alt Hacker NewsIt has made my job an awful slog, and my personal projects move faster.
At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the main project. It also included a ton of stuff you don’t need in the first pass - a ton of error checking and hand-rolled parsing, etc, that I had to spend over a week unrolling so that I could trim it down and redesign it to work in the main codebase. It was a slog, and it also made me look bad because it took me forever compared to the team who originally churned it out almost instantly. AI tools are not good at this kind of design deconflicting task, so while it’s easy to get the initial concept out the gate almost instantly, you can’t just magically fit it into the bigger codebase without facing the technical debt you’ve generated.
In my personal projects, I get to experience a bit of the fun I think others are having. You can very quickly build out new features, explore new ideas, etc. You have to be thoughtful about the design because the codebase can get messy and hard to build on. Often I design the APIs and then have Claude critique them and implement them.
I think the future is bleak for people in my spot professionally – not junior, but also not leading the team. I think the middle will be hollowed out and replaced with principals who set direction, coordinate, and execute. A privileged few will be hired and developed to become leaders eventually (or strike gold with their own projects), but everyone in between is in trouble.
Replies
I think you need coding style guide files in each repo, including preferred patterns & code examples. Then you will see less and less of that.
> did not obey the API design of the main project
If they're handing you broken code call them out on it. Say this doesn't do what it says it does, did you want me to create a story for redoing all this work?
Just reply with this to every AI programming task: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
It's just plain unprofessional to just YOLO shit with AI and force actual humans to read to code even if the "author" hasn't read it.
Also API design etc. should be automatically checked by tooling and CI builds, and thus PR merges, should be denied until the checks pass.
> It was a slog, and it also made me look bad because it took me forever compared to the team who originally churned it out almost instantly.
The hell you are playing hero for? Delegate the choice to manager: ruin the codebase or allocate two weeks for clean-up - their choice. If the magical AI team claim they can do integration faster - let them.
> At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up.
This has to be the most thankless job for the near future. It's hard and you get about as much credit as the worker who cleans up the job site after the contractors are done, even though you're actually fixing structural defects.
And god forbid you introduce a regression bug cleaning up some horrible redundant spaghetti code.
I've heard of human engineers who are like that. "10x", but it doesn't actually work with the environment it needs to work in. But they sure got it to "feature complete" fast. The problem is, that's a long way from "actually done".
If you dont take a stand and refuse to clean their mess, aren't you part of the problem? No self respecting proponent of AI enabled development should suggest that the engineers generating the code are still not personally responsible for its quality.