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Comments (184)

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  ianm218
  If you put this into pangram it is 100% AI generated. People on reddit/ youtube are engagement farming anti ai content... with ai text and scripts etc.The actual content is somewhat relatable but don't fall for the bait.
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  danmcr
  I have a friend who works at a large F100 and in his 12 years as a dev, he has never dreaded his job as he does now.He's working 10 hrs. a day, just entering things into Claude, waiting, reviewing, and learning absolutely nothing.At this point anyone who was truly passionate about programming, is just less and less motivated to become a better engineer.
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  rznicolet
  I sympathize with this, and the company I work for is far less than a year into our mandate. I've recently gained ownership of a project built by a colleague who just left, and... it's horrifying. 100% vibe-coded -- said colleague admitted as much, that he hadn't written code himself for months, and that I should just "ask Claude" if I want to do anything with the project. It's an architectural mess (you do not want to know) and has already thrown up one stupid breaking bug that's causing me a lot of heartburn and extra work.And now the company is all-in.Even if the mandate does get reined in, I don't think I'll last that long. I'm honestly not sure what to do, beyond prepare to change careers entirely.
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  marginalia_nu
  If models are getting exponentially cheaper and more powerful, going all in a year ago is kind of insane. There's ostensibly this reverse token value inflation where whatever you spend on AI today, you'll get much more for the same dollar tomorrow (assuming models get cheaper and better). There's really a weird sort of late mover's advantage to just holding off and saving your money unless you expect your profit to grow faster than AI becomes more powerful.
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  marcus_holmes
  AI is an accelerator.In this case it accelerated piling up the tech debt.There's no reason they couldn't have paused the relentless production of features to do a few runs of cleaning up the code base while it was still readable.
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  proc0
  Yeah this is what happens when you think code is the product. It's really the understanding and also the design of the software that is the "engine" of value, and the problem is that it's hard to justify spending money to build something that is intangible and might be visible in the future.When non-technical people call the shots, they will rarely bet on spending time and effort on designing things properly because they can't see the value and it's hard to communicate and convince others of its business value.
• WillAdams
  One thing which was put forward a while back was Literate Programming as an aid for LLMs to parse/work with code:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747Try having the agents consistently document the entire code base, then review each section and see what can be understood/worked with?
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  jdonaldson
  The word "understands" does a lot of heavy lifting here... there's a difference between true understanding and what people believe they understand. There's also the fact that many people don't understand the majority of the code at their company anyways.
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  NoPicklez
  > Except half of us haven't written anything non trivial in a year and it shows. I spent 2 days on something I would have done in an afternoon in 2024.This is the part that bugs me with AI usage is that it drives the use of it to benefit the company but not the individual. Yes AI allows me to be faster as work (in theory), but as a result I lose out in my own learning as an employee, I lose out in my own cognitive ability to learn, make mistakes and build upon my knowledge and skills.
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  thewanderer1983
  Meanwhile before AI, very large code bases existed where nobody fully understood them, people churned at these companies or projects, and who knows what is in them (xz backdoor)
• _pdp_
  I recently made a program that allows me to review/read code and refactor it. It is not an editor because it is designed for reading and the refactoring is still performed via an agent.The idea was that now that 100% of the code is written by AI we need better tools for reading the output as writing it no longer requires an editor.
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  xyzzy_apps
  If you are not using literate programming in the age of AI to maintain code, you have failed as an organisation. You really have no excuse.https://pbr-book.org/
• trymas
  Why this is flagged? Because it's deemed AI-generated? No one is sympathetic to this?I am (un)lucky to be in a team that for a ~year did not write code by hand almost at all. It's literal vibes, by true sense of the word, i.e. no one truly knows what's up - we only know what we have talked about with LLM.Some anecdotes:- I wouldn't consider any project/service done in last year - a success. Everything turned up either in trash bin or unused by anyone. Some things get usage, but it's hardly usable, inefficient and clearly an AI slop;- Code is definitely a mess. PRs are often too big of what you'd think it would make sense, i.e. hiding one feature under one flag was a `+260 -60` size PR. Any minor change is hundreds lines of code change;- We are locked to an LLM, only LLM will be able to fix a bug if hotfix is needed;- We inadvertently step on each others toes or rewrite subsets of features, i.e.: is someone asks "How feature X works?" , we as a team have multiple different answers. This is because it's easy to (re)write some features and no-one cares too deeply. Developer A implemented feature in Way A, then Developer B got an idea and rewrote half of the feature in Way B, etc. In the end all developers think that same feature works in multiple different ways. In "old days" there would be at least some discussions or knowledge sharing as usually you would consult with developers who implemented something about some of its details;- IMHO it's a management issue that swallowed AI pill, though for some reason they're happy, because PR output is only increasing. A team produces in a week: dozens PRs a year ago, then ~50-100 after `claude` subscriptions, to 500+ PRs now. For them it's literal 10-20x improvement, even though there's no value added to product IMO. And this metric is the only that matters if you want to keep the job (something about metric becoming a goal...);I am not anti-AI luddite. I try to use it as a learning assistant on my free time and try to find some middle ground for coding (i.e. between ease of coding and understanding what's being created).EDIT: I sometimes feel like in a fever dream. Biggest tokenmaxxxers in company complaining that some competitor/other project is AI slop, when we our slop firehose is open at 110% 24/7. How would you feel driving a car made (or flying on an airplane or walking over a bridge) by such practices? Oh we forced AI to use TDD, SOLID and other "best-practices"? Like that made any difference in all things we did last year.
