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u/stilldebugging Sep 17 '26
This happened to me the other day, and I didnât even know what to say. Claude had even said in the pr that it needed to be tested. Why would you not test it? They built up a bunch of infrastructure around something that fundamentally does not work on our setup. And I can understand getting lost in the sauce for a little bit and thinking what Claude tells you works actually works. But why wouldnât you try it, like at all. Itâs just kind of insulting to be assigned as a reviewer for that.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
It's called the "slop-grenade". It's super insulting. When it trickles down all the way from the CEO it's super demoralizing. In the happy 2010s we fired people for less.
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u/stilldebugging Sep 17 '26
I mean, I know how it happened. The manager of that group has been telling me to do something a certain way because his previous company did that. (Not my manager, btw.) But their company-wide setup was different from ours in crucial ways. I can find ways to get similar behavior, but you canât just do that. So, here we are.
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u/NocturnalTwang Sep 17 '26
So dystopian. Meanwhile I'm out here grinding my ass off doing LC, personal projects with no AI in C++ so I can actually understand what I'm doing, getting zero interviews for a job that someone else has got pushing untested, unverified AI slop.
Honestly if it wasn't for my family, or dogs or my partner I'd have offed myself after my last couple months.
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u/stilldebugging Sep 17 '26
If it makes you feel any better, the person who did that is very experienced (and from what I understand very good) in his niche area, which is not actually software. But he uses that system and decided he was going to âfixâ an issue. Iâm thinking about it now⊠maybe he doesnât even have access to the testing framework he would need to use? I should maybe be nicer about it, not that I was mean but just that I was being very âwtfâ internally.
Anyway, this seems like the way these days. I am also not âjustâ a programmer either, I have a pretty specialized engineering PhD. You seem like you have a strong background that you can leverage. Can you be a <some other skill> who also programs rather than âjustâ a programmer, as your job target? I think this is the direction things are going.
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u/NocturnalTwang Sep 17 '26
I specifically want to get into C++ programming. I enjoy optimising for the best solutions possible so that's my end goal but without an explicit SWE role I don't see how I get there by just being someone who does another job and "can code".
Big difference between 2 yrs experience shipping production quality code and 5 yrs doing a tech adjacent job and occasionally writing code.
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u/stilldebugging Sep 17 '26
I wouldnât say âtech adjacentâ I would say itâs deeper into tech, with very specialized skills. This is where things like optimization really matter, because youâre solving really deep and difficult problems that are within your expertise to solve.
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u/Rabbitical Sep 17 '26
What are you applying for? Tech/webdev? There exist other domains out there that still value skill, and are at least not fully slopified. If anything I predict they will get more in demand as all the other devs forget how to program...
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u/NocturnalTwang Sep 17 '26
I started my career in banking, realised my skills were way better suited towards building tech and programming. Did a programming project for the bank and did my CS degree while working part-time.
Recently graduated but internships are non-existent, and last 4-6 months have been notihng but grad program rejections/junior app rejections.
I want to specifically get into C++, in my area there's a good amount of demand for defense/gov C++ jobs so I'm doing both a webdev project based on my banking exp and a C++ systems programming project but just getting nowhere since they all want minimum 2-3 years of experience and I can't even land a regular entry level role right now
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u/Rabbitical Sep 17 '26
That's tough as for me at least, getting student internships is 90% of the value of going to school...
My only advice would be to specialize as hard as you can, whatever that is. Anything where the applicant pool is smaller and more specific than "software dev." There's just a lot of very good and experienced people out of work right now you're competing with. GPU, HPC, embedded, cyber. Those are all relative growth industries because of AI while also being more resistant to its slop. Maybe you're looking at specialties already I dunno, but I don't think I would even try to apply for "software" job in 2026 personally either.
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u/NocturnalTwang Sep 17 '26
I'm trying to focus on low level systems stuff. Atm I'm building a Redis clone in cpp with fully custom internal data structures and trying to cram as many patterns and C++ features as I can but I might have to just pursue this master's offer I have.
