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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

> I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough.

And the tragedy is that this isn't sustainable, and we all involved deeply in tech know this. There is eventually going to be a big reality check the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality, not even with AI, because actual intelligence lies with us at least for now and for the foreseeable future. However when the rope eventually snaps these executives at best will fall upwards, with big severance bonuses and a list of "contributions" we have to be grateful for. We are the ones that will suffer through the next big layoffs.

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Unfortunately, I think this is correct. Such as it ever has been with technological change. The folks at the bottom bear the brunt of the dislocation and the folks at the top pat themselves on the back for being so forward looking and get huge payouts regardless of the actual results. Further, the folks at the top are always incentivized to go along with the herd of their peers because if it works then they were on the bandwagon, and if it doesn’t work, well then, how could they have known because “Everyone was deceived.”

> because if it works then they were on the bandwagon, and if it doesn’t work, well then, how could they have known because “Everyone was deceived.”

They call themselves "risk takers" to justify their high pay.

They are far too busy for that. They have pr people to say it for them.

  the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality

Most companies do not care about quality. _users_ who have to interact with that software will pay the price.

Exemple from one of the wealthiest company in existance, for one of its most strategic product: I was trying gemini-cli on some mcp servers just yesterday, with gemini-chat helping me configuring everything. In less than 10 minutes, I stumbled upon 3 or 4 different bugs. Eventually, even gemini-chat recommended that I throw gemini-cli in the bin and move on to another agent... That's the new norm.

How much creativity do you need to fix bugs in corporate code? Almost zero. It’s maintenance, not creative work. Nothing against it, it’s needed, but let’s be real, would anybody be really sad if this work is overtaken by LLMs? I certainly won’t be, let them do it.

> How much creativity do you need to fix bugs in corporate code? Almost zero.

Have you seen the state of current corp software? I'd say a lot of creativity is still very much needed. Let's see how long this is sustainable.

> would anybody be really sad if this work is overtaken by LLMs?

I'd not be sad about the job itself, but the dev which had a mortgage to pay but now is substituted by a machine churning crap code while their superiors get sore from patting themselves on the back.

IBM system/360 OS had more than 50,000 bugs which could not be fixed because fixing any single bug would introduce two new bugs. I fear that a lot of AI software systems will reach the same crapware state as IBM system/360 very very soon!

I know from personal experience that once you fix a bug introduced by Claude, Claude tries to recreate the bug every time he edits that code again!!

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