alt Hacker News$18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer.
Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.
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$18k a year is near half of my salary as junior verging on senior developer in the conservation field. Not everyone works in FAANG.
The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever).
You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself.
It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t try to fix auto-generated code: because you just regenerate it.
The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”.
In the old world, the refactor probably won't happen in the first place, but the effort would be put elsewhere. "Increased velocity of .. greenfield features" doesn't directly translate to additional revenue, and your number is very questionable in the first place.
Software engineers like to talk as if business and finance are as easy as pushing code out and refactoring. It's not and never has been.