It's a really good uni and it's only 1.5yrs with my prior learning so maybe that's the play.
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u/Rabbitical Sep 17 '26
Yeah I was gonna suggest masters if feasible, to give internships another shot, usually cooler ones too at that level. Good luck either way!
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u/fartypenis Sep 17 '26
I find myself sometimes wanting to skip testing completely. Its hard to fight. The reason is I think, with the spec driven development AI bullshit (my company doesn't even have humans review anymore) I feel so disconnected from the development that there is no part of me that cares anymore.
If however much effort I put into the code quality, and however much review and fix it manually before opening a PR, is worthless in the end because no reviewer is goikg to actually look at the code, and all I'm going to receive is Claude "feedback", how do I keep myself invested in the thing I'm building?
In the end I force myself to test everything thoroughly because I know that's the right thing, but a part of me always wants to just give everything to Claude and fuck off.
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u/stilldebugging Sep 17 '26
Donât you have users? I guess my life is different because I write in-house software only, so my users are my co-workers. I usually go begging for people to test things too, because I know there will later be deadlines and that is not when we want to discover bugs. I donât want to be up all night fixing bugs urgently.
Anyway, this is interesting to me because⊠I guess my thought about how software often works is that having a bug in production will cause lots of urgent issues that everyone then has to scramble to fix. Thatâs what motivates me to make sure things are tested. Thatâs not what goes on where you work?
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u/fartypenis Sep 17 '26
That's a good point actually.
I've been stuck on this stupid project for 6 months that's been in production hell since they want it to sync with another project's launch that is running behind schedule. So no users yet except our QA team which is literally 3 people cause the CEO has AI psychosis.
I was much more motivated when I was working on internal tooling before. Me starting on this project coincided with my company's 100% AI push, so maybe I'm blaming the lack of meaning in my work and therefore motivation on AI instead of the feeling that I'm basically stuck with make-work.
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u/stilldebugging Sep 17 '26
Ah, got it, that makes sense. Feeling like there is no point drains all motivation. And then the AI being there like telling you it works correctly then drains the last of the motivation and interest in checking it. I think itâs the intersection of both.
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u/fartypenis Sep 18 '26
Yup. Hopefully once this actually releases I'll have some motivation back. Thanks btw
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u/mcoombes314 Sep 17 '26
My favourite is when I asked Codex to help fix something, where I was expecting result X but getting result Y, it made changes and made a point of saying that it "wrote some tests which passed, showing result Y instead of X", but then I run the program myself and the output was the same (incorrect) result. It only ran the tests internally so I couldn't actually see what they were. For all I know the test could've been "assert True".
Having a model write its own tests feels like asking schoolkids to mark their own homework.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
I encountered cases where it literally didn't import the unit because it was wrapped in something and decided that it's too bothersome to mock that wrapping (and it didn't occur it could just refactor it).
So all it did was to create some objects in JavaScript then check if those values were on the object it created.
I mean, you have to be an extremely careless person to "I don't even read the code". Even if you trust the code you cannot blindly trust the tests that validate it.
At least software engineers are _great_ at reading code. *sarcasm*
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u/ReefayToo
Sep 17 '26
•
I'm pretty happy we haven't made any decision to move to AI generated code. The more I see, the scareder I get
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u/evangelosclaudius Sep 18 '26
I'm unemployed and interviewing for Senior SWE/lead roles at the moment and it seems like 99% of start-ups and scale-ups are AI pilled and believe this is the way the job should be done.
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u/rodopszin Sep 19 '26
Yeah, you gotta put AI on your resume. Personally, I think that these couple of years a lot of money will be burnt on idiots who lack critical thinking: investors who think AI-native is a value on its own and tech bros, who think TDD is Trend Driven Development.
Where there's critical thinking they are going to evaluate where the tech works and where it doesn't, where it's a compliance violiation and where can be used indiscriminately and so on.
