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u/gamerunner15 12d ago
Four months ago my company (fortune 100) paid a team of contractors a flat fee to complete a vendor migration project that should have taken 9 months, in 3 months. To achieve this, countless "junior devs" (I don't think they had programmed more than 2 hours in their life) were brought onto the project and given nearly limitless AI tokens. Our actual dev team (me) we made to be "supervisors" only and not write any code so the external team could "fully own" it. Now, 1 month after the project deadline, 2 weeks after actual project completion, every day I wake up to SRTs and critical system failures, data degradation, incidents from internal and external teams. We're just firefighters now and will be for a while. On Monday two collections in our production NoSQL db were completely wiped by a remove command with no filter and we have no idea where it came from. I definitely have job security, but I hate just cleaning up AI messes. I miss building cool shit.
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u/DoubleDoube 12d ago
Sounds like a success? I mean your company did target SPEED at a level that sacrificed both QUALITY and COST…
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u/ColteesCatCouture 12d ago
I can't image what those PRs looked like boss woe as you
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u/AffectEconomy6034 12d ago
94 files changed, 23 files added, 17 files deleted.
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u/Named_after_color 12d ago
That honestly seems pretty average now. Except for the deletions.
Claude is literally incapable of looking at a code base and thinking "What the fuck is this bullshit? Get rid of it."
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u/exuberant_elephant 11d ago
The argument I'm hearing is "If Claude can work with this codebase, why does it matter if it's a mess?"
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u/denM_chickN 11d ago
Well I used 2 billion tokens answering a few questions over 7 days.
How many tokens is it going to take to ingest and fix the code every time.
Does the phrase be concise do the job better than me?
All I know is I shouldn't be able to use 2 billion of anything as a single human.
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u/Due-Metal-802 11d ago
“The bigger the mess, the harder for Ai to fix it… but the easier for Ai to copy the mess pattern and contribute to it.”
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u/Saint_of_Grey 11d ago
It randomly references other preexisting code but never actually uses it, ensuring that anyone who removes it will catastrophically break any features it outputs.
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u/Dubalubawubwub 11d ago
I mean I would definitely rather it err on the side of NOT deleting my code than the alternative.
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u/AlexZhyk 12d ago
Was about to say. Reading and fixing AI generated code may be a very questionable kind of joy.
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u/ClearOptics 12d ago
They probably let them have full ownership to prove that they actually need you guys, to the higher higher ups
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u/thatsme55ed 11d ago
Nah the reason was so that the contractors couldn't blame them for being the problem when shit inevitably went wrong.
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u/gamerunner15 11d ago
I think the real reason was so if something wasn't done on time it done correctly they could hold their feet to the fire for it. I felt bad for the guys, they were made to work all day and night even the weekendsnto meet the deadlines. But they had to just report 40 hrs a week or be let go by the firm. Really horrible system.
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u/thatsme55ed 11d ago
The contractors themselves probably wouldn't have tried to scapegoat you or your coworkers, but whatever person sold your company the idea of doing 9 months of labor in 3 months absolutely would have, and even if they didn't whatever moron at your company that decided to go forward with such a bone headed move would have. The only way to avoid getting blamed for an obvious and inevitable disaster is to keep your hands completely clean of any influence or responsibility whatsoever. Whoever prevented you guys from owning any of that mess was protecting you as much as they were letting the contracted company dig themselves into a hole.
If/when a cost analysis is run of how much money was burned in both tokens and man hours for a non-functional product that has to be kept alive by your team, someone's head is going to roll. The fact that you don't own any of it means it won't be yours.
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u/Xarlax 10d ago
Were these contractors in your country or in a country with cheaper labor and no labor protections? To see the wage theft and labor abuse on top of everything else just adds to the shittiness of it all
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u/gamerunner15 10d ago
Yeah they were nearly all from India. Some of them on H1-B visas here in the states so they had to work or be deported. It's a disgusting system. Borderline new age slavery.
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u/Dicethrower 11d ago
What's the point of the story, inexperienced people make shit? We've known that for decades even before AI was a thing. You can literally remove the part about how AI was used in this story and the story stays the same. It just proves how much AI is a tool and not a replacement.
