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What is described here closely resembles my experience too. My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months

What is described here closely resembles my experience too. My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When called out, he would result to personal attacks. After about 6 months, several people left and the ones who stayed went all in on AI. They've been building agentic workflows for the past 12 months in an effort to plug the gap from the competent members of staff leaving. The result, nothing of value has been released in the past 18 months. The business is cutting costs after wasting massive amounts on cloud compute on poorly designed solutions, making up for it by freezing hiring.

throwaway613746 5mo ago
[dead]
AIorNot 5mo ago
Yes I get your frustration, the same thing is happening across orgs these days as claude and co-work has become widespread. Wisdom is a thing, so is competence. Humans have it or they don't but machines do not (yet), but the massive capabilities of the tools are also something that can't be ignored. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's going to take some cycles of learning the ropes with this technology for humans to understand it better. I would push back -why couldn't the senior devs communicate these issues to senior management? It sounds like a broken human system not a broken tool or technology. All AI did was shine a light on the human issues on that org.
- saganus 5mo ago
  From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside. Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.
  - hn_acc1 5mo ago
    Over time, as devs get more experience, they have seen countless fads come and go. Some worked, some screwed things up, etc. - NONE were the silver bullet / savior that they were touted to be by adherents. So they learn a default "no" or "slowly" response to "we need to do this <buzzword> ASAP" from management who only see $$$. I mean AI companies are telling management that devs will resist AI because "it's so good it will let you replace them", so management is getting their views reinforced by devs saying it's a bad idea.
    - bonesss 5mo ago
      Yeah, the developers who will argue and teeth-gnash about using an ORM for weeks on the hope it will save a few hours perceived as boring or obvious are, simultaneously, annoyed and upset at being told to save time with super tools that save time and effort… Pay no attention to the software output or quality or competitive displacement of the people selling you tools. LLMs, like cheesy sales strategies, are something so lucrative the only thing you can really do is sell them first come first serve to other people. Makes so much sense. Why make infinite money when you can sell a course/tool to naive and less fortunate companies? So logical.
  - proofofcontempt 5mo ago
    The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.
    - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
      He doesn't care. When c suite gets fired they get like half a million in severance and go rinse and repeat somewhere else
      - dormento 5mo ago
        And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.
- yfw 5mo ago
  Have you not seen the principals and seniors being offered the door or buyouts?
ryandrake 5mo ago
I'm sure they're even more all-in on AI every month. "We will surely succeed if only we AI even harder!" This is how self-reinforcing delusions work. "AI will close the gap" is the fixed belief, and any evidence that comes in is interpreted such that it strengthens that belief.
- proofofcontempt 5mo ago
  Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited. Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind: - "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes up with the requirements, writes the tickets, and prioritises what to work on. We only need to give it a two or three line prompt" The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    > The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet. "We just need a swarm of many agents, all independently operating open-loop, creating and resolving tickets continuously. We will surely ship to production soon after implementing that!"
switchbak 5mo ago
I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt. I think we're going to see a real surge of companies just like this - crash and burn even though this tech was sold as being a universal improvement. The ones that survive will spread their knowledge about how to tame this wild horse, and ideally we'll learn a thing or two in the future. But the wave of naivety has surprised me, and I think there's an endless onrush of people that are overly excited about their new ability to vibe-code things into existence. I think we've got our own endless September event going on for the foreseeable future.
- vkou 5mo ago
  > I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict. It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off. The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.
- funimpoded 5mo ago
  I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers. It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.
  - deleted 5mo ago
krptos 5mo ago