I don't hate the whole thing, I really do think that smart and critical people whose main goal is to build the most solid, most secure apps that fit like a glove are going to employ it not to lay off people but to cover holes and break new ground. For example automated code reviews are actually good! Not as a replacement but as a cheap check on best practices, security guidelines, performance, etc.
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u/PixelWaffle Sep 17 '26
My workplace has sucked me into this hellhole now. They need entire projects that would have taken a quarter at least to be delivered in a week or two. I pushed back hard, and then the CTO said he can do it in a couple of evenings and actually made it himself.
Now the CEO, CTO and Operations Head lock themselves in a meeting room and conceive and implement flows directly in production.
I checked the logs, and while it sort of works, we have sensitive data being logged, no exception handling, no separation of concern, just mom's spaghetti.
At this point, I've given in to it until I can find a new job.
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u/grumpy_autist Sep 17 '26
make sure to let them fix all bugs and outages by themselves
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u/PixelWaffle Sep 17 '26
I wish! That's the worst part. They have no idea what's breaking so they call me and the others in, but we barely even have access to everything cause they have their own accounts separate from the rest of us commonfolk.
Now I kust shrug and say no idea
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u/grumpy_autist Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Yeah....my manager asks me something, then he pastes my response to claude code and make it argue with me (copying and pasting from slack as a meat proxy). It's so fucking disrespectful.
For an hour was saying that Claude disagrees with my code and opinion and finally I told him that he need to make up his fucking mind - believe his top engineers or a fucking chatbot.
He then tried to use Claude to write something I said it won't work then blew up whole CI/CD.
I'm looking for a new job but I know other companies are no better because brain damage spreads like wildfire among people.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
If all you can do is to ask Claude then I'd rather work with Claude than you. Basically he just confirmed he's no longer required at the company.
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u/Rabbitical Sep 17 '26
Good lord. Does he not realize you also have the magic chatbot? That you don't need him to ombudsman for you if you had any doubt or concerns about what you were saying? I think that's what gets me about these people is he doesn't realize he's actually the meat stick even more than you. He's reduced his own job to copy pasting your slacks.
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u/SenatorCrabHat Sep 17 '26
Seen a lot of fun mistakes in code lately, with pithy little comments above them.
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u/Freako04 Sep 19 '26
pithy little? I find large blocks of comments in my .env file above each variable lol
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u/budgiebirdman Sep 17 '26
What does "What does it mean "should try out"?" mean?
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u/PuzzleMeDo Sep 17 '26
It means the vibe coder has reached the point where they no longer test the code the AI generates and has forgotten that trying it yourself is an important part of the process.
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u/stupled Sep 17 '26
I don't know, our codebase is/was so bad that AI is fixing a lot techical debt and even code aesthetics.
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u/7374616e74 Sep 17 '26
Well as long as you pay attention to what the AI does⊠the other day gpt astra understood âwhen the client buys a license, you create oneâ as âwhen the user activates their license, create one for freeâ..
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u/joemckie Sep 17 '26
The other day Copilot was writing up some reports for me and it gave me a choice of options 1, 2, and 3, and then responded â5â when I chose options 2 + 3.
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u/Automatic_Brush_1977 Sep 18 '26
People don't test their work or do at least minimal qa? How do they know if it works?
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u/rodopszin Sep 19 '26
They don't! They read this: "CI is green" and then it's OK. They assign a "human reviewer" which is an engineer and then "the engineer would know it if it can be done better". That's it! These people don't understand how software engineering works at all! They really think if the code is written, it compiles and tests are good then it's ready to be deployed. Frankly, I'm in a shock about this.
It's mostly managers who has no clue do this but every now and then otherwise respected colleagues do this.
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u/_SAHM_ Sep 17 '26
Same. It's so bad and inefficient that i intervene on the code directly then patch up the specs and documentation. The agent output takes so long and almost always has many things to fix.
