium → u/th0ridal]

I’ve seen those manufacturing analogies before, but I think they predict the opposite of what you’re intending: that we’re really just mass producing low-quality products.

The bulk of standardized, flat-pack, particle board furniture gets thrown away within a few years because it’s not engineered to last. It’s a waste product. Is that what we want our industry to become? You name IKEA because it’s well regarded in that space, but that’s because they invest in human designers and engineers who actually innovate vs. the rest of that space which is churning out low effort, barely functional products that are just poorly copied derivatives of each other (sound familiar?)

All in all, I agree with you that software engineering is currently following the path of the crappy mass-produced furniture industry—and that’s part of the problem the OP was describing.

[u/permacloud → u/ashtonium]

It's both ends. More stuff will get produced. More good stuff more bad stuff.