r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 12d ago
Artificial Intelligence Engineer says Claude Code has made his job "soul-sucking" as workers spend 12-hour days pressing enter
https://www.techspot.com/news/113937-engineer-claude-code-has-made-job-soul-sucking.html7.0k
12d ago
[deleted]
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u/EddieV223 12d ago
And it's not fun. We went from thinkers and potential to just reviewing code all day long with pressure on us all the time.
Reviewing code had always been the worst part of the job.
On top of that when anything goes wrong it's the engineer, when anything goes right or a clever solution is developed the ai gets the credit. It's a lose lose.
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u/DataDecay 12d ago edited 12d ago
I have been spiraling lately, and this sums up a lot of my issues. Its not like before this there was no demand and velocity expectations. Its just so soul crushing as you said, your either another cog and ai did awesome, or its your fault "why didn't you known/catch x, y, and z".
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u/Achrus 12d ago
It’s the classic “accountability without authority” trap but with a twist. You’re accountable for the code but you have less authority over it due to time pressure and AI.
Good leadership would recognize this and try to correct the issue. Correcting course looks like: slowing down development, building trust, listening to those that feel a lack of authority, and trying to increase visibility (for everyone).
Bad leadership will make this worse because they don’t understand it (or don’t care). First comes the “governance” because of small issues. More governance shows that leadership is doing something and gives them a tool to pass blame onto others. Then comes the culture of fear with weaponized governance. You see where this is going right?
Anyways, lots of bad leaders out there right now because market keeps going up. Also, leadership keeps getting told their ideas are good by LLMs.
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u/Odd_Dragonfruit9520 11d ago
Oh my engineer turned Engineering manager who is a childless, unmarried (can’t find one) micromanager thinks we can come up solutions with AI in a few minutes and build solutions easily but problem is these complex systems that we build are used by millions of users and have real world impact.
We screwed up a feature recently because of his pressure (timeline he set without consulting) and we had to roll back the changes and it was pain in the ass for us and users were impacted.
He currently is doing that to another project and we have already uncovered some cross dependencies which make it unsuitable and for sure will fail if we don’t fix the fundamental architecture.
So managers need to tone down a bit and not be short sighted just because AI can do errything!
Perhaps replacing short sighted micromanagers would be a good start.
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u/Eastern_Loquat_7058 12d ago
i think this nails it. when ai gets it right its just a giant ball of functionality no one looks at but when its wrong they come to you asking why is it like this? and i'm like bro you made me ship a 6 month feature in a week i dont know what half of it does.
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u/darsynia 12d ago
So many of the hobby groups are also completely in on AI and so for people like my husband who is a software engineer with 27 something years of experience, even the space is that he uses to relax are full of slop and enthusiasm for the slop. Completely demoralizing from every single angle.
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u/dragonblade_94 12d ago
LLM's have essentially created the tech equivalent of 'new money,' industry juniors and hobbyists that have internalized the sudden increased output due to AI tools as elevations of their own self worth and with an intense need to flaunt it. They love to bring up their AI agent stack and toss engineering buzzwords in the same way someone would flash a Rolex to signal wealth.
I really don't want to gatekeep the industry or anything, but I think a lot of people like this are in for a very rude awakening when AI continues to fulfill the reason for its existence and crushes the value of individual engineers and developers into the dirt (along with plenty of other sectors). Some people are seeing sudden career jumps since management hasn't fully figured out how to make them redundant, but it's coming...
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u/GummyWormTaco 12d ago
If I see one more person bragging about how many lines of code their vibe coded app is, I'll lose my mind. Lines of code was never a badge of honor or signal of quality.
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u/almo2001 12d ago
“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
― Bill Gates
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u/TrekkieGod 12d ago
Not for developers (if anything, we've always prided ourselves on being able to simplify code and make it more elegant, decreasing the lines of code).
However, for managers, lines of code has been a stupid metric for a long time.
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u/Vyradder 12d ago
Managers love their metrics. They have to grasp at these little straws to make themselves relevant because they cant do what you do anymore.
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u/ChickinSammich 12d ago
Managers love metrics because they want numbers they can put on a graph to put on a powerpoint slide to show their boss how great their team is doing and that's why they deserve a bonus and a raise.
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u/The_Upvote_Beagle 12d ago
As usual, Mark Twain (perhaps wrongly but w/e) has a great saying that applies:
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
Being more concise, thoughtful, and deliberate is often significantly more difficult. I can't believe people actually brag that their 'app' is longer - in my mind, it's significnatly worse then.
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u/brillpit 12d ago
The owner of my low voltage company has been spending the last 6 months developing an app that is essentially a CRM.
He does have prior software development experience but that was 20 years ago.
He won’t shut up about it.
He released a beta for us to test in the field and we couldn’t even get passed the login page.
Just spending hundreds of hours building something that already exists instead of managing the business
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u/Jotun35 12d ago
I'm no software engineer, I'm more of a "script kiddie" and I've been using Claude intensively for a specific complex project these past few months and... I swear, the crazy amount of lines of codes just makes me mad. I keep trying to trim this shit down but the deadlines don't always allow me to keep the code clean and concise. 🙁
And AI is either too verbose or so condensed and obscure that it gets hard to read...
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u/OneArmedZen 12d ago
It's the new version of *e-peen*. I don't even call them "vibe coders" anymore, it's more like "mime coding" - like a babboon just trained to hit enter and being so proud going "ook ook eek eek! i did a thing!"
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u/TheJudgingHat2222 12d ago
I saw it put something like "AI allows the wealthy to purchase the illusion of skill while removing access to wealth from the actually skillful."
Considering the type of entitled people I see lionizing AI it's the perfect description.
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u/SekhWork 12d ago
"AI allows the wealthy to purchase the illusion of skill while removing access to wealth from the actually skillful."
