If you have such toxic environment, run.
The whole industry is adjusting to the reality that the expected output of an engineer is much higher than it used to be. It’s not local to one company. You may find a better environment for the time being, but this is the direction everything is headed.
While they obviously want a high quality product, no outages, a responsive system etc, I don’t think they necessarily understand why you need to avoid creating god-objects, need to reason about abstractions, etc.
Most environments only care about the output. In the case I'm thinking of, Software made it perfectly clear to Management, most of whom were former engineers, that the product desperately needed redesign in some ways. But as long as the cost of that redesign exceeded the cost to get the next version out, it could be postponed. This went on for years.
It’ll take production incidents, impacted customers, and brand damage to make the executives start to prioritize quality over quantity again.
Besides, it's probably counterproductive in the long run to think of strong worker rights as being opposed to the employer wanting higher productivity out of the worker.
The expectation of higher productivity measured by completely useless means, letting a highly qualified employee jump through hoops for the amusement and misconceptions of the C-level.
But I'd agree that everyone can start planning a career shift that'll span a few months to some years in order to seek better working conditions. Passively accepting all work degradation because that's life and money is needed is partly responsible for the current situation too.
Coding faster leads to less understanding and higher long-term risk. Source-Code amnesia is real, and there’s a time requirement to really understand and appreciate what a system is actually doing.
I’ve been able to implement very large features using frontier models, but the code needs to always be revisited.
AI can do two things: find vulnerabilities, and prototype code. It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best.
We don’t need to produce faster to be successful, we need to create better, long lasting products.
This is why I have switched nearly all of my personal coding experiments over to Qwen3.6 27B. Opus make it easy to gloss over too much and to delegate too much. And so I don't build sufficient memory of the code to provide long-term oversight.
But Qwen3.6 27B sits on an really interesting balance point. It understands code well enough to get 80% of the way to a good design, and it can fully implement a well-specified feature. But if my understanding of the code starts to weaken, things start going wrong much more quickly than they do with Claude.
Opus will happily take complex code beyond the point of salvation, if you allow it. I'm currently cleaning up a successful prototype code base right now, one that was partially vibe-coded and now needs to be put into production. And Opus generated massive amounts of tech debt. So clearly people who lean into vibe coding will need to keep upgrading their models for many years to keep up with the mess created by earlier models.
Opus is relegated to the planning / design phase.
Have you tried Claude Opus 4.7?
For example you might have a great design/architecture session and then run out of context. The next agent tries to piece things together from fragments of conversation and such. But it often starts going off on tangents, searching overly broad to understand, misses cues and nuance, all-the-while burning tokens.
As other articles have put it: AI makes doing the easy things easier and the hard things harder. Because hard things require creativity.
To bring this back to the original post: companies need people, and they shouldn’t expect that they can fire half their workforce and replace it with AI. Quite the contrary. The faster companies move with AI the more technical debt they’ll end up with it’s a guarantee.
“If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go together.”
Copilot switches to API pricing starting next month (let's see how long it will last for our $39, and $19 since September), Anthropic switches all corps into API based pricing. From the most popular choices I think only Codex didn't switch yet (although it is hard to tell because I don't know their enterprise pricing).
I have DS-V4-Pro agents pretty much running 24/7. The cost is inconsequential. The same cannot be said for anything from Anthropic.
Consumer sentiment is in the gutters certainly. But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent
Oh hell no, ever since the tail end of Biden the trend for unemployment is showing upwards when corrected for seasonal effects [1], and for real wage growth the situation has been worse for an even longer time [2] - if not for the effects of the post covid stimulus packages plus emergency wage raises following the energy cost explosion thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The story the stonk markets tell is completely decoupled from reality, partially because the AI wash trading bubble keeps distorting the statistics, partially because no matter what the stonk markets only can grow up because pension contributions keep blowing up the market [3]. Not getting that difference was what blew up Biden's reelection and is now screwing over Trump.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
[2] https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/data/wage-growt...