“I am done with this shit”: developers say AI has stripped the pride from their work
A viral Reddit thread on r/ClaudeAI captures a growing burnout among developers and other white-collar workers. The consensus: AI tools have turned them into “organic vessels” who just press enter, erasing any sense of victory or pride in their work. Many blame toxic management demanding impossible speed, while a vocal minority insists it’s a company culture problem, not an AI problem.
Basically, you're all just condoms between Claude and your production server getting fucked.
- prologic
To be honest, this is less about Claude Code per se (or any other coding agent) and more about business and corporate culture. In my experience, if you work at a company whose culture is to deliver as fast as possible, then this is ultimately what you get when those same managers start to realize we can also ship 10x faster (no matter the costs). The "Delivery Pressure" is very real in _some_ corporations, and I _believe_ things like Claude/Codex just accelerate this even more, which is what we're seeing in some places. In a fast-place industry, can you blame 'em?
- NichoPaolucci
It's very interesting that this has become such a dichotomy.
On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
The other side is this complete, absolute disconnect from the job function, absolute dissatisfaction, empty feeling where the whole world is burning.
- Buttons840
We need a way to interleave our own notes into the source code.
It's like Bible study, everyone studies the same Bible, but everyone wants to have their own highlights and notes.
Some might say to use comments, but my Monday morning chain-of-thought doesn't belong in a comment.
I want a way to do literate coding. I want to interleave writings, and drawings, and editable code snippets that point to actual code in the code base -- and I want to see when those code snippets are stale, or have been edited by other developers (or agents).
I want a way to build up some artifact of my understanding that I control, that exists primarily to aid my understanding, and isn't constantly shifting as a thousand LLMs pass through the actual codebase changing everything.
The code used to be the canvas of the programmer. Now programmers have no canvas. They need a canvas. They can't understand things without a canvas to hold their thoughts.
- arijun
Theres something ironic about the top comment being an AI summary of everything, so I don’t have think or synthesize a view for myself.
- wookmaster
I find it wild companies were so ready to ship intellectual property to another company. I sort of thought they would experiment then use all the massive RAM on our Mac books to implement something more local we can use and keeps our stuff out of another companies hands but it was just Claude Claude Claude tokenmax tokenmax tokenmax.
- Havoc
>In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs.
Thing is that's the goal (owners/management), not an unwanted side effect (programmers perspective). You can't get rid of workers if you're still dependent on their thinking. This pain is seen as a necessary step towards the promised land of profitability without pesky salaries, demands for foosball tables and RSUs.
This will get pushed by the powers that be...code base quality & people's feelings be damned.
Brave new world...hold on.
- causal
Sounds like it would have been a terrible place to work even before LLMs. And I bet they aren’t actually shipping much.
- sdcfgy
We are there. I’ve got fuck you money in the bank. I’m just kicking back waiting for the company to fail. It’s free money until then. Make up some shit and go back to doing other stuff.
They have lost money for the last two quarters, customer satisfaction is at an all time low, staff morale is gone, defects are piled up, costs are escalating on tokens and cloud, nothing is getting done but everyone thinks it is.
Let it burn.
We need a total reset. The entire market is overblown, overhyped and sells things nobody needs. Layers and layers of stupid to get nothing done. It’s an extraction economy. I’ve seen people replace simple stuff like a spreadsheet with a cloud hosted vibe coded turd. What the fuck is wrong with people?!? Have we collectively forgotten simple and elegant solutions?