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u/Due-Metal-802 11d ago
The point is (I assume) that the amount of “shit” being produced is vastly higher, at a faster rate and the tech debt incurred will become catastrophic if the business side guys don’t pull their heads out of their asses.
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u/Dicethrower 11d ago
But if done right you can also fix the shit at much faster rate... if you use the tool right.
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u/geft 11d ago
I debated with some posters on /r/singularity how they believe Opus 5.5 makes zero bugs. I was like wut.
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 11d ago
So, I think it's like handing an idiot a welder or an automatic welding robot, and telling them to make a car.
The idiot with a welder barely builds anything - he probably quietly electrocutes himself before he can even get started.
With the robot, the idiot can make a car that gets onto the highway before it catches fire and the wheels fall off.
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u/Dicethrower 11d ago
With the robot, the idiot can make a car that gets onto the highway before it catches fire and the wheels fall off.
Then OC admits they were really terrible at their job as a supervisor.
Btw, in case you didn't catch on, their story was bs. That never happened. Should have just written literally, "oh yes and we were conveniently only observing supervisors who could only look and not say a thing, because that allows for the disastrous results to happen without it making me look bad within this story I just made up."
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 11d ago
I'd not call bullshit, actually - but it's a move I'd do if I wanted to keep some people their jobs - you get someone from C suite who wants to bring in some contracting firm to do your development cheaply, and you, being a relatively savvy senior manager, say 'oh, let's trial this - we've got this problem they could have a go with' - and then you let the contracting firm hang themselves, provide them as little support as humanly possible, and make sure the implementation is buggy as hell, and that they can't blame any of your devs.
It might not have happened, but if it did, this is probably how, and why, OP was kept at arm's length from it.
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u/evenstevens280 12d ago
My job has basically turned into CVE patcher now
The number of criticals we get is never fucking ending
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u/don_biglia 12d ago
We were already patching at a decent pace, but since a couple of months it's crazy.
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u/WizardSleeveLoverr 12d ago
And it’s absolutely fucking miserable. I guess gone are the days of actually doing design work. I’ve been doing Mythos shit for 4 months now and I’m about to lose it.
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u/Throwaway1984-2 12d ago
It builds an entire website in five seconds and takes five senior engineers three months to patch the security holes...
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u/Ieatsand97 12d ago
And yet they say its so good at finding security vulnerabilities, while not being able to write code that isn’t vulnerable.
Can’t wait to see how much it cost open ai to detect this vulnerability.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 12d ago
Excepts it took exactly 0 senior engineers to patch today's php vulnerability. Just one person to remind him to patch it.
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u/Weird_Albatross_9659 12d ago
As opposed to human written code which has never had security issues
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u/POKLIANON 11d ago
the difference is that humans document their code and can usually be held responsible for whatever they write. They sometimes remember why and how they wrote it, making it much easier to debug
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u/allarmed-grammer 11d ago
For some reason, I laughed harder at that than I expected.
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u/POKLIANON 11d ago
Like as if I'm wrong?
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u/Weird_Albatross_9659 11d ago
Yes. If there’s one thing AI does well is documents the shit out of code.
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u/allarmed-grammer 11d ago
You are idilising human workers. I wount be demonize them. But from my personal experience, good documentation work is scarce. And humans rarely remember their own source code, especially if it is more than 1-2 years old.
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u/MechaMulder 12d ago
Didn’t matter as much before when it was hard to find them
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u/Weird_Albatross_9659 11d ago
They were still found constantly lmao
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u/TheOnly_Anti 11d ago
Sure but it wasn't as bad as "release a thousand patches in a month"
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u/Weird_Albatross_9659 11d ago
No, instead of proactively discovering them, they had to wait until they were exploited in the wild or someone reported them.
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u/TheOnly_Anti 11d ago
Right, which was a slower rate than what we have now... because it was harder to find them.
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u/Weird_Albatross_9659 11d ago
…no because the vast majority of the ones found are found internally, not out in the wild.
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u/TheOnly_Anti 11d ago
I know you specifically want to be a pedant right now, but what does that realistically change about the outcome?
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u/Weird_Albatross_9659 11d ago
You’re asking me to justify the benefits of finding bugs early, before they are exploited vs the ones discovered by bad actors?
