If you’re sitting under a tree in the rain and it gets soaked through and you start getting wet, finding another tree won’t help you.
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.
It doesn’t necessarily mean shipping faster either. Speeding up code production doesn’t mean it speeds up qa, compliance, and the litany of other things. Everyone seems to forget Amdahl’s law.
Code quality matters to engineers. Find a senior manager who cares. Or worse, find a customer who cares.
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.
Code quality also exists on different axes. I've seen the case where code quality was poor in some aspects, e.g., tons of technical debt, coupling making it difficult to make changes, but overall product quality was very high. It had to be: it was a medical device.
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.
On a task by task basis the code Claude generates is pretty good these days.
The biggest issue I see is that it wants to rearchitect the code constantly and I have no faith in my tests anymore because Claude will just "fix" them
Thats why they said they optimize for effective output at the cost of higher token use. They didn’t say they are intending to have high token use, instead thet implied its a second order effect of seeking more effective output.
As one that does, it’s a difficult discussion to have with the executives. My peers look like their teams are producing more than my teams are and any argument along the lines of “but their code sucks” isn’t going to hold water. The executives care but until there’s actual impact or poor quality, it won’t matter, and it’s a lagging metric. Many still don’t care about technical debt and that’s been well understood in industry for a while.
It’ll take production incidents, impacted customers, and brand damage to make the executives start to prioritize quality over quantity again.
American software engineers are paid commensurately more than equivalent roles in countries with strong worker rights. There is no free lunch.
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.
Well, if we are talking the worldwide software development industry, FAANG-like salaries are a tiny exception. There are so many places without strong worker rights and without a high premium for workers.
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.
It’s too bad that, yet again, instead of the productivity gains leading to shorter work weeks, the benefits accrue to the companies. Just once I’d like to see productivity gains lead to more leisure time, not higher expectation.
Maybe once we get universal income we can start recommending this. Until then the individual isn't to blame when the only option to keep providing is to keep grinding in a toxic environment.
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.
Perhaps for now. But you know, after working solid with AI for two years and adopting effective methods using detailed plans, and having a lot of success with it, here is the problem:
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.
> 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.
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.
Strong agree (although I'm on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with 6-bit quant.). If you're a programmer, it gets the job done. When I occasionally don't want to care about the code, I switch over to DeepSeek V4 Pro.
Yes I use Opus 4.7 regularly as my daily AI tool. It can do incredible things for sure, but more in the sense of pure intellect not much in “emotional” or “creative” intelligence.
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.”
Now as you can see from the article, it starts turning. People are getting less pricey than agents on API pricing.
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).
What is in the gutters is memories of 2008-2010. That was the last time folks experienced a bad economy. I remember Ed Elson saying something along the lines of "who cares about employment, what matters is inflation". Sure, if you're 27, you haven't got a clue what a bad economy looks like.
Unemployment and CPI : The most false statistics on the planet. Instead, look at employment population ratio 25-54, and core inflation. That will FREE YOUR MIND.
> 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.
If you’re sitting under a tree in the rain and it gets soaked through and you start getting wet, finding another tree won’t help you.
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.
I don’t disagree that the expectations are higher, but token output hardly correlates to code output worthy of merging.
It doesn’t necessarily mean shipping faster either. Speeding up code production doesn’t mean it speeds up qa, compliance, and the litany of other things. Everyone seems to forget Amdahl’s law.
Code quality matters to engineers. Find a senior manager who cares. Or worse, find a customer who cares.
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.
Code quality also exists on different axes. I've seen the case where code quality was poor in some aspects, e.g., tons of technical debt, coupling making it difficult to make changes, but overall product quality was very high. It had to be: it was a medical device.
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.
Code quality directly correlates to everything you describe.
Yea, but I’m not sure customers or mgmt get that
As code quality goes down, so does productivity, as it becomes more difficult to add new features and there are more bugs introduced.
Nobody cares until the code gets so twisted in knots that bugs and security issues predominate.
Exactly. As long as poor code quality doesn't make a difference in the actual usage of the product, no-one but the engineers will care.
On a task by task basis the code Claude generates is pretty good these days. The biggest issue I see is that it wants to rearchitect the code constantly and I have no faith in my tests anymore because Claude will just "fix" them
I think some tests should be considered to be part of the specification rather than the product.
Thats why they said they optimize for effective output at the cost of higher token use. They didn’t say they are intending to have high token use, instead thet implied its a second order effect of seeking more effective output.
They don't care about quality as long as it works enough. It's a clown show all the way through.
As one that does, it’s a difficult discussion to have with the executives. My peers look like their teams are producing more than my teams are and any argument along the lines of “but their code sucks” isn’t going to hold water. The executives care but until there’s actual impact or poor quality, it won’t matter, and it’s a lagging metric. Many still don’t care about technical debt and that’s been well understood in industry for a while.
It’ll take production incidents, impacted customers, and brand damage to make the executives start to prioritize quality over quantity again.
*the whole industry in countries without strong worker rights
American software engineers are paid commensurately more than equivalent roles in countries with strong worker rights. There is no free lunch.
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.
Well, if we are talking the worldwide software development industry, FAANG-like salaries are a tiny exception. There are so many places without strong worker rights and without a high premium for workers.
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.
It’s too bad that, yet again, instead of the productivity gains leading to shorter work weeks, the benefits accrue to the companies. Just once I’d like to see productivity gains lead to more leisure time, not higher expectation.
Be careful what you are wishing for. All the leisure time you would want while having no job or money could be the future we are heading for.
Fair point. Though I don’t think time without money is really leisure time :)
Maybe once we get universal income we can start recommending this. Until then the individual isn't to blame when the only option to keep providing is to keep grinding in a toxic environment.
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.
Where to, that's the question. The economy is in the gutters and the replace-people-with-AI craze is making the issue even worse.
Perhaps for now. But you know, after working solid with AI for two years and adopting effective methods using detailed plans, and having a lot of success with it, here is the problem:
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.
> 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.
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.
Strong agree (although I'm on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with 6-bit quant.). If you're a programmer, it gets the job done. When I occasionally don't want to care about the code, I switch over to DeepSeek V4 Pro.
Opus is relegated to the planning / design phase.
> It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best.
Have you tried Claude Opus 4.7?
Yes I use Opus 4.7 regularly as my daily AI tool. It can do incredible things for sure, but more in the sense of pure intellect not much in “emotional” or “creative” intelligence.
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.”
Now as you can see from the article, it starts turning. People are getting less pricey than agents on API pricing.
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).
The Chinese models are going to look really attractive.
I have DS-V4-Pro agents pretty much running 24/7. The cost is inconsequential. The same cannot be said for anything from Anthropic.
> The economy is in the gutters
Consumer sentiment is in the gutters certainly. But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
What is in the gutters is memories of 2008-2010. That was the last time folks experienced a bad economy. I remember Ed Elson saying something along the lines of "who cares about employment, what matters is inflation". Sure, if you're 27, you haven't got a clue what a bad economy looks like.
Unemployment and CPI : The most false statistics on the planet. Instead, look at employment population ratio 25-54, and core inflation. That will FREE YOUR MIND.
It's easy when you can just lie. The data from phone surveys is increasingly divergent from the delayed payroll data.
> 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...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233492
And open positions are simply because someone decided to run from that place