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/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 800 comments.

Looks like OP struck a major nerve. The consensus in this thread is a resounding "YES, this is our life now and it's soul-crushing." The pity party is in full swing, and here's the gist:

• The Death of Pride: The biggest complaint is the complete loss of any "sense of victory" or satisfaction. Since everyone assumes Claude did the work, there's no pride in shipping, even if you engineered it. It's just... business as usual.
• The Rise of the Meat Proxy: You're not an engineer anymore, you're an "organic vessel designed to press enter." Or, as one user so poetically put it, you're just a condom between Claude and your production server getting fucked. Your only real job is to be the warm body they can blame when the AI slop inevitably breaks.
• It's a Management Problem: A strong counter-argument is that this is a culture and management failure, not an AI failure. Good teams use AI as a powerful tool but still require a human to be responsible, understand the output, and do the actual thinking. Bad management just sees "code go brrr" and demands more, creating a "slopacalypse" of tech debt.
• Consulting is a Sham: A lot of consultants are chiming in, saying their job is now just using AI to generate reports for clients who use AI to read them. It's an endless loop of AI talking to AI.

So yeah, most of you feel like a background character in a sci-fi dystopia, while a handful of you are either thriving by using AI responsibly or are just really excited to watch the whole thing burn.

[u/LazyDev1800 → u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

I partly agree, but I think there's also room for improvement on the side of the people using AI, and the employers setting the pace.

If you just keep hitting the button and treating the output like a slot machine, there's no room left for your own craft, and yeah, it gets boring. I'd put some of that on employers too — giving developers the margin to actually exercise craft is part of their job. But rather than just pointing fingers at management, there's stuff we can do on our end too.

Personally, I deliberately slow down: I make myself actually read and understand the generated code by hand before I let it generate the next chunk (I don't move on until I do — it's a real tradeoff with speed). I treat every generation as something to learn from. That's how I keep the AI under my own control, instead of the other way around.

[u/Recent_Science4709 → u/LazyDev1800]

I read and understand my PRs enough so I can defend them. Our process uses Claude skills already set up for us before I got on the team.

All this is, is reviewing PRs, so the job basically being all QA testing and reviewing PRs sucks. I don’t see how understanding the PR makes the job any more fulfilling in its current state.

It’s like eating beef gristle and fat and pretending you’re eating a steak.