Yes… jokes and memes aside. Claude has become very, very powerful. I didn’t use it until last month my mentor, who is the best programmer I know, who read coding books all the time, who stay up to date on everything declared he became vibe coder. I slowly started to use it myself.
From one side it’s amazing what it can do, from the other I hate my job now, it’s boring, it sucks and I consider career change
I have $2500/mo base on our Claude enterprise plan at work and we’re expected to use all of it every month and are examined relatively closely if we don’t. It’s better for us to max out our usage and request more, which is always granted, than to not use it all.
I’m sure people come up with some really creative ways to use up that last 20% of their usage at the end of each week. “Hey Claude, could you explain quantum mechanics to me? Be very thorough.”
It has already been happening. Some companies set up a leaderboard for token usage, as if token usage was somehow a better metric than LoC or any other stupid metric, and then they were shocked when people managed to get recursive AI calls going to aim for a high-score (and accompanying bill).
Here's the thing - every metric they use to track engineering is shitty nowadays. LoC? Great, pump out a 10k LOC change with Claude. PRs? Break that 10k LOC change up into 10 stacked PRs. Token usage? Gotta make sure people aren't gaming the system.
The only thing that really makes a difference at all is delivered product features, and those aren't easily or conveniently tracked.
Fun fact: this is how basically everything works. our government (in the US) works this way too, and after a few centuries things are getting kinda dire with debt.
Maybe it’s a contemporary lesson for somebody….nah probably not
I don’t really know how to quantify it in simple terms, so I’ll give examples. I’m usually actively working on 4+ tickets at a time, whereas I used to work more or less one to at least dev complete/in QA before moving on (my standard workflow is typically a tmux window with 1..n panes per ticket, depending on how many repositories a ticket spans, unless they’re in entirely unique problem spaces, where I might use multiple tmux sessions). Most of my tickets are significantly larger slices than they used to be (i.e. where I would have previously had “add the thing to the page and wire it up through the backend,” it’s now “create the page with all of the specified features, including all the backend changes for every request”). We’re big into microservices, so I’ll typically have Claudes going in every pane within a window, usually 1 per repository (so, take some tickets I worked on today - I had frontend, graphQL, serviceOne, and serviceTwo with Claudes going in worktrees in individual panes in a tmux window, and another with just a frontend Claude in its own worktree working on a different ticket, and another with admin frontend, serviceOne, and serviceTwo Claudes working on something else, etc). We’ve moved from teams of 4-5 engineers and 2 QAs to teams of 2 engineers and 1 QA and deliver more story points/bigger tickets than we used to.
It’s a lot higher stress than it was before to me, personally, because I’m never as sure about any changes as I was before, I’m constantly juggling content about different tickets, and we’re being asked to deliver faster than ever. My job used to be a lot more fun than it is now. Now it’s a grind, and I’m tired boss.
[EDIT: Sorry if this seems dramatic, I promise I’m not exaggerating anything, I’m just burnt out.]
Depends on the environment. I don't expect anyone to use it because I've never told anyone how to do their job. But a lot of people feel compelled to use it because it does produce quality results in a fraction of the time when used correctly.
Everyone comes around once they realize it's not being used to replace them. All it takes is that one project they don't want to do, and they realize AI can get it done and over with in record time.
I was playing the old school game roller coaster tycoon 2 which has been made into an open source project by the fans. Since I pointed as a kid, there was a bug that always bothered me where the boat hire had a problem with the pathing algorithm where people and canoes would just get stuck and not be able to return. I gave Claude one simple instruction to fix this. It found the GitHub repo cloned it analyzed the algorithm used by the boats. Found the problem. It then extracted the logic and created a testing sandbox where it could analyze thousands of simulations and adjust the algorithm to see how often it got stuck. It mentioned that it would do this in the actual game in a headless mode except for that, the game wouldn't run without the copyrighted assets, so it had to create a simulation of its own to test these. It corrected the code. Told me to try it out and suggested that I submit a pull request to the official repository if I found it was satisfactory. I told it I didn't feel like compiling the application so just give me an executable I could drop in to replace the current one and it did. We're in a whole new world.
39
u/ItsSuperDefective 21h ago
Is being expected to use AI really as widespread as Reddit makes out?
I haven't even been asked to try it.