Linters and static analysis -> setup as hooks in your harness. Don’t rely on CLAUDE.md because it’ll ignore it a lot.
> ASCII drawings in code
Please don’t this is super obnoxious. Make proper diagrams and kee them in knowledge base. Link out to them if you need to and let the agent fetch them via MCP or API or whatever if it wants them.
> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR).
The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes.
Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work.
When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero incentive for me to give feedback for you to give to an agent when I can give it to an agent myself.
Coding isn’t the job anymore. It’s understanding systems and architecture design, and ownership of what you work on. Being able to design solutions, understand them, deliver them and support them in production is the job now. Engineering is still engineering. End to end ownership is the job.
I think the fear is that the "higher" paying webdev jobs will be drying up while those traditional industries you mentioned still have the need for developers but auto, medical, and weapon industries never paid well.
Remember moving to New England to look for work and all the interesting embedded medical device companies paid like $80k less than a react dev job I got at an ISP.
I'm in Medical Devices and while AI is at best a small part of development right now, rest assured that we are actively investigating how to make it an approved part of our process. Then again, coding was only ever a small part of our job.
Nope, whatever the customer hires us for, webdev, distributed systems, desktop, mobile, consulting on architecture, whatever makes them happy and gets us a contract.
Of course not, but consider the size of the field if the “webdev” stuff goes away. Competition for the remaining positions in other domains become more competitive and you may find the floor rising faster than you can? Or you’ll find that weak, but cheap heuristics will throw you out with the chaff.
Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.
We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
When I ask an agent to do a code change for a PR, it’s because it’s not something I think the other engineer really should waste their time on. It’s on the same level as nitpicking what lines the braces go on before we had auto-formatters and lint checkers in CI.
Other staff engineers I rarely even see their code. I trust them to be able to review and deliver and support their own code and communicate breaking changes. Knowledge gets disseminated at weekly architecture reviews, in person.
Offshore developers under me have their code gone over with a fine-toothed comb. They don’t own the work. They don’t support it. They can’t even speak to me without using copy pasted Claude responses that are wrong half the time anyway. I have zero qualms with “going over them”.
> Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
Agents don't "handle" code review. With no human in the loop, there is no difference between "generating" code and "reviewing" code. Let's not bastardize the word "review". The code is unreviewed. Now, whether that's a dealbreaker or not for your project or company is a different question.
Personally, I've found that unreviewed LLM code unnecessarily explodes in complexity and the credit / token cost per change increases in tandem as the LLM pulls more into its context window. This is especially the case when you let it go wild on test cases. We don't have an unlimited budget for AI, maybe you do, so this is a concern for us. So we've decided to continue to review code and ask LLMs to significantly reduce the complexity of their generated code - which is a task that we're finding they are extremely bad at.
They're probably extremely bad at reducing complexity because the incentive for frontier model providers might be to train models that are capable of one-shotting flappy bird, instead of models that are capable of maintaining mature code bases that already have an implementation of the ad-hoc parsing function it just generated, as well as the newly-generated 50 test cases for it.
Every additional level of abstraction in computers has resulted in bloat that makes software less efficient and more bloated. AI is merely continuing to accelerate the tread.
The real issue at hand is that humans need to decide to start resource constraining AI before it consumes the entire world.
> We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
So you already failed the first part of doing your goddamn job as an engineer which is reviewing and owning code. Code review is a vital part of that, because code ownership is a responsibility shared by your entire team. We used to say that cowboy coders were a disaster for your team and now you're saying everyone on your team is effectively a cowboy coder.
If it turns out claude or whatever LLM you're using pulled in a bad package and now your companies data has been exfiltrated are you going to be the one willing to be fired for your blunder?
Jesus, this rant is so eerily similar to one I read 25 years ago when someone explained why they stopped using C and started using C++ that I wouldn't be surprised to find that you are the same one who was complaining back then.
> Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
So you're producing slop that is going to blow up in your faces. That's your organization's right, but not everyone is interested in giving up on producing a quality product like you guys are.
Even if AI does the coding, I cannot understand the architecture of a change unless you split it in individual tasks that are "as small as possible but no smaller". And even if AI does the code review, the architecture review falls onto me.
Ownership of the delivered code. This takes authorship out of the equation -- doesn't matter who wrote it, only matters who owns it and can be blamed for it. Not having written it doesn't absolve blame when something goes bad.
Ownership of something you have little control over is a great way to burn yourself out.
If you constantly have to push back against the eager puppy jr dev who’s 1000% sure their vibe slop is prod ready and has proudly told the admiring crowd of stake holders it’s ready to go, wtf kind of life is that? Now the senior/lead is the bad guy and is in the no win scenario.
> If you constantly have to push back against the eager puppy jr dev who’s 1000% sure their vibe slop is prod ready and has proudly told the admiring crowd of stake holders it’s ready to go, wtf kind of life is that? Now the senior/lead is the bad guy and is in the no win scenario
Oh.
You just described my last couple of jobs
I guess that partly explains why I've been miserable and exhausted all the time
Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now.
Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback.
Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.
> Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.
I'm pretty certain SOTA is better than you at engineering. It's gonna be a real shock to your system when you finally acknowledge to yourself that you are nothing more than an expensive proxy to an LLM.
I basically only use Fable and no it isn’t. Might I suggest that if you think it is you’re just projecting your own insecurity on others. Coding isn’t engineering.
Yes it is. It'll write a better doc at any level for any task you may do. If you're not able to see that, you just don't know how to give the context right.