Art community over here yelling this for years now as they illegally (their own words, thanks Microsoft) violate all artists copyrights to hoover up training data and then produce subpar results to try and drive them out of business. AI bros just want the clout of being artists without any of the work.
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u/TheJudgingHat2222 12d ago
This is why they circle jerk it so hard too. It's like those forced positivity communities where everyone calls each other "king" and other cringe stuff.
Nobody would give them the clout that they don't deserve, so they give it to themselves lmao
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u/SekhWork 12d ago
Yep. Basically the meme of all the people in a circle talking with the one guy screaming outside it about how amazing his "art" is and noone caring at all. They are pretty much trying to manufacture consent for AI with the "adapt or die!" bs but as soon as all their tools break due to either being priced out of it by ppl like Anthropic charging a ton, or legal shut downs, or just... the fact that AI doesn't make money.... they will be stuck using outdated stuff running on home systems while real artists never stopped making things with pens and paint.
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u/SmokyMetal060 12d ago
Nah fuck it. Gatekeeping is good. Put in the work and learn.
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u/Itsmyloc-nar 12d ago
Gatekeeping is good actually. Nothing is anything when anyone is allowed anywhere
Unironically.
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u/Ok_Basil351 12d ago
I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was filled with experts who would quickly disabuse people with delusions of grandeur of the notion.
I thought the way of the Newsgroups were the future. Instead we got Eternal September, but in real life.
Anything not gatekept will be ruined by the hordes and by money. If you value something, value it enough to gatekeep it.
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u/mythrilcrafter 12d ago
I really don't want to gatekeep the industry or anything
As an engineer in the Optics/Laser Applications industry, I don't think it's gatekeeping to say that a person should be educated/experienced enough to recognise bs designs.
It's been frustrating to have people from management send us a Claude or Grok query telling us how to solve a design problem claiming that "what's wrong with you guys, why is the pre-quote feasibility study taking so long? it's just algebra!" (nothing about Optics is "just simple algebra")
When those AI "solutions" are either inaccurate or they exist in a vacuum that doesn't consider that just because the math says that it works, doesn't actually mean that the lens/assembly is actually physically creatable.
There are guys on our team who have multiple PhD's in this field, and most of the training the AI is incorrectly using comes from papers and studies written by these guys; let them do their work.
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u/captain_haywood 12d ago
I’ve pretty much dropped out of hobby coding at this point. Have to deal with enough slop and AI-related BS at work that it’s just not enjoyable to do it in my free time. All that time I spent building skills that transferred to my job is now spent building my mountain biking skills and I’m liking that change. If all they want is slop at work, let them feast.
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u/ItsAllSoClear 12d ago
I made a cool project with a deterministic narrator and someone immediately asked how I used AI.
I just said "no". 🥲
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u/element-94 12d ago
Something I noticed up and down our org is that no one gets recognized anymore for their hard or creative work. Everyone just assumes it was AI.
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u/AnAnxiousCorgi 12d ago
Same thing happened at my org. So I stopped trying to work hard or be creative. Fuck it, they want AI to do everything? Sounds good, AI is gonna do everything come hell or high water.
And it will create more issues over time, the slop code we're pushing out now isn't the worst, I actually think our team and most of the org has done a good job trying to keep the code following the same standards we did "manually", but there's little bits of drift and "OMG GET THIS OUT NOW" rushing that's breaking down the edges.
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u/Coldstripe 12d ago
Tech debt on crack. I bet in a handful of years computer science jobs will see a rebound as digital services start degrading from improperly reviewed AI slop and the vibe coders don't have enough fundamental area knowledge to know how to fix them.
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u/ChickinSammich 12d ago
Our manager's manager wanted all of us to submit a write up for how we use AI and automation in our jobs and I just gave some examples of some powershell scripts and bash scripts I wrote to do specific tasks for me.
My manager asked me to add the information for which AI models I used to write those scripts and I just said "I wrote them myself. I didn't use AI. If I want to ask someone to help me with a task where I can't trust their work and I have to double check everything they did, I'll ask [name of a different coworker on my team who was notorious for halfassing shit]."
I'm pretty sure he never submitted that to his manager.
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u/SomeLibra623 12d ago edited 12d ago
Hobby group I'm apart of enjoying a new game update is full of it too. One person is taking screenshots and running them through some AI to "stylize" it. My buddy defended them when we were in a group chat saying "oh its just like a filter. Those old filters like you could do on your phone." Yeah sure. I lived through those too bud and I'll tell you that a "filter" does not redraw or add shitty details that don't make sense. Hard to have a constructive conversation with any of them on it without them getting offended like I'm personally attacking them.
To help counter this in my own psyche anyway, I found an actual sketch filter that works similar to the black and white threshold function from photoshop. Popped my screenshot in it. Adjusted the filter because too light and there's hardly anything, too heavy and it's really hard to see. Still hard to make out but it's a filter. It's not supposed to make it smoother. That would be on me to do. Threw a sepia filter on after and boom. An actual "it was just run through a SKETCH FILTER" picture. Side by side to my screenshot and it looks the exact same. As it should.
Now I'm here venting/celebrating this on reddit because to open my mouth in this group is to isolate myself away from them. Thanks to anyone who read this far <3
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u/throwaway928816 12d ago
it's nice you lend an ear for his complaining. it's not nice hearing how terrible the world is. stay strong!
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u/Fistinguranus69 12d ago
Im in a group that does retro videogame hacking and we've been invaded. Trying to keep the morale has been super hard. Some of them have been working years on passion projects just to have a dude ship a slop ai version of it. There's even a breed of ai bros coming into our servers treatening us to ship ai slops if we don't hurry up. I swear...
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u/Outlulz 12d ago
There are so many slop decomps now. I have to just assume when once is announced that it's AI slop unless the devs come out and say otherwise.