I've personally witnessed this: 1. My own manager now gives "expert advice and suggestions" using Claude based on his/her incomplete understanding of the domain. 2. Multiple non-technical people within the company are developing internal software tools to be deployed org wide. Hoping such demos will get them their recognition and incentives that they deserve. Management as expected are impressed and approving such POCs. 3. Hyperactive colleagues showcasing expert looking demos that leadership buys. All the while has zero understanding of what's happening underneath. I didn't know how to articulate this problem well, but this article does a great job!
- a_victorp 5mo ago
  Same, the other day my manager sent a python script to create a jira ticket from some data to a team slack channel... as if no one else could figure that out or ask some LLM (sorry, I needed to vent)
a34729t 5mo ago
We don't need AI for not producing anything of value in a large company, though it certainly helps us produce even less!
gregrata 5mo ago
"hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything" Huh? 18 months ago? I've been using it that long - it wasn't able to do that back then....
- tomwojcik 5mo ago
  Agreed. Cursor has been released in 2023, but Claude Code and Sonnet in Feb 2025, right?
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  I had a similar situation 2 years ago. Correct these tools could not do those things, but people still used them for it. As well as diagnosing their dogs with cancer and whatever else.
- dolebirchwood 5mo ago
  > it wasn't able to do that back then It was, if you accept that it did so poorly.
2ndorderthought 5mo ago
I saw something really similar happen at my last few jobs. 2 jobs ago vibe coding wasn't even viable but some of the people went so hard on making everything so much more bloated with LLMs it was so hard to get yes or no answers for anything. 1 line slack, 20second question would get a response that was 2 pages of wishy washy blog posts with no answer. Follow ups generated more hours wasted. My last job we watched a PM slowly become a vibe manager of vibe coders. He started inserting himself into technical discussions and using ai to dictate our direction at every step. We would reply but it got so laborious fighting against a human translating ai about topics they didn't understand people left. We weren't allowed to push back anymore either or our jobs would get threatened due to AI. Then they started mandating everyone vibe coded and the amount of vibe coding as being monitored. The pm got so disorganized being a pm and an engineer and an architect(their choice no one wanted this)that they would make multiple tickets for the same task with wildly different requirements. One team member would then vibe code it one way and another would another way. It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work. I then left. I am trying my best to not be jaded by all of these changes to the software industry but it's a real struggle.
- towers 5mo ago
  The forcing of competent engineers to vibe code is something I’ll never understand. Also, I’ve heard rewriting people’s vibe coded efforts being a substantial issue, everything that engineers do nowadays seems to be code review.
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    It would be horrible to rewrite. Not the first commit or whatever. But after a few weeks of people not reading the code it looks more like a write only code base. I refused to go full vibe/agentic coding. So I got to see what was happening. This was only over a short period of time mind you. There was a lot of duplicate and triplicate methods. A lot of the classes were is-a related without inheritance, not the biggest deal but it was becoming a mess. Code I used to know well was more or less gone. It was rewritten in a way that wasn't the same approach and had lost lessons learned. Some of it had real battle wounds baked into it. Things qa passed the week before were broken in places no one thought they touched. A good deal of tests were useless or didn't mean anything for production. Code review is more or less impossible for me. I can read maybe a 1k line change. 20-30k changes all the time? You end up saying "sure buddy lgtm". We had someone put a 200kloc change for a new feature using a 3rd party tool no one had used before. No clue, but it was not my business apparently because we needed to be more individuals now that we were using AI
Traubenfuchs 5mo ago
My company hired a lead architect and he stayed with us for less than a year. He introduced some overengineered shit we are still recovering from. How those people get to where they are and get hired for that kind of position is beyond me.
- about3fitty 5mo ago
  I think this may be a consequence of hiring for a position with the word “architect” in it. It implies the need for complexity vs. Getting a gaggle of senior devs together and letting them sort out CI/CD and patterns as they are needed. In a lot of cases, an architect is not needed but must justify themselves.
tyyyy3 5mo ago
Exactly what I expected to read after reading the first part of your post lol. I’m starting to realise, many people and the management themselves don’t really understand why the firm exists, and what they do. Funny to watch tbh
e40 5mo ago
> When called out, he would result to personal attacks. Oh, that's bad. Sounds like a terribly toxic environment.
LPisGood 5mo ago
My boss told me enforcing code quality wasn’t important because in 6 months we won’t even read code anymore.
- urbandw311er 5mo ago
  There is perhaps _some_ truth to this, long term. But I think it’s way too early to remove all the QA.
boron1006 5mo ago
I can’t tell if we’re in identical situations or we work in the same place…

throwaway613746 5mo ago

[dead]

