Comment by throwatdem12311 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwatdem12311 | Hacker News Reader

throwatdem12311

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.

I know what people from their country think of the people from mine so I won’t be losing sleep over it.

Or you’ve got it backwards. Claude et al. with offshore developers to fix hallucinations and verify answers will replace onshore developers.

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).

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