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u/darsynia 12d ago
Heh yep. Husband is an Aleph One dev (and would be pretty annoyed at me for calling him a leader, even though it's true). he could've written your entire comment, it's exactly the problem.
He's holding the line but it's pretty miserable at this point.
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u/Sunsparc 12d ago
/r/homeassistant is currently fighting that, everyone has their own vibe coded integration they post daily.
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u/Rekshail 12d ago
On the gaming side, any time I look at anything related to Modding, it's >50% AI now. Vibe coded mods, generative AI images plastered across the mod sites. It's fucking depressing, man.
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u/TalShar 12d ago
I've been using it to help solve the problem of "I don't know what I don't know." Basically an advanced search engine. I ask questions like "What's the most Pythonic way of doing this?" or "Is there a better way of passing these arguments?" and then act on the info. I've got a ton of things built into its instructions to stop it from using social language or doing things on my behalf. When I begin being tempted to ask it to just do something for me, that's my sign that I need to take a break.
I've learned a ton from it, but I can absolutely see how someone who didn't go into it with strict rules for themselves and the agent could have their brain turn to mush.
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u/ItalianDragon 12d ago
Except that you are running at full force into another problem: you don't know enough about what you're asking the LLM about to know if it's telling you something that's true or complete bullshit.
Considering that the more LLMs advance, the more they have a propensity for bullshitting the user, I wouldn't be surprised whatsoever to find that a very large part of what it told you was at best inaccurate, at worst completely and utterly wrong.
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u/darsynia 12d ago
Genuinely, if you can make sure that you have someone in your life who can help you be clear eyed about the mental dangers of this, that's pretty important. I know a lot of people think this is fear mongering but I have watched so many people I like and respect turn into... I don't even know how to describe it. The AI psychosis phrase really does seem to fit. When they get to the point where they are asking an LLM whether it is Father's Day tomorrow and then they just believe it (it was wring) instead of checking the calendar, and they ignore their own parent... that kind of stuff.
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u/Information_High 12d ago
This has been my favorite way to use AI as well - I ask a question, and it aggregates a tidal wave of product documentation and internet discussions to provide a tailored answer to my question.
If I see something I don't like, I push back, and the AI and I go back and forth until the information is solid.
Hallucination happens, but not as often these days, and the AI usually accepts correction pretty readily.
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u/TheJudgingHat2222 12d ago
The problem is far too many people are just copy/pasting whatever it spits out and not even checking it.
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u/DarthFury1990 12d ago
This right here..... My best friend cannot code at all. He is smart and could learn but he told me his time is valuable. He is starting up a new company to be independent. He completely vibe coded this new business as a test.
He is loving it.
I had him show me the code he is working with... Sure it works but it looks like it is barely operating and held up by string. I went in and fixed it for him and he commented how efficient his program is now running and he was shocked. Just to show him that AI isn't where he thinks it is currently.
He asked me to come work for him and I declined because he can't even afford 10% of my salary and I said "I did this to show you as a courtesy and to try and actually hire someone". But he can't even afford to even hire an entry level programmer right now.
I asked him what he used and he said ChatGPT because Claude was too slow for him, he needs to be efficient. I said "at least use Claude" and he still absolutely refused because it was "too expensive" and his "time is precious and he needs things to work quickly"
I ended the conversation there and said "good luck" because it did me no good to go back and forth with him.
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u/95688it 12d ago
there was a guy at a event I went to this weekend, he wasnt part of the hobby he was just talking to people to get ideas on how he could possibly use and sell us AI in the hobby. it was in silicon valley
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u/modsuperstar 12d ago
Just like with art and graphic design, they’ve automated the stuff that brings joy and requires creativity and left you to do the crap work. Automate the fun and leave you with doing the dishes and folding the laundry and expect you to be more productive.
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u/Blazing1 12d ago
I went to a yearly food festival in my area. Every vendor was using chatgpt generated everything. It turned me off so much I went home.
Everything has the same look now and my internal judgement for what looks good and what doesn't is completely gone, so I'm starting to discount any AI generated graphics businesses use, and just stick to anything that looks older, or something established before 2021
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u/macaulaymcgloklin 12d ago
I read something like it feels like you're in a game where all the in-game ads and artwork are all the same because it's done by one company lol
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u/White_Immigrant 12d ago
If I see a company using AI I assume they're lazy, theiving, and cutting corners elsewhere too.
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u/l3tigre 12d ago
It's depressing. I miss the job I loved.
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u/UnexpectedAnanas 12d ago
You and me both, brother.
I started doing this as a young teenager and fell ass first into a career just because I liked it. AI has taken my love for the job away. "Soul-sucking" is pretty on point.
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u/MediocreAnalyst2121 12d ago
What’s the point of reviewing the code?
Like sure I’ll make sure it’s not putting secrets into the browser, or doing weird curl calls with user input.
But actually probably reviewing the output so I have a full understanding takes about the same amount of time as writing it by hand. And if I write it by hand then I’ll inherently understand the code.
Getting it to produce output I like is more difficult than doing it all by myself.
I am not getting any productivity gains from this and I don’t understand the code anymore either.
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u/VistaLaRiver 12d ago
I am a technical writer, and this is my issue as well. I can do the research and writing myself, and in the process I understand the technical issues and how to convey them to the target audience, making it easy to update and incorporate feedback down the road. Or I can have AI do it, and then I have no basic understanding to use to review the output of AI, and so I have to work to develop that understanding (which used to come for free in developing the deliverable). And now I'm not as actively flexing my writing muscles, making it harder to create new content on the fly.
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u/dolacuporanek 12d ago
Likewise, but in healthcare sciences. I understood a lot of complex topics simply by the act of researching them to write or present. Now that LLMs can cut almost all the work out, I find myself retroactively retracing my old steps because I am not familiar with the topic outside of the authoritative illusion of LLM assisted knowledge.
