[raw_anon_1111]

Your company isn’t paying you to solve puzzles. If you aren’t putting things into production, what good are you as an employee?

> Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.

Claude very much learns if you teach it and tell it to note things in the CLAUDE.md files you want it to remember. Claude is much better than any junior and most mid level ticket takers.

[bayindirh]

> Your company isn’t paying you to solve puzzles. If you aren’t putting things into production, what good are you as an employee?

No, the company is exactly paying their employees to solve puzzles, which company labels them as problems or requirements.

And when an employee focuses on solving puzzles and enjoys it, the code naturally ends up in production, and gets forgotten because the puzzle is solved well.

[raw_anon_1111]

And if they could solve the problem faster with AI?

But there is no “puzzle” to solving most enterprise problems as far as code - just grind.

And code doesn’t magically go from dev to production without a lot of work and coordination in between.

[bluefirebrand]

> And if they could solve the problem faster with AI

It's such a shame that everyone only cares about "faster" and not "better"

What a shameful mentality. Absolutely zero respect for quality or craftsmanship, only speed

[raw_anon_1111]

I care about exchanging labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

My employer just like any other employer cares about keeping up with the competition and maximizing profit.

Customers don’t care about the “craftsmanship” of your code - aside from maybe the UI. But if you are a B2B company where the user is not the customer, they probably don’t even care about that.

I bet you most developers here are using the same set of Electron apps.

[bluefirebrand]

Yes, what you are describing is both true and also highlights how bankrupt we are as a society

Just because things are this way doesn't mean they should be or that we should just accept that they must always be this way

[raw_anon_1111]

Now I work in consulting AWS + app dev as a staff consultant leading ironed and unless you work in the internal consulting department at AWS (been there done that as blue badge RSU earning employee) or GCP, it’s almost impossible to get a job as an American as anything but sales or a lead. It’s a race to the bottom with everyone hiring in LatAm if you are lucky (same time zone more willing to push back against bad idea and more able to handle ambiguity) or India.

Everything is a race to the bottom. The only way I can justify not being in presales is because I can now do the work of 3 people with AI.

[notpachet]

A Russian word for this is "пофигизм" -- the cynical belief that everything is fucked, so why bother.

[skydhash]

There still is. In most enterprises, the tasks are usually to take some data somewhere, transform it to be the intake of another process. Or to made a tweak to an existing process. Most of the other types of problems (information storage, communication, accounting,..) have been solved already (and solved before the digital world).

People can see it as grind. But the pleasure comes in solving the meta problem instead of the one in front (the latter always create brittle systems). But I agree that it can becomes hell if there were no care in building the current systems.

[raw_anon_1111]

And they are tasks with standardized best practices. I knew that I wanted to write an internal web app that allowed users to upload a file to S3 using Lambda and storing the CSV rows into Postgres.

I just told it to do it.

It got the “create S3 pre-signed url to upload it to” right. But then it did the naive implementation of download the file and do a bulk upsetting wrong instead of “use the AWS extension to Postgres and upload it to S3”. Once I told it to do that, it knew what to do.

But still I cared about systems and architecture and not whether it decided to use a for loop or while loop.

Knowing that or knowing how best to upload files to Redshift or other data engineering practices aren’t knew or novel

[skydhash]

They aren’t. But there are a lot of mistakes that can happen, and until an AI workflow is proven that it can’t happen, it’s best to monitor it, and then the speed increase is moot. Hunans can make the same kind of mistakes, but they are incentivized not to (loosing reputation and their jobs). AI tools don’t have that lever against them.

[raw_anon_1111]

And so are mid level developers. A mid level developer who didn’t have 8 years of experience with AWS would have made the same mistake without my advice.

I would have been just as responsible for their inefficient implementation in front of the customer (consulting) as I would be with Claude and it would have been on me to guide the mid level developer just like it was on me to guide Claude.

The mid level developer would never have been called out for it in front of my customer (consulting) or in front of my CTO when I was working for a product company. Either way I was the responsible individual

[nly]

> Your company isn’t paying you to solve puzzles.

Actually they are, but it's also true that you need to put solutions in to production.

[raw_anon_1111]

No your company is very much paying you to put things in production. Thats all they care about

[bayindirh]

No the company wants its problems to be solved and needs to be addressed.

When things are put to production as soon as possible without respect to quality, we see what's happening all the time.

Bloat, performance problems, angry customers, Windows 11...

You get the idea.

[raw_anon_1111]

The reason your login is taking 45 seconds and your database is locking up with 10 concurrent users isn’t because developers didn’t write good code following the correct GOF pattern.

If companies cared about bloat and performance you wouldn’t see web apps with dozens of dependencies, cross platform mobile apps and Electron apps.

[nly]

Putting solutions in to production. Not "things". Honestly I'm sick of dogshit companies wanting something done yesterday but are happy to spend the next 2 years having engineers debug the consequences.

I've just written the fifth from-scratch version of a component at work. The requirements have never changed (it's a client library for a proprietary server, which has barely ever changed). I'm the 5th developer at the company to write a version of it.

All because nobody gave engineers the breathing room to factor the solution in to well thought out, testable, reusable components. Every version before is a spaghetti soup of code, mixing up unrelated functionality in to a handful of files.

No well thought out interfaces. No automated end-to-end testing, and no automated regression testing. The whole thing is dire and no managers give a fuck.

AI cannot solve for a lack of engineering culture. It can however produce trash faster than ever at these toxic shops.

[raw_anon_1111]

And this has nothing to do with AI like you said. On another project my vibe coded API that I designed I also didn’t look at a line of code besides the shell script I had Claude create to do the integration tests with curl.

On the other hand, AI doesn’t care about sloppy code. I haven’t done any serious web development since 2002, yet I created two decently featureful internal websites without looking at a line of code authenticated with Amazon Cognito. I doubt for the lifetime of this app, anyone will ever look at a line of code and make any changes using AI.