• HoldOnAMinute
  You can try small scale, low-risk refactoring.Longer term, use agents to read the code and write a new requirements document from scratch.Iterate on that doc for a long time. Then build the new system.
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  voidfunc
  Just do what management wants and take the bag of money. That's all everyone is doing up the chain anyways.
• netrem
  One counter argument to this is that realistically nobody 'understood' the codebase even before AI.A couple months after not touching code it was always a mystery. You'd know the high level architecture but you can still know that even while using AI.
• tripdout
  This is a fake post, which is expected for Reddit.
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  cadamsdotcom
  Someone is rife for disruption.
• VCFundedGenYer
  Catsarch link for those who don't want to use reddit with an account:https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xq2n3t/a_...
• guywithahat
  The title confuses what’s actually happening. All of the senior devs left and now it’s a tiny, skeleton crew. Other than the growth of the code base (which is arguably feature creep and a sign of bad product design), this would have happened with or without AI. I do feel for him, but losing so many key people means nobody will understand their code regardless of.
• ToyKeeper
  Posted in a subreddit for vibe coding enthusiasts.Top-rated reply tells submitter to solve their AI problem by adding more AI.Magnificent.
• Refreeze5224
  This is the very obvious logical conclusion of AI and programming. The bean counters don't care if you understand anything, or if your skills atrophy. Unless and until the cost of no one understanding the code outweighs having to pay those pesky humans and all their wants and needs, this will continue to be the norm.
• pluc
  Gee if only we could have seen this coming.
• cudla100
  Hackernews post about reddit post. The circle is complete.
• shantnutiwari
  All the AI fanboys running at full speed to flag this
• dilap
  I guess mgmt also mandated they use AI to write their reddit posts?
• didntknowyou
  oh cmon it's not like AI existed since they were born. if they seriously forgot how to code in the 6 months AI was mandated then they deserve to be restructured. some of these reddit posts are pure bait or bs
• j45
  It means the mandate was not detailed or developed enough yet to be able to look out for the things that needt o e now.
• pessimizer
  What do you do when your entirely AI written codebase runs like shit? Do you prompt it to "do better"?"Find the things that you did that are badly, and do them better. Add a directive to claude.md to do it right the first time, next time."If AI codes better than humans, I don't understand why it has a dozen copies of stuff everywhere. Even people who suck don't suck that much. I don't even understand how you can get away with it unless you're writing functional code.
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  tayo42
  Pangram said the op post is 100% AI generated.It does seem to have ai pacing and ends with a question.> The part that actually hurts is who is left.That line actually made me suspicious. Op doesn't respond, also has a hidden profile.This stuff is all over reddit now.
• anon
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• nickphx
  i left a position after 9 years because a recently hired CTO decided we needed AI for everything... zzzz
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  stego-tech
  I really wish more folks would have the stones to name and shame these shitty companies and leaders in public. Stop letting the C-Suite control the narrative and just be bluntly honest with these slapdash, fad-chasing, shitshow LLM “implementations”.It’s not properly using the tools, it’s not improving products, it’s just burning money in the furnace of Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, nVidia, and OpenAI. You’re not building world-changing pipelines, your executives demanded you gamble at the slop machine as fast as possible to inflate share values so they can parachute out.You owe them nothing, so start snitching. Scream openly about the harm this blind push into fads did to the humans, the product, the customers, and the shareholders. The truly excellent use of LLMs continues getting overshadowed by the blind fealty marches and purity tests orgs instituted around mass-adoption and cognitive-offloading, and you’re doing every stakeholder a disservice by pussy-footing around the issue.Find your spine and name names.
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• holyxing
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• alex_mantello
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