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u/banned-from-rbooks 12d ago edited 12d ago
There is no point in reviewing the code because the AI coding workplace actively rewards laziness, ignorance and incompetence. All that matters is volume. No one else is reviewing the code.
We used to practice code ownership. I spent inordinate lengths of time thinking over design, readability, maintainability, performance, coding standards and best practices. I gave presentations on these things.
It was important that we understood, or at least were able to understand how the code worked, so that when a complex bug arose in production we could make educated guesses about the root cause.
The gatekeeping of quality was extremely important, but now the gates are open. The software stack we spent years cultivating has been drowned in an avalanche of nonsensical slop pushed out by contractors and interns that replaced our FTEs. Even people on the product team are pushing PRs.
No one knows how anything works anymore. If there is a bug, they just prompt the AI to fix it until maybe the issue stops presenting itself - probably introducing many other bugs in the process. Our product has become garbage but that’s now the industry standard. No one cares and the consumers don’t have a choice.
I’m a principal engineer with 20 years experience. I worked at Google for almost a decade. AI is good at answering simple coding questions, generating boilerplate and writing unit tests as long as a human is there to review it. It reduces tedium, but it can’t design software.
I want to quit and do something else.
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u/Fractured_Senada 12d ago edited 12d ago
Ya'll need to unionize.
Edit: The internet has created unprecedented connection with your fellow brothers and sisters, use it to build a national coalition and petition to unionize. The C suite has gotten high off their own supply, give 'em a dose of reality when all the tech workers (coders, engineers, and administrators) say "No more AI" in unison.
Let them fire you or lay you off and see how that goes. I figure white collar tech workers are the main group making the economy move, when you lay off your spenders, the economy withers.
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u/justin107d 12d ago
It is tough to unionize something that can be offshored so easily.
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u/SuperNintendoChlmrz 12d ago
Speaking as someone who has been offshored, this.
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u/justin107d 12d ago
I just started a new job last year as a team lead. In the spring they offshored or promoted everyone under me. If my niche industry knew how to use tech I would be worried about AI. Instead we get to tell callers that the only electronic method available to send us their paperwork is fax.
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u/percydaman 12d ago
Same. Was a cg artist doing architectural renderings. Some for really famous architects. Some pretty iconic architecture. It really counted for nothing.
Basically lost my job and career to it all being offshored to China and India. I've been out of that game for several years before AI even came onto the landscape. I have to assume, it's even worse now.
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u/egusisoupandgarri 12d ago
Unions are fighting RTO in Spain; Airbus just paused theirs because of employee protests. A union for Blizzard Entertainment employees (gaming industry) just negotiated that any AI use has to be vetted by employees first. They also got permanent hybrid policy with remote work and disability exceptions and priority hiring if they’re laid off. Unions are doing things but these types of stories don’t make headline news.
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u/Watchmaker163 12d ago
The boss will always use that fear against you. It’s been like that for over 150 years. Better to fight than throw up your hands and continue to be mistreated.
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u/21Rollie 12d ago
10 years too late. We should’ve a long time ago but tech bros always think it would limit their potential. And then during Covid we got high profile anti-union action like at Medium. Now, it’s desperately needed and idk if we hold the cards for
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u/Abangranga 12d ago
The good and bad thing about being a software engineer is that there isn't something like a PE (Professional Engineer) certification or other standardized "hey do you still have a clue what you are doing?" test that pops up every few years. Currently that is very very bad lol.
My current job is 100% my last tech job. If I wanted to approve code all day I wouldn't have jumped into this industry.
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u/dw444 12d ago
Tech workers are some of the most temporarily embarrassed billionaire ass workers on the face of the planet. They’ll twist themselves into knots trying to justify anti union stances based off of obvious misinformation. Being a left wing tech worker is a lonely life.
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u/coconutpiecrust 12d ago
I am curious about all the code LLM companies ingested to train their coding models. For free. Did they ingest proprietary code? Like, if the code is any good, doesn’t it belong somewhere and someone should get paid a licensing fee? I understand that tech companies don’t what to pay for the training data they used to get paid themselves, but still, all the code they ingested, if it’s quality, doesn’t it belong to someone?
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u/_SpaceLord_ 12d ago
There’s a reason why a Microsoft exec just referred to AI as “the largest theft of labor in human history.”
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u/DustyRacoonDad 12d ago
Everything put on Github or any other similar site alone is more than enough training data.
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u/h0uz3_ 12d ago
The moment someone touches an LLM, everything after that gets attributed solely to "AI". This ignores the fact that good software needs a lot of skill even when a lot of the code gets created using an LLM.
Even worse, when someone does all the work manually but had used AI here and there for bugxiging, it's "all AI" now.
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u/TBTapion 12d ago
Every time people at work glaze how good AI is at doing their job, I always feign interest. It gets exhausting
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u/john_a1985 12d ago
That's the point. How can one ever look good on a performance review when that's the narrative?
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u/DShadow2106 12d ago
Pretty much word to word ... It absolutely sucks to work without having a deep understanding of what you are doing and is not fulfilling at all. Yet we have to do just that at this point because the work that used to take weeks is now expected in a day.
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u/Independent-Fruit4 12d ago
you just made me realize why I hate my job so much
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u/thederevolutions 12d ago
Everybody is sort of just doing unnecessary stuff for other people that will never step foot in their own community.
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u/ThrustBastard 12d ago
Irrelevant bullshit to make someone else more money
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u/Ok_Conversation_3815 12d ago
This is the sad realization that after 5 years of career is making me hate my job
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u/Universal_Anomaly 12d ago
Supposedly these days people are suffering a lot from depression and burnouts and I think an important part of that is that for many people their work doesn't feel meaningful, it's just filling up the hours to "earn" your salary/wages.
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u/Reeeaper 12d ago
This is so accurate. One of my duties is inputting numbers that the AI system is supposed to update automatically but often misses 60-200 skus a week.
