Engineer says Claude Code has made his job "soul-sucking"
techspot.com
techspot.com
That said, I think this article underscores the fact that software engineering as a discipline is already unrecognizable from what it was like even a few years ago. You now have to be more into architecture and directing how the AI development tools write out your code.
I know a guy who works at Amazon, and the models at OpenAI and Anthropic are so good that he doesn’t even really write code in the classic sense anymore. However, because of his background and experience, he does know what he should expect and if an output matches the quality he wants, versus just blindly trusting the AI tool.
In our world, you have to adapt or die. It’s that simple.
"I know a guy", what a weird thing to say in October 2026. I don't think I know anyone who still writes code in the classic sense.
People write code for all sorts of reasons, it's not a monolithic or uniform activity.
boss doesn't know or care. i just get plus perf reviews and raises so it's chill. my perf reviews are actually trending up since opus 4.5 so i'm feeling good actually.
i think smart people crave an adult in the room in these infantile psychotic times
The question on peoples' minds is, will you be able to find another 300k job if you get laid off?
I suspect that literacy will not go down, but what we become literate in will change. Just as compilers reduced literacy in assembly language, automatic code generation will reduce literacy in code syntax. But then, other forms of literacy will replace that. High level system design, etc.
Everyone working in SW before AI was also an autodidact since you always had to learn things on your own to stay employable. I don't know many now still making a living exclusively on what they learned 30+ years ago and nothing else.
There was no economically justifiable reason for me to learn about compilers, operating systems, and even CMOS VLSI. But I couldn't be satisfied writing software without knowing how those things worked. I taped out a chip in which all the polygons drawn by deterministic software I'd eithe written or understood. No place+route. It was the 2000s version of non-AI coding in the 2030s -- standard cell placement is essentially gradient descent.
Some people just have to know how it works.
The history of, 'No one will know how to do anything and the industry will collapse' is almost as old as programming itself.
1 Edsger Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (EWD 498, 1975) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498...
2. John Backus, "The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III" (1978) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800025.1198345
3. Dijkstra, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...
4. Alan Perlis, "Epigrams on Programming" (1982) Specifically #93 https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1982-perlis.pdf
5. Joel Spolsky, "The Perils of JavaSchools" (2005) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
But don’t you think these were just complaints about higher levels of abstractions? We still had to learn lower levels in school.
AI and tbh society in general just invalidates the economic viability of learning what’s under the foundations.
It was ever thus, learning the foundations of basically anything was never economically rational. I mean, I'd have been much better off learning product marketing rather than working my way through Volume 1 of Knuth's TAOCP.
And yet, I still did the non economically rational thing.
But our "civilization" is coming to an end. The most evident bits to me are the falling birthrates and what I would call a kind of despair among people. No one is trying anymore from what I can see. Seems like the soul-sucking was successful: the machine has our souls now.
I can work on this "soul-sucking" job, but what of the next gen?
How about letting them decide? Problem solved for you and them.
Do you at least have any self reflection on the fact that you were also part of the problem? Like what do you think happens to the job market when everyone in the last ~15 years tells their kids to go into SW engineering?
>but what of the next gen?
What jobs did previous gen did before the ZIRP and smartphone era created a once-in-a-lifetime demand boom of SW devs?
I keep checking back on LLMs every couple months and while they are now great for figuring out bugs in a system I don’t know much about (say in my use of a framework I’ve never used before), it’s been super helpful. But whenever I have it write a lot of code, even in a not huge project, it mostly works but it’s like a gum and popsicle stick machine gun and I’m scared of what large org code bases will look like in a few years.
Oh they will, once they get laid off and need to start interviewing again.
> it’s near impossible to tell who is cheating
Ask them to answer with their eyes closed?
> Ask them to answer with their eyes closed?
These are senior and principal engineers that we want on our team. I fear being distrusting like this is a terrible first step and might dissuade them from joining.
Indeed he should, but I think the unspoken part of the post was that when everyone is now a monkey pressing enter in claude and not reading any code, like OP self identifies, then you also have no leverage to jump to a better job.
Only programmers who can code as good or better as AI, without using AI, will have the leverage, but those are not most programmers now.
For context, I have been programming for 25 years now, mainly out of self interest.
I find joy in relegating mundane tasks to claude, while working on the broader picture with my trusty pen and paper.
I don't give "Build me this end to end" type tasks.
I do the program on paper. The architectural aspects. And instruct claude to flesh out lower level stuff.
Product-minded software engineers are thriving. Less tedium, easier refactors, manageable scope creep.
The “hard” part of engineering has moved up to higher level challenges: evals, sandboxes, etc
Sure, automating away things that would otherwise just be basically copy/pasted anyway have always been fine, but this is a very different scale.
It is interesting how people can differ in terms of disposition though.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that one disposition is better or worse than another objectively, but rather that I subjectively find impatient, superficial, consumption-driven people extremely dull, which I also tend to associate with people who mostly care about the result. Additionally, I believe that this focus on the production of more and faster is a non-trivial contribution to producing things that have no longevity or are otherwise enshittified. The less we're involved in the intimate details of a thing, the less we're inclined to care, and the less it's even acceptable to care about quality.
I agree that there's a decent overlap here, and that your point stands. But there's a lot of merit in getting real products out there, vibe coded or not. Market forces then dictate value.
And I have always found that a little hollow, and depressingly capitalist within tech.
Getting to the end product so much faster with so little friction really pushes the boundaries of what you can actually build. It's exciting (Also kind of ominous for obvious reasons)
Telling the AI to go, say... sort out all the IAM stuff for some new feature you're building is actually incredible.
If you're gonna break the HN rules with overused doomerist low quality reddit-level snark, at least try to make it funny or intelligent so we can have a giggle.
How so? You think AI will design and build cars, boats and planes or do your plumbing? Good luck with that.
>and I don't think most programmers have what it takes to do skilled labor
Only the fakers and opportunists who lucked into the industry without any effort, and then lucked lucked some more into avoiding getting laid off.
Those who got into the industry because they actually have critical thinking will have no issues staying in the industry or pivoting into other industries.
AI already does all of these things except the plumbing.
>Those who got into the industry because they actually have critical thinking will have no issues staying in the industry or pivoting into other industries.
The vast majority of people got into the industry because they could make six figures right out of high school and roll the dice on retiring a billionaire before 30.
The reality of end-stage capitalism is going to hit most programmers like a brick to the face.
What's an example of a specific job that will soon no longer exist because of AI?
Designed? I'm not sure. An architect or engineer of some sort I suppose. Someone who has credentials that i can't afford to go back k and get at this point in my life.
Built? I live in a very old house right now. Not sure who may have built it then. Probably the same people often building houses now, poor immigrants who had some issue preventing them from working a better job or trade.
> Who designed and built your cars, planes, boats, etc?
Cheap workers in foreign countries? Maybe some of the plane ans boat stuff if done domestically and is a little more lucrative though. I'll give you that.
> Who fixes your HVAC or plumbing?
The guy my slumlord sent to fix my plumbing complained to me about the state of his government housing. But i suppose according to HN he must just be pocketing his six figure salary and scamming the government.
So rather than insisting that more review time is needed, teams should set success criteria and a set of reference examples to compare the outcomes against.
As long as there are clear criteria, there is no need to worry about what AI produces; ambiguous parts can simply be left to human judgment.