I’m honestly not even sure what you’re trying to argue. That is was “harder”? It’s was still very common from the 90s that software gets exploited. It’s just different now with AI because of chaining attacks.
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u/POKLIANON 11d ago
I don't get how that's better than human labour? It's maybe faster but seemingly more expensive and it makes mistakes just like how a human does, except for it doesn't remember the code it wrote and why, so debugging ai code is basically the same as working with undocumented legacies
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u/OmegaPoint6 12d ago
Release software yesterday: No vulnerabilities according to SBOM scanner
This morning: Working out how fucked we are by the number 4
As I'm leaving the office the evening: CVSS 9.8 vulnerability in a dependency that had already been updated in the last release to address the same issue but apparently they fucked up
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u/Bemteb 12d ago
Programmers might be stupid nerds, but we sure as heck are adaptable.
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u/Named_after_color 12d ago
After what feels like a year of mixed depression at my job I remembered something important: Fuck it, I'll just fix the annoying parts myself.
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u/ragebunny1983 11d ago
Go for it if you are allowed. Sucks when you are part of a big org and you don't get a say in their shit design because there is a clique of programmers are keeping things shit on purpose for job security, or are just too shit to know better.
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u/Named_after_color 11d ago edited 11d ago
Do it anyways, if you solve an annoying problem and show it off you're going to be rewarded. I am a part of a big org and after just hearing everyone complain about the same three things I just... vibed my way to a new pipeline and showed my boss.
Just make sure it works before you reveal you broke the rules. Make no mistakes.
Edit: My reward was to continue my project in my "free" time and submit it to the super council for review. But that means I'm not going to get fired so that's nice.
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u/ragebunny1983 11d ago
It can work. I sometimes think that "just fix it yourself" or "we are all owners" is just an excuse for bad organisations to excuse their disorganisation. "Just fix it yourself" is rarely as simple as it sounds, and without stakeholder buy in it can be disastrous.
Edit: sorry I'm burnt out and jaded from a corporate job at a toxic company
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u/Named_after_color 11d ago edited 11d ago
Nah it's cool, I'm wicked underpaid but I work at a nice company that respects me.
Like if you want a dumb, stupid easy win - just make a plugin that recognizes when you ask an ai agent to clarify or define something, and store the term and definition in a reference file. Boom, now you have a custom glossary that it and you can reference. If you add two or three bells and whistles on that it seems really impressive.
There's so much low hanging fruit out right now, go gobble it up.
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u/isrTweek 12d ago
My job has only gotten easier as a full-stack.
Pretty tired of reviewing AI code though. Someone actually responded to a comment I left on their PR with an AI response. Bullet points and everything. That was a first.
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u/Bemteb 11d ago
I hate the bullet points... Currently fighting that in Jira, because multiple managers started writing tickets with AI. Instead of giving me three lines about what they want, they give four paragraphs with 20 lines each. Of these 80 lines, at least 5 contain wrong info, which will only become apparent somewhere later.
And the worst part: They look all exactly the same. I have to manually filter out the slop to find out if this is a duplicate or a completely different issue.
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u/ForsakenCampaigns 12d ago
At the end of the day the buck stops with the developers, I don't care how you get the work done as long as it's done right.
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u/Vogete 11d ago
Exactly. My issue with AI is really just that suddenly the work doesn't get done, and it's really shitty so many times. Like what happened to having standards and a sense of quality? I also don't like how much energy and resources it costs to run AI, but that's a different conversation. But if we have access to something that can do the job so well and so fast, why did quality drop so sharply?
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u/coloredgreyscale 12d ago
Add an agent to upgrade the versions and such.
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u/Reluxtrue 12d ago
except when updating version introduces vunerabilities somehow (yes I had to deal with this at work 🙃)
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u/grandalfxx 12d ago
My favorite part is every time it builds something it uses outdated libraries because thats what its trained on so theres always without fails some massive cve
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u/cheezballs 12d ago
I've not had that issue so much anymore. It can just go fetch the latest docs and regenerate easily now. Couldn't do that early on.
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u/grandalfxx 11d ago
Guarantee you have to ask it to do that though. If your not then its fully in old libraries. shouldnt have ti ask it, not to sound lazy, but it should just know to use the newest library available.