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u/InvisaBlah 12d ago
I've come to this realization myself in the last few weeks. My company has stopped hiring, my workload has increased, and we've all been given Claude subscriptions. They're expecting us to offload the difference to AI.
The problem is that the AI sucks half the time, and takes twice as long the other half. Don't get me wrong- I'm not an AI hater, it's super useful for offloading non-critical tasks that can run in the background, but I would much rather have a team backing me up than a prompt.
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u/thrway-fatpos 12d ago
Dont forget that you cant reason with an AI, and it doesnt organically get better over time or learn the codebase or conventions.
A junior can become a mid and senior over time. An AI will remain stagnant at its skill level until the provider company releases a new model.
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u/21Rollie 12d ago
Or you pay up for the better model. And then your company gets mad that you spent $300 yesterday on Fable.
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u/UnexpectedAnanas 12d ago
Use AI for everything!
NO, NOT LIKE THAT!
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u/WJ90 12d ago
I’ve seen this a lot.
Offload things to AI. Stop hiring. Then get surprised at how much it cost to use AI. The budget to pay the fired employees was already reallocated and leadership won’t approve a change.
Now there’s no money in the budget for the AI or the people that were so “replaceable”, and now the company is stalling out.
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u/darsynia 12d ago
I genuinely worry that the endgame to this is making software engineers a button pushing entry-level job. I just hope that this all comes to a head before we lose so much institutional knowledge we are all doomed to shitty products and consumer dangers with the majority of companies just shrugging because they can't fix it.
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u/thrway-fatpos 12d ago
The endgame for all stakeholders and billionaires is to get rid of stable work and keep everyone on unstable gig work. The goal is for no one to own anything and be dependent on corporations forever.
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u/saera-targaryen 12d ago
It makes me so frustrated because if we had a different economic model this would be such a good thing.
Like, imagine if workers just got to work less hours for the same pay and benefits as before when things were automated. Everyone would have such a huge incentive to automate everything!
But as it is now, when we automate something our friend three cubicles over gets fired. I wrote a little internal app for another team at my company to automate an easy but time consuming process and now that team has had three people leave and they haven't been approved to backfill any of those positions because the app I built. And that was a few years ago before AI. I hate that every time I solve a puzzle or cause a new efficiency in a process all I can think about is our CEO getting a raise and a peer getting an unemployment check.
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u/Ling0 12d ago
On top of all of that, the fact that Claude can get things wrong a lot and you have to kind of walk it through scenarios so it fixes itself. Every time I ask for something from it I make sure to ask it again multiple times different ways and ask for the logic of why it did something. Yes it's great for being able to say "add this button over here and include the on click event to trigger this function that does XYZ" but having it fully create that function is what you have to keep challenging it for
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u/SecondBestNameEver 12d ago
This happened to other industries that digitized in the past. Look at TV and electronics repair, you used to have to know how circuits worked, read circuit diagrams, solder a new component in, etc. Now, if it's not all glued together to begin with, you just replace the whole board, or more often just scrap the product because the labor to repair is the cost of a new one. I couldn't imagine the tinkerers of yesteryear enjoying the modern version of this repair job.
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u/21Rollie 12d ago
The fact that repairing a washing machine costs about as much as buying a new one is criminal.
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u/firewall245 12d ago
Yeah it’s this. I would tell my old manager that something was gonna take two sprints and be a tough task and he would say “can’t you get copilot to do it”
lol
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u/i_am_voldemort 12d ago
I am waiting for the AI take over by it burying some malicious code inside slop that noone understands that gets deployed to prod
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u/rolloutTheTrash 12d ago
I mean, I test my code regardless of whether Claude coded it or not. But the soul-sucking part for me is that I got into the field because I love solving problems. Now that AI strips that away the fun is gone. Sure I get paid solidly for it, but just being a high-paid code editor is boring and doesn’t really instill the pride in me that I used to get from the job.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 12d ago
Tale as old as time. When you ship slop code that’s full of issues and tech debt, it doesn’t fail catastrophically right now. It fails a year or two from now, and when it does managers never blame their decision to rush it out the door a year or two ago. They think they’re having issues because of something that came up recently.
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u/Dirty_Harold182 12d ago
This hasn't been my experience at all. Management has actually been very adamant that if you're using AI, you still need to understand, explain, and own whatever you're shipping. Its been much more "AI is a tool to help you work faster" rather than "press enter all day and ship code you dont understand."
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u/Draminian 12d ago
This may be heavily dependent on your industry. I work for a medical device company and we have to document a full understanding of all of our code for FDA approval. We use AI to help speed things along, but our workflow is much closer to just having it double-check our work rather than the other way around.
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u/tooclosetocall82 12d ago
It really depends on the management. Mine too is more like this, but what is disheartening is weaker engineers pushing for AI to do more to the point of suggesting letting it also handle the reviews. Of course they look crazy productive next to the more cautious seniors and will probably eventually sink the ship.
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u/Attila_22 12d ago
They say this but still give you a week deadline to build a whole product that used to take multiple devs several months.
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u/Billgrip 12d ago
the great promise of what ai can to make life easier for workers has always been a lie. You will simply be expected do more
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u/Racthoh 12d ago
That's pretty much been the case of everything. Oh you're more efficient now? Great, here's more stuff.
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u/_bobby_cz_newmark_ 12d ago
Correct. The results of productivity are driven upwards to the top of the heap. Productivity has increased but workers' share in rewards have stayed stagnant.
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u/TimSylvester_ 12d ago
That was the exact flaw in John Maynard Keynes argument that industrialization would lead to leisure - he didn't realize that the Epstein class would take all th gains for themselves, while exploiting the workers more and more, such that the increased productivity from the labor class would result in the labor class doing more for less proportional wealth, instead of the labor class doing the same amount of work in less time for relatively equivalent wealth, and thus having more leisure time.
