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Will Claude Code ruin our team?

justinjackson.ca

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Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#21

Post by bob001 »

avaer wrote: post #4

I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago. My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore. Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at y…

If a startup is laying off engineers then it’s dead in the water. That means it’s not growing and focused on cost cutting at the expense of velocity. Thats what a large company does. The issue isn’t AI but the startup fundamentally being broken and this being a last gasp for air before it dies.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#22

Post by idontwantthis »

overgard wrote: post #3

I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion. A…

Do people really think like that? I see the other people at my company as human beings solving complex problems whether they are an engineer, a manager, an exec, or HR.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#23

Post by moregrist »

suzzer99 wrote: post #7
avaer wrote: post #4

I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago. My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore. Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at y…

We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?" Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.

> Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.

Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#24

Post by Tallain »

satvikpendem wrote: post #10
suzzer99 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?" Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.

I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.

I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#25

Post by mijustin »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #17

This naturally seems to indicate smaller teams will become more normal. Many of my clients are blown away by what our teams can do with 1 senior engineer now. Anything below enterprise level software should be thinking very hard about what team composition actually needs to look like to achieve good results. It's likely a lot smaller headcount than it used to be.

I definitely think teams will be getting smaller, and will become even more outcome oriented.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#26

Post by xrd »

One phrase stuck with me from this: "they'll start to absorb lessons that it took their colleagues decades to learn."

I think the point of failure now will hinge on the willingness of teams to admit what they don't know. The ones that don't won't be saved by Claude.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#27

Post by satvikpendem »

Tallain wrote: post #24
satvikpendem wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.

I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?

It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#28

Post by reverius42 »

peter_mcrae wrote: post #11
toomanyrichies wrote: post #5

As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to. I recognize the necessary evil that is Zoom calls and face-to-face time in the larger context of running a business, but I also know what…

When the product marketer, product manager, and designer are the same person there is no alignment meeting.

In my experience at BigCorp, Inc., "alignment meetings" are for meeting with other teams, not for meeting with your own team. You'd just call that a "team meeting", "feature crew meeting", "leads meeting" (if it's just leads), or something to that effect. In BigCorp, Inc. you traditionally need to have both kinds of meetings somewhat regularly. Not sure how the advent of AI will change that structure.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#29

Post by mijustin »

xrd wrote: post #26

One phrase stuck with me from this: "they'll start to absorb lessons that it took their colleagues decades to learn." I think the point of failure now will hinge on the willingness of teams to admit what they don't know. The ones that don't won't be saved by Claude.

What’s changed now, with AI, is that you can have compressed learning cycles. Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before.

Admitting when you don’t know something has always been important; but the ability to build, deploy, and find out has never been greater.

Instead of theorizing about what might work, you can just build it and find out.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#30

Post by 827a »

I think the reality is that these tools are good enough that, to some degree, all three of the roles are correct, everyone is now definitely more able to do others' roles, leadership knows this, and even if there's a period of inefficiency or overwork or lower quality output, there's going to be a drive toward collapsing responsibilities. OpenAI saw this early: Member of Technical Staff. The degree to which this negatively impacts the team or company's output is really a function of (1) how drastically leadership does layoffs, (2) how quickly models and agents continue to improve, and (3) how earnestly leadership can admit mistakes and backfill humans when they realize they've over-fired.

In other words: Yes it will ruin our team.

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