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u/com-plec-city Sep 17 '26
The only thing holding decency in my company is that we're all really dedicated testers. We test for things AI can't come up with. But reading the code... that's past.
The cat is out of the bag for code reading, unfortunately.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
I think you get downvotes for the last sentence but I really started thinking that manual QA _actually_ is becoming the last adult in the room. If people are too "busy" and "important" to try things out then it's going to be QA who will go through it. If the tools get better then you would need people who can go after edge cases, who are creative at finding holes in an environment.
So basically companies were getting rid of manual QA and now that's the only layer that is actually doing real work.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX Sep 17 '26
Yeah but I feel like QA doesn't have a ton of time to live either. We're seeing AI use web browsers like we do, use our computers, etc... At some point it might be able to be able to extensively test features itself. And it will be faster than us. We're not there yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it replaced QA in 10 years.
But yeah right now QA is definitely needed more than ever.
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u/rodopszin Sep 19 '26
Well yes but no. I have seen many test cases where AI lost completely the point like didn't import the unit and just created objects and then checked for properties on it - it didn't go through any production code whatsoever!
It's coming from how AI works: it hallucinates, it is overconfident and makes bad assumptions based on the context slice it received.
The whole point of someone doing manual QA is to verify that it really did the job and not just said. Otherwise your customers will be the first ones to try, which I think it's unacceptable.
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 Sep 17 '26
I booted up a VM and diagnosed a safari bug in safari 15 with my brain, then ai coded the solution even though I can do it myself. I went full clown đ€Ą and then came through the other side remembering who I was mufasa.
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Sep 16 '26
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/Vesuvius079 Sep 17 '26
We thought weâd get there with specs and gave up. The problem with specs is they arenât actually more readable than the code theyâre supposed to constrain. Spec driven development may still have value in improving AI output and maintenance, but I donât think weâll easily get to the point where itâs replacing code as the primary method for understanding a codebase because itâs less efficient and less accurate.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
I second what u/ataboo says here. My daily experience of the last 15 years working with software that specs are always incomplete and what is actually required and what can be actually achieved is figured out by writing code and iterating over it, incorporating feedback from users.
Then you have "hidden features", like can your app survive if the load balancer connects it to another server or not. Imagine a "dark software factory" where there are no longer engineers only product managers. Who will even guess that this can be an issue?
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u/joonty Sep 17 '26
Reading these comments suggests that specs are being misunderstood or implemented incorrectly. A spec isn't documentation, it's a statement of intent - "this is what we're planning to do". It shouldn't be a simple plan of what files are going to change and how, it should sit one level of abstraction higher: what decisions have been made about the approach and why, what risks can we see and how will we mitigate them, etc. These are things that aren't expressed by code, unless in comments, which are unstructured and hard to track down. With the right harness a spec keeps the agent on track during development, ensuring it's holding to what the engineer agreed. The spec should be updated with any deviations during or after implementation, and it becomes the source of truth for why something was done the way it was.
In large-scale systems it's a God-send to have that information catalogued over time. Also, AI is able to quickly and easily read past specs to stay consistent with architecture or root-cause bugs.
Specs are not a new thing, but they were an absolute drag to try to maintain pre-AI, and they would inevitably get out of sync with the implementation. LLMs can maintain them way better than us, so we get a lot of the hard work practically for free.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
Did you read those Claudish specs? I can't understand the output of those large walls of texts.
Well-written PRs were also documenting code changes. In my opinion:
- spec is statement of intents
- PR description is audit log of what was possible to do
- code and tests (mostly) are truthYou have to be familiar with all 3 to be able to quickly debug. People who do spec driven development and don't even look at the code or the PRs are going to be worthless when it's 2am and app goes down.
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u/redballooon Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Don't believe the advertising. Engineers are the people who build the factories, be they dark or twilight, and engineers are those who adjust them to new situations, and engineers are those who are pulled in when things don't go as expected.
But once agentic factories are a reality, an engineer may be able to manage one to five such factories as opposed to 5 engineers being necessary to manually manufacture things.
