Let engineers enjoy the benefits of AI
Companies are pushing AI everywhere.
Into departments: product, design, tech, customer service, ops, fraud detection….
Into they organization processess. How teams interact with each other. How people interact with each other.
Now everything it’s all AI-mediated.
Voxium, writes on twitter (highlight is mine):
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
Right and fast
I’m seeing a shift on how companies work nowadays.
5 years ago, Qonto was using the Toyota Management System, which is people-centered, with continuous improvement in their processes. Finished working products were valued. We had project-planning phases, where it was decided what to build, why, and at what cost. We were doing things right the first time. We were focusing in one project at a time, until completion. We were keeping technical scalability down. We took the time.
CRAP Score as deterministic AI quality gate
AI produces code fast. The code generated is non-deterministic. Code complexity tends to increase.
Any new project started using AI, looks good. Until it doesn’t. It decays very fast without human steering.
Providing contextual style-guides, or rules as Markdown doesn’t work. You expect deterministic outputs from a non-deterministic process.
AI will either edit your current program, or extend it.
On edit, it will often reuse the same style and standards in the codebase its modifying.