Thorstein Veblen explained this problem, to an extent, in Theory of Business Enterprise and Theory of the Leisure Class.
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u/Appropriate_Roof_223 12d ago
There is also a companion argument of encroachment on leisure space (consumerism culture) given by Debord and Marcuse,i.e., capital’s need to keep the conspicuous consumption up through spectacles and false needs.
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u/Fragrant-Vehicle-479 12d ago edited 12d ago
Our HR department is easily the most pro-AI and they keep talking about how it allows them to "keep their brains free" and take busy work for them. They're still here till 5 like the rest of us.
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u/Exyui 12d ago
If I was expected to do the same work but just had AI to help me do it faster, I would love AI. But like you said, they just move the goal posts and force me to use AI instead, which results in AI just making my life worse. I'm not getting paid more or getting more free time, but my job becomes a lot of interacting with AI, which is honestly just boring.
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u/between_ewe_and_me 12d ago
It's boring and frustrating as hell for someone who is naturally very detail-oriented. It forces me to compromise way more than I like but I don't have the token budget or time required to actually get everything right. I've always had to fight for quality but suddenly everyone's collectively decided they're happy to lower their standards even more if it means shipping something a little faster. It's insane and I fucking hate it. I'm honestly trying to figure out if I could survive financially if I got completely out of tech and join a trail building crew and just spend my time digging in the forest.
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u/swsko 12d ago
What the fuk?This was just a reply on a thread posted on Reddit and these guys made an article from it???I saw the reply yesterday as it was a top comment and now I see an article 🤦🏻
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u/hfxRos 12d ago
Welcome to the internet.
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u/karmapuhlease 12d ago
Have a look around.
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u/RhubarbIcy9655 12d ago
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found.
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u/ericbebert 12d ago
We've got mountains of content, some better, some worse
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u/Keeltoodeep 12d ago
Being an online journalist is soul sucking. I spend 12 hour days pressing enter prompting LLMs to comb Reddit for article ideas.
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u/DCtoMe 12d ago
I was about to say, "an article being posted on reddit that is written about a reddit reply I read yesterday. Wow"
Meta as fuck
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u/TomWithTime 12d ago
Tomorrow's article will be be the rise of skepticism of credibility for articles based on social media posts, citing this comment chain
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u/not_some_username 12d ago
That’s modern journalism for you
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u/Prof_Outis 12d ago
AI writes the post. AI reads the post. AI creates the ads that surround the post. AI clicks the ads. AI writes an article about the post. AI reads the article. AI creates the ads that are viewed by the AI that creates the reddit post about the article about the post about the article.
Somewhere in the chain a 4 year old Palestinian child is burned alive and 50,000 gallons of drinking water are contaminated. A dork in a leather jacket makes 5 imaginary dollars.
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u/DoorBreaker101 12d ago
Hi, can I use your comment for a story I'm running about how confusing the internet has become?
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u/sroop1 12d ago
Wanna know what's more soul sucking than vibecoding? Generating click bait articles from nothing.
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u/ApexAftermath 12d ago
Kind of sounds like whatever you read on Reddit yesterday was stolen from Twitter. The original thing that the article came from seems to be a Twitter post.
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u/mvaaam 12d ago
Definitely felt my soul burning away. Being required to use it is rough. The worst part is people being amazed that you can write code without it .. like what do you think all my commits prior to this year were?
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u/WallBurnt 12d ago edited 12d ago
I had a live code interview last week and I had to check the syntax of a damn
forloop.I've been coding since I was 16, have a CS degree, have 15yrs professional experience, and have worked at top companies for most of that.
That was the most embarrassing shit I've ever done during an interview and it's entirely because I haven't written much code by hand in over a year. I am interviewing for Staff+ roles.
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u/TheGreatJabron 12d ago
It's like in school when the math teacher shows how to solve something, it looks quite simple. Then you try to do it by yourself and don't understand anything. You must "do" to learn, understand and keep a skill. Now you look over LLM code, looks fine. You do that for months / years and lose your skillset while everything becomes more and more complex. This will cause a loss of knowledge and at some point the systems will breakdown and we won't be able to keep them on.
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u/TheJudgingHat2222 12d ago
Interviews are just generally embarrassing because you always have to impress people that don't actually understand what they're testing you on.
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u/WallBurnt 12d ago
Nah, he was a Principal Eng. The look of disdain on his face is something I'll never forget.
It was primal.
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u/marmot1101 12d ago
and I had to check the syntax of a damn for loop
I used to jump languages supporting a bunch of different services, some of which only had to be touched once or twice a year. I've googled for loop and other basic syntax thousands of times over the years. And if anyone had a problem with it I was in the wrong room. It's not like I don't understand what the structures are for, so spending 15 seconds asking ai or googling the syntax is irrelevant.
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u/epicfail1994 12d ago
Yeahhhh I’m basically a Claude interpreter these days. Technically the work is easier but I also have 3x the work so it’s really not
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u/maowai 12d ago
I find it exhausting to be constantly splitting my attention between 4+ things. Just as soon as I focus in on something new, another prompt is complete and I need to switch back, review and prompt again.
The most rewarding feeling but rare parts of my jobs these days are when I can turn music on and just build something by getting my hands on it. But that comes with a nagging feeling that I’m doing something “the slow way.”
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u/Palinon 12d ago
3 is about the most that people can do without getting too worn out. Now their talking about how we can automate the bots ro review the work from the bots and put enough guardrails in place that we trust the results.
So instead of three, you have twenty but only look at ones that need intervention.
I don't know if I'd recommend going into software anymore.
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u/TomWithTime 12d ago
Aren't we so blessed, we exchanged being creative at our own pace to performing less difficult yet tedious hand holding and reviewing at a rushed pace.
I've been enjoying writing code for over 20 years, but now with the help of AI, I can catch up to my coworkers in experiencing burn out!