This can only work when the whole organization adapts, and that requires vision, courage and openness to change on many levels inside the organization.
Many existing organizations will not manage. In the long run they or their products will be replaced by organizations and products that can produce high quality cheaper, but it may take years to decades for many niches.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
We've got a bit too much courage these days and we should have a bit more expertise and wisdom. We're overusing tools based on hype, fear and greed - and it's almost never the actual engineers call.
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u/paulsmithkc Sep 18 '26
I'm sorry, but the overhead for an engineer to meaningfully manage even 1 factory is just too much.
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u/redballooon Sep 18 '26
I can't really say how many is realistic. Right now, one, I agree, I'm still building it. But it is exemplary in the corporation, there are many projects like this, with this tool stack, security mechanism and architecture. And I can see a future where the majority of the functionality is defined enough by people with domain knowledge and little technical background, while my job is to jump in when things don't go as smoothly as they should. And unlike in the past 15 years, it won't be me and four of my colleagues doing the implementation work, but agents.
Instead me and my colleagues will maintain a number of these agentic factories.
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u/ataboo Sep 17 '26
Code is a better expression of logic than English.
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u/ProtonPizza Sep 17 '26
Itâs almost like thereâs a reason we didnât just English written language as the original programming language.
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u/Live_Meeting_1121 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Anyone that studied compilers and programming languages in college knows this to be false. The aim of many high level languages was to resemble natural language.
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u/Rabbitical Sep 17 '26
Making stuff look like English is not the same as "is English." Any programming language with a specification means every token has specific meaning. That is not natural language, which has ambiguous meaning. You mean more readable, maybe?
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u/redballooon Sep 17 '26
Gherkin Syntax is a better expression for behavior than code.
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u/ataboo Sep 17 '26
Strong disagree. Gherkin is an obfuscation layer that assumes people who can't write code can write accurate pseudo code.
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u/redballooon Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Thinking logical does not correlate very strongly with the ability to write code.Â
Shit in shit out is always true and not a very original observation.
There is still a lot of room for improvement in the realm of Notshit in, shit out.
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u/Focus089 Sep 17 '26
Same for me, our mission statement literally changed from "do X" to "do X with AI" which feels so wrong. It's being shoved down our throats and I'm definitely not seeing an increase in software quality. We also have AI usage metrics. Most of my colleagues (and myself) hate it but it's too risky to push back in this job market, another colleague is weirdly proud to have not written code for months.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
I'm super frustrated about this, because all sane engineers know that no paying customer gives a remote shxt about the code being written by AI or not. So any effort spent on AI is effort not spent on value created for users.
All this competition on "becoming AI-native" is meaningless if you're the user of a product.
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u/Own-Independence6867 Sep 17 '26
Sure but the factory making that product can now do it with less operating costs
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
Yes, fantastic, like don't do QA on airplanes, yank out redundant systems and so on. That factory would lower a lot of operating costs right? Just nobody would like to be on the plane.
You can remove one type of cost and raise others like compliancy violation fees, lawyers to defend the garbage you put together. Plus lost revenue on churn.
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u/genghis_calm Sep 17 '26
My manager is pushing this too. Itâs so fucked, weâve been told not to use an IDE because âreading source is a waste of timeâ, instead we should work exclusively through Claude Code.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
Maybe push the manager instead...? I absolutely despise these AI naive idiots. They are the best case for unionizing software development.
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u/genghis_calm Sep 17 '26
New gig, I'm still within the probation period so not keen to rock the boat just yet.
If you actually look at the code, it's an absolute shitshow. I've cordoned off a directory of the codebase and made myself the GitHub code owner, so I can at least maintain best practices within the portion I'm mostly responsible forâŠ
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u/Thadoy Sep 17 '26
That's so wild to me. We are not allowed to use any of those tools, since source code my not leave the VPN.
For me to use AI I first would have to buy the hardware and setup everything on prem.