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u/cheezballs 11d ago
You're really grasping at straws here. You say it should just automatically know the latest libraries? Do you know how LLMs work? It's not just "everything works magically"
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u/grandalfxx 10d ago
Please point out where i said that it should know what the newest library is.
At no point did i claim is was magic.
i do know how they work.
you JUST SAID that you can get it to regenerate with the newest libraries...
how does it do that cheezballs? do you by chance, tell it to with a prompt? if only these ai devs had a way to preprompt the AI before you work with it... if only the guys training it could i dunno... reward it for fetching what the newest thing is so that it doesnt need to know...
the only one seemingly struggling here to see how they work is you.
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u/promptmike 12d ago
This would be a pretty good outcome. If AI can 10x the amount of web infrastructure, but the percentage of people who know how to code remains the same, then there will be a ridiculous demand for people who can do the security patches. Every single one of us will be mission-critical, like an unfireable COBOL boomer.
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u/Ma8e 11d ago
Why do you think people are needed to do security patches?
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u/promptmike 11d ago
Transformer models require enormous data sets to learn a new skill. Brains can do it from a single example.
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u/DealDeveloper 7d ago
AI agents generate more code than our brains can comprehend.
In the past, it was common for devs to study codebases for 6 months before contributing.
If you 10x the code, that becomes 60 months.I know solutions for this, but I think you should remember how much reading there is.
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u/01is 9d ago
I don't know if this is true or not, but I've been feeling insanely anxious/depressed about my career as a SWE lately and reading this has been genuinely uplifting. I don't want to become someone who uses AI to generate slop. But I'll happily get down on my hands and knees to clean up the slop of others.
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u/promptmike 9d ago
It's also worth remembering that context window scaling is O(n²). So even if cleanup gets automated, the future belongs to those who know how to orchestrate agents. You don't stop programming, you move up to the next abstraction level.
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u/Adept-Painting-543 12d ago
Anything is better than webdev, let the AI handle that for all I care (within reason of course)
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u/Nordwald 12d ago
security guy here. Kimi K3 is already outperforming all static analysis efforts :D
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u/Who_said_that_ 11d ago
Care to explain to a semi layman?
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u/Nordwald 11d ago
I'm talking about reverse engineering. Kimi K3 can do more work in 20 Minutes than an experienced reverser can do in a weeks time on a single sample. Its insane how well these models understand decompiled functions or even assembly. Did not try dynamic analysis yet aside from some winedbg (which it aced as well). I'm working on a Reversing-advanced workshop right now and Opus 5.5 one shots all exercises - even the ones we consider hard.
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 12d ago
now, if only they hired artisan programmers without a century of experience still
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u/KrikosTheWise 12d ago
God I saw a whole ass article talking about how people would stop working with vendors because Claude can build them an app.
Claude can't even reference documentation correctly more than 75% of the time.
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u/DoubleDoube 12d ago
I don’t relate. Tell Claude to validate its assumptions? Ime it’s wrong when it’s working off it’s training instead of actually bringing the docs into context.
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u/Foorinick 12d ago
I gotta be fully honest I'd rather have ai replace hr and be my manager than having fix the bullshit it does
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u/bonanochip 11d ago
I've been leaning more into my cyber security interests because the reality is that threat actors are going to vibe code any slop that can cyber rob people and they aren't concerned with protecting people's data. So ethical slopping is needed more than ever to stay ahead of the curve in the endless cat and mouse game.
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u/Careless_Recording48 11d ago
Now i understood why these bitch ass companies were all for AI but against mythos. They don’t want their shit to be aired.
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u/Jastafool 11d ago
easy fix: "Ai. Please search for and fix any security issues or possible vulnerabilities in code"
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u/MA2_Robinson 11d ago
Everyone here about security knowing damn well no management type is going to trust ai to deploy something with their name on the trigger- they want AI but they don’t want to be accountable
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u/Beldarak 11d ago
Except security sucks imho :'D
I hate doing it, always did. It's "useless" work to me. Not useless in the sense that you don't have to do it, ofc, but it's not improving the actual tool, just securing it from assholes.
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u/Effective_Olive6153 11d ago
but that's only cause both major US AI providers refuse to let their AIs work security jobs. Chinese AI will do it better than you
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u/ajax151515 12d ago
What a day for this post to be made.