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u/Born_Balance6881 12d ago
Engineering leader here.
The biggest problem with AI is it gives underskilled workers the ability to produce complex solutions which they typically do not fully understand.
I also have seen a new level of laziness when it comes to researching, reading, learning and applying learned concepts to the outputs of AI.
This results is so-called AI Bombs that can signifcantly negatively impact systems. From both an immediate operational perspective and a scalability perspective.
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u/foreverpeppered 12d ago
Design leader here. It’s happening a ton upstream too. You get 5 year plan AI Bombs, Roadmap AI bombs, PRD bombs, design research bombs, design bombs, the list goes on. It’s ruining the lifecycle and it’s out of control.
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u/21Rollie 12d ago
My old as shit director is an AI fanatic who LOVES these tools. He’s building all these POCs for things that would’ve taken too long and good talent before. But thing is, not every idea should be built. When you had more budget constraints before, you’d think things through before committing to them. Nowadays you can drop $500 for a project and say you “saved” thousands of dollars and months of time - except your little toy still cost you a week and some change and you made 10 of them and nobody wants to use them.
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u/free2express1982 12d ago
Not every feature should be built has been the tech problem for years. I see how this is accelerating it insanely. I’m a designer building iOS apps now. I now see the full API documentation and my brain says “I could make this the fully featured xyz app of all time” but I know that this can throw focus from the original problem out the window and result in a poor user experience. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and tattoo their goals on the inside of their eyelids or this is going to continue.
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u/usr_bin_laden 12d ago
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Edit, people. Edit. Just because you can do anything/everything does not mean you should do everything. Art and Aesthetic live in the things you choose to NOT include.
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u/N4dd 12d ago
This should be copied and pasted everywhere. Why do normal people enjoy using Apple products? Because they just work, they are simple, they do the job that they say they are going to do. You don't generally have to pull out a manual, or google, or spend hours upon hours learning the software. They aren't perfect, but I'm always amazed at how well Apple tends to constrain things to just what is needed.
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u/chekmarks 12d ago
I cant wait for all these 'leaders' to get fired for forcing their employees to use claude, thus producing AI bombs.
oh wait, the employees will get fired. the leaders will get a bonus for cutting costs.
eat the executive class.
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u/saera-targaryen 12d ago
This is exactly why smaller movies have been blowing up recently while the giant marvel and star wars releases have been more miss than hit.
People use creativity to solve problems when resources are tight. If resources never tighten, people never get creative. We need that tension and pressure to make us reflect on what's necessary and what can be cut or changed to fit what we have. That process of cutting out the cruft produces magic.
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u/whatevs8686 12d ago
More than half of the documentation I get from PMs is AI slop. Like just copy and paste. They have no idea what they are even trying to build, how it works in concert with other parts of the system. How does a project have any chance of being something good when it starts that way.
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u/Schroedkill 12d ago
Engineering leader here as well.
Completely spot on.
Before AI - there were typically too few top-level engineers to ensure and guide quality of architectures, implementations, or development processes across each product domain at a given company. Leaders end up doing the best they can with the time and resources they have but ultimately things slip through the cracks. However, pre-AI, complex problems took time and effort and significant planning to be successful. This created opportunities for leaders to get injected into that process at various stages to prevent problems.
This is no longer the case.
AI has unleashed floodgates that enable anyone of any level to attempt to ship anything in fractions of the time. It’s completely unsustainable to expect engineering leaders to be able to ensure quality in the same way we did in the pre-AI era.
And until the culture of AI usage changes, the tooling continues to improve, or we devise better processes and development lifecycles - we can expect to see AI continue to erode the industry with more incidents, less quality, less maintainability, and less deep-understanding of the systems folks are responsible for.
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u/Centurix 12d ago
Wait till business owners find out that your job just got "easier" and they decide that they're paying you too much.
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u/21Rollie 12d ago
They already have. I mean they don’t need to lower your salary. Just keep it the same and don’t promote and pile on the work. Effectively, they cut your wage without any lawsuit potential
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u/Anonymity6584 12d ago
Instead of automatic mouse mover, ssounds like this person needs autonatic enter key simulator...
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u/ArgentineBeauty 12d ago
They need that bird from The Simpsons that Homer used to press the keyboard for him when he got obese to work from home.
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u/ValkyrX 12d ago
Where is the any key?
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u/mentallyhandicapable 12d ago
Whew, all this computer hacking is making me thirsty, better order a tab.
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u/SuspiciouslyDullGuy 12d ago
So the job has become about burning tokens, which burns fossil fuels, in order to create (probably) less efficient software, which will demand more CPU cycles, which will burn more fossil fuels? Gotta love those Big Tech billionaires right? Who could possibly doubt that they've got their priorities straight on this one?
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u/st_heron 12d ago
Yeah it fucking sucks. A career where you get to build stuff has turned into being a cocksleeve between a codebase and an LLM.
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u/GhanimaAtreides 12d ago
I’m leaving the industry after almost 20 years. Maybe I’ll come back after the AI bubble crashes and they realize we need competent engineers to pick up the pieces. I’m going back to school for a career in healthcare in the interim though.
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u/tinkertron5000 12d ago
I don't know how. I've got ideas. I have a ton of hobby-related skills that I could use as a basis for work, but nothing would make the same kind of money. I've got a family that I'm the primary provider for. I don't think I could afford to become a student again and still keep the household fed.
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u/TheWombatOverlord 12d ago edited 12d ago
Cory Doctorow, the guy who coined the phrase "enshittification" calls this a reverse centaur, a human being dragged behind a super-fast machine solely to do the tasks the computer can't do. In a Software Engineer's case that job is to fix the immediate problems that keep the code from working as intended, and as an accountability sink, there to get yelled at when the AI makes a mistake or take the fall when something breaks. Because, inevitably a human cannot give the same care for the code they ship when they are shipping 2x-6x more code.