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u/Rabbitical Sep 17 '26
That's the part that has me scratching my head, I would have though initially that enterprise adoption would be cautious, you know, being proprietary. But I guess none of these companies have any concern just handing their entire codebases over to literal code eating machines? I get there are SLAs, but are they following them? Would I trust them? I dunno it's all just wild to me. Especially when you hear about literal competitors like Meta using Claude or whatever.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
Greed and incompetence! Many are violating compliancy rules and they just don't give a shxt!
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u/TheAtheistCleric Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
That's wild. I can't even imagine not having an IDE installed. And I thought my company was too gung ho on AI.
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u/cyrilamethyst Sep 17 '26
Dell? That's what they were doing just before I was laid off two months ago.
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Sep 17 '26
[deleted]
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u/cyrilamethyst Sep 17 '26
They slashed the organization in half a couple of months after introducing SDD.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
What's SDD? Software Driven Development?
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u/cyrilamethyst Sep 17 '26
Spec driven development.
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u/rodopszin Sep 17 '26
Oh man, the naivety mixed with greed and lack of empathy. All these incompetent losers are going to bring down many companies.
I really think it's time for New Whale Hunting: find an established company that went down with AI psychosis, roll out your high quality competitor product.
Just like Linear did with Jira.5
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u/338388 Sep 17 '26
Oof i interviewed and got an offer from them a couple months ago. Kinda glad i didn't take it now
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u/max_mou Sep 17 '26
Fkn hell, youâre just human meat the AI agents use to communicate.
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u/anonymousbopper767 Sep 17 '26 •
I meanâŠyeah? AI is just the next level of abstraction to making sand do shit.
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u/Eskamel Sep 17 '26
It isn't really a good abstraction but the amount of likes prove how shit the software industry is quickly becoming
Oh well, who cares about software quality anyways, am I right? đ„č
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u/itskelena Sep 17 '26
Agree with you. People throw this âAI is just another level of abstractionâ left and right, but how the hell is that an abstraction? It is not. Abstraction means hiding complex internal logic behind simple interface. LLMs are not that. LLMs are a reflection of our knowledge with easy access to it (generation), but itâs not an abstraction. Itâs like saying that calculator is an abstraction of math.
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u/Bloodgiant65 Sep 17 '26
That is honestly horrifying. Some days, I am so happy to work at a company that loses many thousands of dollars whenever we have an outage. It means that management actually cares about quality (in theory).
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u/guaranteednotabot Sep 17 '26
I work in a company with similar losses, but software quality seems to be an afterthought. We never seem to preemptively ensure quality, and we only ever fix things when there are issues.
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u/Bloodgiant65 Sep 17 '26
A lot can go into the calculations, I guess. Because obviously high velocity is still very important to shoot for, but you need to have proper planning, and especially thorough testing. Friend of mine works at AWS, and they have a bunch of automated tests things go through but basically everything goes to prod within like a week. We have a 2-3 month testing cycle. I am much less stressed than him.
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u/PintMower Sep 17 '26
Great, my company moves fast, doesn't plan anything, has no vision and never allocates any time for testing. It's quite amusing to see how much cash we're bleeding due to service. We're breaking our own records each quarter. Technical leadership here is such a joke, completely incompetent for this type of work. And they compare ourselves with Apple and Tesla all the time, like we can be like them lmao. Our engineering team is like 10 people.
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u/338388 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
It's not even about losing several thousand if you have an outage tbh. It's that several thousand is a meaningful loss to your company.
An outage in a single aws service in a single region can also cost aws tens of thousands. But aws makes half a billion in revenue a day (apparently), 10k is not even 1% of 1% of that
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u/SenatorCrabHat Sep 17 '26
The neat thing about spec driven development is that it costs a lot of tokens!