I can't imagine what level of monkeys you've been working with when you can't even imagine a human writing better docs than Claude. Disturbing, frankly.
> You just don't know how to harness it with the right context maybe.
Him placing this at the end of all his statements is just screaming, it takes an engineer to get a nicely engineered product. admitting defeat in his own statements over and over, kinda funny.
> Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.
I'm really grateful for my company's culture. Reading replies like this, I remember how easy it is to forget how atrocious that can be elsewhere. Thanks for the perspective and reminder.
You misunderstood my reply. I'm talking about culture, not engineering or coding.
I'm just grateful I don't work with people that say "good riddance" to blanket foreign talent bans, and "catch up or get left behind" to fellow engineers.
That doesn't sound like a nice place to work? Is all I'm saying.
I don't think this is related to culture, it's just the internet nowadays. You need hot takes for engagement. That user probably runs with that mindset always on
Something not being the primary reason I'm paid does not imply that it's "solved". Personally, I enjoy working at a company where people have intellectual curiosity about varying viewpoints to ambiguous questions like "is coding solved?" rather than scolding people who don't adhere to the dogma as being "left behind".
To be clear, I use LLMs every day as part of my work pretty much entirely because my employer wants me to and has encouraged me to make them part of my workflow. They've managed to do that without anyone saying anything as aggressive as the parent commenter.
My company has excellent culture. Zero tolerance for slop, top to bottom. With or without AI, you own your work and you are accountable for it. We’re a business not a daycare for foreign contractors without useful skills.
We prefer to hire on-shore junior engineers now, but their job isn’t just to just bang out grunt work Jira tickets. They own their work end to end and support it at every level. They get mentorship from seniors to move beyond coding and into systems and architecture level thinking. That’s the job now.
You’d be suprised how often people rise to the occasion when you don’t treat them like children.
I don’t know why I can’t rely to the person below me so I’m editing:
We don’t admonish. It’s a mission statement and an up-front mutual understanding by all parties that you own your work end to end and you are accountable for it. You don’t even get an interview if you don’t agree. People that are offended by it don’t even bother applying. Excellent filter.
Treating people like adults means not admonishing them by saying things like "we're a business, not a daycare". Adults don't need to be informed that they're working a job because they already are aware. Talking down to people by saying things like that is pretty much the opposite of treating them like adults.
Had an offshore dev respond to me with copy pasted Claude response for the first time the other day.
My reaction was of immediate visceral disgust.
I can say in no uncertain terms that I do not care if your English is completely broken. I prefer that over AI slop. You will not improve your writing and language proficiency if you do not practice them! If you do not care about your language proficiency then you have zero business doing offshored work.
The answer was also wrong. I pointed Claude to the micro service repo in question and asked it myself. Got a different but correct answer, after verifying it myself.
Their code is so trash I wonder if we’re even using the same models. Every PR I need to go over it myself and have Claude refactor and restructure everything. Claude generates decent code that can be made great with just a few iterations. I don’t even think these guys are running the code to test it, let alone read it. Just slop and ship.
Can’t rely on them to understand the code or even answer simple questions about it.
What is even the point of all this?! AI has made me personally more productive but overall it’s still a net negative because when you’re a “-x dev” the force multiplier from AI is overwhelming and soul crushing to everyone around you.
The "good" news is you won't have to deal with this much longer. Claude, which this person basically admitted through their behavior, will replace 99% of the offshore devs in the next couple years. Then you won't have to get the ick from talking to them and they can go back to having no real economic prospects in a 3rd world country, and most likely lose the social and economic standing they had from having a good job.
You can’t fix hallucinations if you don’t even know what the code does. In my experience working with dozens of firms, offshore do not give a single damn about understanding. Frankly, their job security rests on nobody understanding what the code does. If they can inflict the brain damage on your organization so they can keep billing you in the future they will absolutely do it.
Oh a lot of onshore developers are going to be gone too.
I think I've worked with close to 200 software engineers close enough to get a good understanding of their abilities in my 20+ years in the industry. I think the current version of claude and chatgpt are more effective at writing code than about 85%, maybe up to 95% of them. That is to say, if you let me hire any of them for the cost of my Claude Max + Chatgpt subscriptions ($400 a month), I would probably hire less than 5% of them at that cost. I get more done, and with higher quality using Claude by myself than I would with a team of 50 average software engineers, and it takes less of my time to do it.
The industry is going to get rocked.
I think a company that right now has 10-20 full time software engineers will have 2-3 in 5 years, and realistically 2 of those 3 aren't necessary to get the coding done, they are there so you have coverage over vacations and redundancy when someone leaves.
The only reason I think offshore is going to be completely eliminated is it's too high friction to work with them. They are far away, you have to hire a firm to manage them which means hiring a manager on site as overhead, and they are awake when you are asleep (or pretending to be awake when you are awake).
Funny. I was just this joking this morning with a colleague about using Postgres for everything.
Considering adding mongo for unstructured data? Just use postgres jsonb.
Building a search index? Postgres is fine too.
Considering using redis for fragment caching? Just use an unlogged table in postgres with key value columns. Need pub/sub? Well just use postgres listen/notify.
Using postgres for everything has served me very well.
> ASCII drawings in code
Please don’t this is super obnoxious. Make proper diagrams and kee them in knowledge base. Link out to them if you need to and let the agent fetch them via MCP or API or whatever if it wants them.
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