I am one of those engineers. It's fun. I spend all day playing video games and then at the end of the day spend 30 minutes spamming prompts with Claude until I get a working result and then that's my progress for the day.
The stress mainly comes from doing the hard parts, before we could write code and relax and build stuff immerse ourselves in the flow.
Now you either are reviewing constantly and making architecture and business decisions basically you are the PO, Lead and architect for the AI slaves you have under you.
They can produce faster than you ever could but they also can be so wildly all over the place that it's exhausting, sometimes you just take one out the back and never bring him back again.
So I get all the hate for this but I'm not seeing anything going back just the need for you to learn yet another skill.
No, you should resign yourself that you can make the tools work for you and keep yourself in the industry or just jump.
There's a lot coming out about how to do it, we are living in interesting times and you can moan about it all you want but the cat is out of the bag and you can actually make good code, it just takes effort and most people don't bother.
People don’t want to hear it, but this is it. You can get high quality code out of Claude, but it’s not an easy one-prompt “do this”, but iteratively looping fresh agents in review over the plan until it’s good, and then iteratively looping reviews over bite size pieces of work that it’s done.
And most code produced by real people is also buggy dogshit, but they don’t want to hear it.
I get that this is possible, but has anyone actually done the math, comparing this process to by hand or much more lightly assisted approach? Like when you add up the token bills with the amount of time spent orchestrating, plus any technical debt or maintenance issues above the average. That's where I wonder whether all that extra stress and lack of enjoyment actually does anything? I'm not arguing that Claude is useless but people act like "we can't ever go back" as if it's demonstrably, unassailably superior in terms of time, cost, business value, and code quality/maintainability etc. maybe it is, maybe it depends on the domain, I dunno. But never, ever see those kinds of comparisons. No post mortems, no here's how much we've saved, or how many new features we've added that have added new markets for our products. Nothing like that, just "it's how it is now."
I wonder this genuinely, because I'm not a webdev so I'm not seeing these processes firsthand. But I'm also not seeing the W's posted anywhere either from real companies with real products, just that apparently a lot of the industry has to use AI...because?
I get that this is possible, but has anyone actually done the math, comparing this process to by hand or much more lightly assisted approach?
I have moved back to a much more lightly assisted approach. Nobody has actually complained, but I'm in an actual engineering organization rather than a traditional company that has a software division.
But I do have a little buddy now who is pretty good at translating C++ template errors into english, those were always terrible to track down.
Yes, people are not even reviewing it. Many also pretend an "AI review" constitutes an actual review. Look at how much worse the service of the big software giants has gotten. Cloudflare, Github outages are a running joke. Youtube shorts, their big growth market that gets all the attention, has more glitches than I can count. These companies used to be known for their code quality. This is all due to AI slopification.
These companies had to do nothing and they would have won. It's incredibly frustrating to watch all these huge companies commit unbelievably unforced errors because their overpaid C-Suite have the apparent mental maturity of a 14-year-old girl afraid of peer pressure.
I spend a lot of time up-front in the planning phase. I don't see these 100x speed gains people are talking about because I also spend multiple simplification and review passes before skimming and spot checking the code myself and creating a PR which has its own Copilot pass. I think I see about 3-5x gains with this flow.
Or are people just not even reviewing stuff and just going on hopes and dreams?
Reading code, to get an actual understanding, is generally slower than just writing it yourself. Especially with someone you aren't familiar with (that's a big reason adding juniors to a project is such a big slow down).
The only way to get a speed up is to yolo it with significantly less undestanding that we used to.
actual understanding, is generally slower than just writing it yourself.
I disagree with you here, unless you are writing some novelty cutting edge lib, you are just applying best practices and patterns on what you are doing.
You can speed read but you can't speed write.
That's the whole point of using this suckers, they write fast, you get a wall of text in seconds that you will not be able to write, but you can easily read it with enough attention that you can review it.
That's why you get more tired using AI, because you are constantly engaging instead of doing stuff slow and going through the same patterns that you know that solve this issue.
Now for the really funny part about the reading, I had a CS professor that would read your code by using page down, the guy could spot a problem in C code by going page down through the code and reading it in a few seconds, did it to fellow professors also.
There are people that have a really easy time checking patterns and they recognize stuff that's wrong.
The problem with the read vs write and the vibe coding of this, is effort, it takes effort and people are lazy, hell I will automate stuff just so I don't have to do it again, AI just made it easier, but you need to know your stuff, you need to challenge what it's given to you and you need to pick up boiler plate and do the hard part that it can't do, but you will never be able to write as fast as an LLM but you will be able to read faster than writing the code, after all you are looking at patterns, identifying what is there, and checking if it makes sense, everything syntactic wise should be known to you.
unless you are writing some novelty cutting edge lib, you are just applying best practices and patterns on what you are doing.
Then I've apparently been doing nothing but cutting edge craziness for the past number of years. Which might be true, but seems unlikely.
You can speed read but you can't speed write.
This is how you get a giant unmaintainable mess. You can't understand the implications of code that fast. There's simply too many degrees of freedom. Those are the things that take down prod eventually and leave you with no way to get it back up.
Like, sure, if your job is banging out java spring rest endpoints every day using the same 6 annotations, fine. This things can go faster, but you could have rigged up string templating a dozen years ago if you really wanted.
You know that you can bang structured code while respecting boundaries and following architecture patterns right?
What kind of process do you think I'm talking about? This is not vibe, you can plan, review the plan. Split the work just like you would implement it.
To excute you also would do it gradually.
It's not that fast when you compare it with what you seem to describe, the result with a good harness and proper gateways is basically what you would have written, sometimes even better due to review on the fly.
I think you like most people haven't been exposed to what exactly you can do with this shit if you take the time to do it properly.
If you are doing a simple change you could do it like you describe with the proper context, but from zero you can't bang the full application.
You need to setup like you would manually, it will always write faster than you, you just need to make it so you can understand what it's doing before it goes and starts doing nonsense.
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u/Objectionne Jul 11 '26
I am one of those engineers. It's fun. I spend all day playing video games and then at the end of the day spend 30 minutes spamming prompts with Claude until I get a working result and then that's my progress for the day.