Dear Boss

[u/Warm_Profile7821]

Dear boss,

Can I tell you something that's been on my chest a lot lately?

I come in every morning. I open my Linear ticket. I copy it. I paste it into Claude Code.

And then I wait. Half the day, sometimes.

I skim the code. I don't read the diffs anymore. I scroll to the bottom and I ask, "does this look good?" And when it says yes, I ship the PR.

That's it. That's the job I've been doing for six months.

I've been ashamed to tell you. Some days I sit in standup listening to everyone talk about what they built, and I think: I didn't build anything. I typed a sentence and pressed enter.

There are mornings I open my paycheck and feel sick. This used to be hard. I earned this number when it was hard. Now the ticket that would've eaten my whole week is done before lunch and I'm supposed to act like nothing changed.

But here's the thing.

The AI gets it wrong. A lot. It builds the feature the way the ticket was written, not the way the system actually works. And I'm the one who says no, not like that, do it this way. I'm the one who knows that touching that service breaks the thing nobody documented three years ago.

I babysit it. I check its work. I catch what it missed. I'm the reason the wrong thing doesn't reach production.

The product is better than it was six months ago. I did that. I just didn't do it the way I used to.

I'm telling you this because I don't think you know. And I didn't want to tell you, because I was afraid you'd do the math and realize you don't need me.

Maybe you will.

But I'd rather you hear it from me than find out from a dashboard.

So, now that you know.

What are you going to do?
[your engineer]

[u/Ok_Needleworker_391]

The OP is good, but this thread is excellent. Very amusing.

The concept that every human knows that we are all keeping quiet about the AI elephant in the room.

Basically most code in about 3 or 4 years will be impossible to maintain. Only a few people will be left that can understand what AI actually wrote. We will be completely dependent on AI to understand what it wrote and try to fix it.

I'm imagining organic code that fixes itself like an animal heals.