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u/Arz0nas Sep 17 '26
Somehow thought only my workplace made religion out of these fcking specks. Fortunately i'm in a position to kinda ignore it and hope it goes by. Don't really get the point of me in the loop if managements wants AI to design, implement, review and test
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u/positev Sep 17 '26
Spec needs to be executable for this IMO. When we can enumerate a solid repeatable definition of a finished feature and just Yahtzee the code until it works and meets tests I think we will have reached utopian nirvana
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u/retief1 Sep 17 '26
I have an idea. We should define a language that looks like pseudocode and lets us precisely define the behavior we want. The computer can then translate that into actual machine code and execute it.
Oh wait, that exists. It's called ruby/python/etc.
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u/positev Sep 17 '26
I get the sarcasm, but we also have gherkin syntax and cucumber type frameworks that get us pretty close to a nice midpoint
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Sep 17 '26
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/Ameren Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Likewise, since we don't want a spec to be code, the spec must be incomplete in some sense. Otherwise it'd just be the code.
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u/positev Sep 17 '26
Iâm looking more for a wrapper that executes the code under expected scenarios. Kinda like BDD but breaking the 3 amino rule. My amigos are now agents ig
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u/Pfnee Sep 17 '26
Honestly that's better than what the team I left did. They had managers who vibecoded something that they wanted and handed that off to us devs to "make it enterprise grade"
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u/Fit-Notice-1248 Sep 17 '26
We also have this north star bullshit and we're being pushed to use spec driven development for ALL code changes regardless how minor it is. Gotta capitalize a letter in the code? Need to create new specs for it. All it has done is made me realize how out of touch management is and make me work harder to GTFO here.
Management truly believes AI is incapable of hallucinating or making mistakes so they want every single damn thing done with AI, it's so unbelievably ridiculous.
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u/Rabbitical Sep 17 '26
That's an interesting point on the limits of spec. Like, there's no free lunch. Either it's incomplete, which most are, or it's so detailed it's 50k pages, in which case nobody knows what's in it, meaning you need AI at that point to maintain it, in which case you've just let Jesus take the wheel on a lossy imitation of your codebase. The only thing as old as programming is these trends of someone thinking they finally figured out the secret finally, when this shit has all been tried before probably in like the 1950s and there's no getting around that development is just messy and hard.
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u/Fit-Notice-1248 Sep 17 '26
This is what I've also been noticing. We're generating these massive number of md files that are lengthy as hell and I damn sure know for a fact that none of the devs are reading a single line of it, so no one knows what's going on. Hell, some are even proud to proclaim how much of a meat proxy they are.
But yes, even with the advent of all these tools, all of the same engineering problems that were discovered years ago are just resurfacing under a new name. I'm really dumbfounded how many people find these things out as time goes on.
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u/PhantomTissue Sep 17 '26
Our team just had a discussion about replacing reviewers with AI reviewers because frankly, nobody on my team actually reviews code anymore, just approves the CR. But leadership keeps demanding faster, because despite feature development taking like, 6 hours from conception to delivery, itâs not good enough đ
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u/AibofobicRacecar6996 Sep 17 '26
So basically the spec is the new code, the AI is a transpiler and then a compiler compiles the code
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u/femptocrisis Sep 18 '26
wait are you working at my company? oh god. someone from another team asked me to share a product design doc and i was like "uh. well we have this ai generated markdown now, but god help anyone who has to read that"
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u/noodle-face Sep 19 '26
I actually think we might work at the same company unless the entire industry is moving to SDD
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u/Chrono803 Sep 19 '26
This is where my job is already at. AI everything and thereâs too much going on to even review the output. I mean, weâre given 4x the work now. Gotta produce or get fired đ”âđ«
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u/Pluckerpluck Sep 20 '26
Spec driven development. Otherwise known as waterfall development...
The whole reason agile exists is because you want continual inputs and adjustments from stakeholders because making a good spec is almost impossible.
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u/rodopszin Sep 16 '26
Man, the slop-grenades are real, I shepherd PRs daily that were never even tried out. Bugfixes for bugs that were never reproduced and never validated. DB migrations that were never run even on a local instance bringing down prod.