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Will Claude Code ruin our team?

justinjackson.ca

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Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#31

Post by oezi »

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.

Well in 2 years AI will have so advanced that none of this matters.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#33

Post by threethirtytwo »

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…

No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It is not universal like car driving.

The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable. Anyone can do it. The reason why these jobs are segregated is because society is under the delusion that these are special skills that require intense training when at most he training is equivalent to learning how to drive.

Some of you may be thinking I’m insane but there are tons of jobs that are like this. The presidency for example. You can be senile and insane and still be president. The country doesn’t blow up just because you’re insane. Or maybe this isn’t a good characterization.

Hmm electrician or plumber is the better comparison. The skill level required to be a PM or designer is equivalent to electrician or plumber. Anyone can pick it up with training. It’s not rocket science folks.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#34

Post by tuan »

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.

> absorb lessons

That maybe correct for some lessons. Many lessons you have to learn the hard way to really absorb them.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#35

Post by 1123581321 »

I’m mainly concerned about communication worsening. If a former engineer, designer and PM all want to do the same job now, the results will be fine, excellent, even, but only if they communicate and build together better than they used to. People who only communicated along the lines provided by the design of their role or organization have new skills to learn.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#36

Post by paulhebert »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #33
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…

No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice. I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It…

Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take.

I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills.

Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design.

I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference in your mind?

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#37

Post by nurettin »

I think it will enhance everyone.

PMs can't develop, since llm development (adding code to whatever the llm initially spat out) still consumes time and effort, but they can now write a PoC without devs and quickly get it up and running without sys ops.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#38

Post by what »

xlbuttplug2 wrote: post #19
Spivak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less armchair speculating about the observable outcome, that people are losing their jobs, but the why. AI coding tools aren't making 10x developers, they aren't even making 1.5x developers. They also aren't making "PMs who code" or "designers who code." It would be really cool if this was the case, I would be singing the praises of these tools finally realizing Stallman's dream of end users who can take…

> they aren't even making 1.5x developers I won't try to speak for anyone other than myself, but my multiplier is definitely over 1.5x, probably higher than 5x. I choose to sit on my hands in my freed up time so upper management does not catch on to and exploit this fact. Eventually they will though via overzealous coworkers.

It’s not hard to 5x your productivity when you were close to zero to start with.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#39

Post by sefrost »

moregrist wrote: post #23
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.

> 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 th…

If that’s how this works out then perhaps Accenture will be okay after all.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#40

Post by blehn »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #33
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…

No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice. I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It…

> It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc

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