alt Hacker NewsI am done with this shit
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To be honest, this is less about Claude Code per se (or any other coding agent) and more about business and corporate culture. In my experience, if you work at a company whose culture is to deliver as fast as possible, then this is ultimately what you get when those same managers start to realize we can also ship 10x faster (no matter the costs). The "Delivery Pressure" is very real in _some_ corporations, and I _believe_ things like Claude/Codex just accelerate this even more, which is what we're seeing in some places. In a fast-place industry, can you blame 'em?
It's very interesting that this has become such a dichotomy.
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
Some people are taking longer than others to realize that the job has changed. That's all that I see in these rants.
It shouldn't be surprising that if you swim against the tide by doing things the old way, you are going to feel more burnt out because of it.
Theres something ironic about the top comment being an AI summary of everything, so I don’t have think or synthesize a view for myself.
Ever since software became a "prestige" career, attracting the former-would-be-dentists of the world, the entire field has been gatekeeping a lot of mediocre talent. Let's be honest.
If we're looking for a silver lining, AI is an equalizer and creates competition among the mediocre, driving salaries down. It's not all bad.
No sense of victory?
I'm still surprised sometimes at how rapidly I can prototype something. Is it always shippable? No. But something that would've taken me an amount of time I can't afford to is much quicker.
This past weekend I decided to build an iOS app as a personal project. Normally I wouldn't have the time to work on one like that but I was able to get a working POC that is actually usable for my trivial use case in a matter of hours.
I'd call that a victory.
I wonder if having a good account plan, a good ruleset, and a nice graph of the entire platform would give me tremendous leverage with companies like that. Nothing beats a swarm of agents checking everything, running multiple probes, and finding the best solution for every problem, including generating all the questions stakeholders need to answer before proceeding.
I believe I would end up enjoying life more while everything gets solved through agentic development.
If I compare this with my previous companies (publicly valued companies), I would definitely be on vacation while still delivering perfect PRs and features in a matter of hours, instead of the 2-3 week timelines it took me and my team in the past.
the reddit claudebot summary at the top is chefs kiss level of irony.
Sounds like it would have been a terrible place to work even before LLMs. And I bet they aren’t actually shipping much.
>In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs.
Thing is that's the goal (owners/management), not an unwanted side effect (programmers perspective). You can't get rid of workers if you're still dependent on their thinking. This pain is seen as a necessary step towards the promised land of profitability without pesky salaries, demands for foosball tables and RSUs.
This will get pushed by the powers that be...code base quality & people's feelings be damned.
Brave new world...hold on.
We are there. I’ve got fuck you money in the bank. I’m just kicking back waiting for the company to fail. It’s free money until then. Make up some shit and go back to doing other stuff.
They have lost money for the last two quarters, customer satisfaction is at an all time low, staff morale is gone, defects are piled up, costs are escalating on tokens and cloud, nothing is getting done but everyone thinks it is.
Let it burn.
We need a total reset. The entire market is overblown, overhyped and sells things nobody needs. Layers and layers of stupid to get nothing done. It’s an extraction economy. I’ve seen people replace simple stuff like a spreadsheet with a cloud hosted vibe coded turd. What the fuck is wrong with people?!? Have we collectively forgotten simple and elegant solutions?
Read a rant about corporate Scrum hellholes before AI existed. Reddit and this site is full of them.
This is similar except mindlessly churning short tickets with no time to plan or think and producing crap has been replaced my mindlessly herding bots and producing crap. Management doesn’t care and just wants to push tickets is a constant.
I’ve seen the term “code grinding” for these environments and I saw that phrase as far back as the 2000s.
This isn’t a new type of workplace. I’m willing to believe AI has made it even more dull.
> Or, as one user so poetically put it, you're just a condom between Claude and your production server getting fucked. Your only real job is to be the warm body they can blame when the AI slop inevitably breaks.
This sounds like it's gonna explode in our faces, tbh.
What hurts the most is the loss of community. Yeah it was a job, but it was a fun, cozy job. We got to sit around and think about things together all day, and poke holes in each others arguments, and collaborate toward a solution. There was a deep level of camaraderie and satisfaction in "being in the trenches" with your colleagues. It's all gone now. Juniors don't have questions anymore. Seniors are siloed off in their own world of feature development. And product has just become meat proxies. I'm dealing with a huge amount of grief over this now as someone who's lifelong vocation and sense of identity is seemingly evaporating.
All of this to avoid the reality that experience and expertise are a thing that can't be easily commoditized.
That is an impressive level of tone-deafness to see an automatic AI-generated summary of comments as the top comment on the thread.
That whole thread feels like something out of Black Mirror. Especially the comment from Claude AI right under the OP’s post summarizing the thread. The dark humor of the juxtaposition of Claude AI’s harsh summarization of all the users’ pain….pure Black Mirror.
The other day I inherited a repo from someone that left the company. The first one to be almost fully vibe coded.
It's horrible. It's over engineered in every way. It follows a completely different pattern than the other repos. It adds 10 CLI options that don't have any use (why does Claude add --threads to everything). It's impossible to follow the flow of the code. Of course, days after I inherited it, it broke so good luck to me fixing it I guess
The original post on X/Twitter is here: https://x.com/v0xium/status/2101526107128529120
In the post, he had only been at the company for 2 weeks. Maybe they have a really bad on-boarding process and he just wasn't seeing the process clearly.
Surely it cant' be this bad, or a company would collapse?
Nice. A Claude bot summarises the comments of people complaining about Claude so you don't have to read them!
This company is not treating agent code generation as if it's out in the open. Why in the world would you work like this? It has nothing to do with management. If your coworker is just going to do agent review just share the fucking prompt and do it yourself like you would with any other tool. Jesus fucking christ.
> My company was recently acquired. My company was currently going through a platform modernization. The company that acquired us is also going through a platform modernization. They acquired us specifically to use our new platform. Our platform isn't even fully built yet. I'm doing 100% of the coding. I'm tasked with finishing the platform, migrating all my companies existing customers to the new platform, migrating the new company's existing customers to new platform all while continuing to sell to new customers. The company is pushing AI-first EVERYTHING. I'm not allowed to hire. The new company had 20+ people working on their platform. I'm now expected to do it with 5. I had to fight for those 5. They thought I should be able to do it with 1 engineer. They are cutting people 30% annually over the next 2 years. 200+ employees to ~60-70. And they are asking me if I'll be ready in Q1 or Q2 next year. Our product person gave AI the legacy code bases to generate a report of all features and gaps. I supposed to go through an HTML file that is easily 100+ pages long and a spreadsheet with 30 tabs and hundreds of rows each. I pushed back that it's not fit for human consumption and let's start with high level gaps and they're acting like I'm not a team player or something. It's ridiculous.
This is crazy. LLM usage has somehow convinced people that it's $999 for not just knowing where to place one nail, but for knowing where to place an almost infinite number of them. Disingenuous marketing by the big players does not help either.
I do what I am expected to do and get paid for doing it.
Learn to be a plumber! Lol
I think people should use even more of Claude to come up with system design. All the people I know use LLMs for generating code and slop documents. But not for ideas themselves. So the pattern I see is lots of code + lots of documents but built on system designs that are generated by humans without LLM oversight. They don't use it in the one place that matters the most!
Assume you have control over things. How do you make it not soul crushing? Even if you don’t have an incentive to produce as fast as you can, it’s still kinda sucks. Even if you take the time to carefully review the code produced etc.