Fundamentally, all these tech companies hate their employees. There is a reason Amazon warehouses have higher injury rates than most warehouses. There's a reason Amazon delivery drivers are forced to pee in bottles to make their quotas. Because both of these employees are being commanded by machines to act at superhuman rates. So it should be zero surprise when the machine that can push Software Engineers beyond their abilities gets made, Amazon wants to push it to make the lives of their devs worse.
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u/Confident_Chipmonk 12d ago
The future of the Jetsons is here. George’s job was to push the button
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u/Erazzphoto 12d ago
Well it doesn’t matter what you do or what you use, 12 hour work days is soul sucking by default
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u/MiningForLight 12d ago
12-hour days?!
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u/slinkywafflepants 12d ago
I am happy I live somewhere I only have to press Enter for 7.5 hours a day.
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u/Feral_Nerd_22 12d ago
I am definitely more burned out, I don't get the satisfaction I used to get when completing tasks (Dopamine) and all my thinking goes into prepping clause and doing more then one thing at a time.
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u/veracity8_ 12d ago
When AI coding tools first came out, my coworkers were so excited. I immediately recognized that this would automate the most enjoyable and rewarding aspect of the job. More time for meetings!
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u/ciacco22 12d ago
If an engineer is senior level (assuming they’ve developed their skill set pre-AI), their day is spent hitting enter and screaming “that’s not how this works.”
If an engineer is junior level, they are hitting enter and creating code that will break production.
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u/Brilliant-Muffin-879 12d ago
All jobs ai gen touches become curating and error correcting, no problem solving, no inventing, no innovating, no creativity. And that’s if you get to keep your job
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u/VVrayth 12d ago
"Good news, AI takes care of all the creative stuff so that you have more time to devote to the drudge work, with even more pressure on you for productivity" is peak mismanagement. God we are so screwed.
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u/Ok_Photo_3023 12d ago
For me it's not the reduction of manual coding that makes it soul-sucking, it's the fact that no matter how much code I ship the business just demands more. There's simply no such thing as productive enough.
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u/Babetna 12d ago
I can agree. I finally tried Github Copilot and it completely destroyed my productivity, I am barely motivated to try solving anything on my own when the code just magically appears ... and it works. The damn thing doesn't even let me write the comments, I write the first three words and the rest of the comment is right there, maybe a few words off, but quite close to what I wanted to write in the first place. There's no sense of accomplishment, no satisfaction of testing and seeing it work as intended, not even the annoyance of getting yet another bug that needs to be smashed. It's like someone replacing having sex with watching porn and then not even allowing you to masturbate.
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u/Food_Library333 12d ago
So the Jetsons will become historically accurate. Who knew.
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u/RoyaleWhiskey 12d ago
Yea that's is supposed to be the goal of technology, to make our lives easier and thus the work day shorter. The problem is we still adhere to a 100 year old system that is the 40 hour work week.
And since someone will comment "well be glad it's only 40 hours before that is worse", that is irrelevant. Society shoukd strive to be better that's why we invented indoor plumbing, antibiotics, etc, just because previous generations suffered doesn't mean future generations should either.
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u/f_djt_and_the_usa 12d ago
Engineers were the most informed people in the organization. They actually knew how it all worked. Now nobody does.
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u/cothomps 12d ago
His mention of “big company” is pretty spot on - those places can be soul sucking without AI if you’re buried in the third level scrum team or whatever.
I don’t think any of his complaints are different to any of the “crank out features not quality” approaches that have been common for over 40 years.
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u/NoPossibility 12d ago
This. It’s a company/business culture problem at its core. It’s the MBAs and CEOs trying to chase infinite stock price growth at the expense of workers and customers. “Line goes up” mentality, all other factors be damned.
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u/peaceful_pancakes 12d ago
is that what george jettson was doing when pressing the one button over and over at work?
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u/schewb 12d ago
The moment they made us start using Claude at my dev job I thought, "what would Dennis Ritchie do?" So now I have like 5 Claude skills that are also combined into "higher-order" skills, and now I can solve almost any support ticket or well-defined bug with a single skill invocation with the ticket URL. I have feature development about 70% automated at this point, too. I'm pretty sure 1 or 2 of my skills technically violate our usage policy, but I already have talking points to weasel out of trouble if I get caught. Using it practically feels like malicious compliance as I would not have chosen it voluntarily.
Tl;dr: I get paid to paint Warhammer minis and build Lego sets while the last shreds of my burnt out intelligence does my job at half the speed but 3x the througput.
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u/CaptainDildobrain 12d ago
Simple solution: get one of those drinking birds like that episode of The Simpsons.
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u/selfownlot 12d ago
I’m an engineering manager. Everything I’ve read says AI tools are accelerators, not force multipliers. It will speed you up, but unless you have a near perfect intent framework providing exhaustive info to the model (which is basically impossible), it’s going to make some decisions on its own and what you get will be unpredictable. If your engineering practices are in any way flawed, it will “accelerate” you right off a cliff.
That’s why studies are showing devs “feel” 20% more productive but are actually 20% less productive…or that the productivity increase averages around 8%. On my team we’ve put a lot of time into building an intent framework to keep the models in line, but we also have realistic expectations of the work.
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u/Nutrimiky 12d ago
My company is slightly starting to realize that costs have gone up, not a single product release cycle has been shortened or improved, and code base changes so fast architects and leads have lost any control on quality. But hey we have had hundreds of side projects showcased that and submarine refactorings wip, and so many new documents and comments that no one has read.
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u/VincentVanGob 12d ago
it would be the same as taking a carpenter who has been making hand-made furniture their whole life and then making them sit on a factory line just assessing whatever the machine is churning out, telling it what it needs to improve on and then repeating that all day. its a completely different job
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u/Hellofriendinternet 12d ago
Sounds like this is what they’re doing at work in Severance.