AIorNot 5mo ago

Yes I get your frustration, the same thing is happening across orgs these days as claude and co-work has become widespread. Wisdom is a thing, so is competence. Humans have it or they don't but machines do not (yet), but the massive capabilities of the tools are also something that can't be ignored. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's going to take some cycles of learning the ropes with this technology for humans to understand it better. I would push back -why couldn't the senior devs communicate these issues to senior management? It sounds like a broken human system not a broken tool or technology. All AI did was shine a light on the human issues on that org.

saganus 5mo ago
From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside. Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.
- hn_acc1 5mo ago
  Over time, as devs get more experience, they have seen countless fads come and go. Some worked, some screwed things up, etc. - NONE were the silver bullet / savior that they were touted to be by adherents. So they learn a default "no" or "slowly" response to "we need to do this <buzzword> ASAP" from management who only see $$$. I mean AI companies are telling management that devs will resist AI because "it's so good it will let you replace them", so management is getting their views reinforced by devs saying it's a bad idea.
  - bonesss 5mo ago
    Yeah, the developers who will argue and teeth-gnash about using an ORM for weeks on the hope it will save a few hours perceived as boring or obvious are, simultaneously, annoyed and upset at being told to save time with super tools that save time and effort… Pay no attention to the software output or quality or competitive displacement of the people selling you tools. LLMs, like cheesy sales strategies, are something so lucrative the only thing you can really do is sell them first come first serve to other people. Makes so much sense. Why make infinite money when you can sell a course/tool to naive and less fortunate companies? So logical.
- proofofcontempt 5mo ago
  The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    He doesn't care. When c suite gets fired they get like half a million in severance and go rinse and repeat somewhere else
    - dormento 5mo ago
      And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.
yfw 5mo ago
Have you not seen the principals and seniors being offered the door or buyouts?

ryandrake 5mo ago

I'm sure they're even more all-in on AI every month. "We will surely succeed if only we AI even harder!" This is how self-reinforcing delusions work. "AI will close the gap" is the fixed belief, and any evidence that comes in is interpreted such that it strengthens that belief.

proofofcontempt 5mo ago
Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited. Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind: - "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes up with the requirements, writes the tickets, and prioritises what to work on. We only need to give it a two or three line prompt" The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  > The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet. "We just need a swarm of many agents, all independently operating open-loop, creating and resolving tickets continuously. We will surely ship to production soon after implementing that!"

switchbak 5mo ago

I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt. I think we're going to see a real surge of companies just like this - crash and burn even though this tech was sold as being a universal improvement. The ones that survive will spread their knowledge about how to tame this wild horse, and ideally we'll learn a thing or two in the future. But the wave of naivety has surprised me, and I think there's an endless onrush of people that are overly excited about their new ability to vibe-code things into existence. I think we've got our own endless September event going on for the foreseeable future.

vkou 5mo ago
> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict. It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off. The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.
funimpoded 5mo ago
I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers. It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.
- deleted 5mo ago

krptos 5mo ago

I've personally witnessed this: 1. My own manager now gives "expert advice and suggestions" using Claude based on his/her incomplete understanding of the domain. 2. Multiple non-technical people within the company are developing internal software tools to be deployed org wide. Hoping such demos will get them their recognition and incentives that they deserve. Management as expected are impressed and approving such POCs. 3. Hyperactive colleagues showcasing expert looking demos that leadership buys. All the while has zero understanding of what's happening underneath. I didn't know how to articulate this problem well, but this article does a great job!

a_victorp 5mo ago
Same, the other day my manager sent a python script to create a jira ticket from some data to a team slack channel... as if no one else could figure that out or ask some LLM (sorry, I needed to vent)

a34729t 5mo ago

We don't need AI for not producing anything of value in a large company, though it certainly helps us produce even less!

gregrata 5mo ago

"hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything" Huh? 18 months ago? I've been using it that long - it wasn't able to do that back then....

tomwojcik 5mo ago
Agreed. Cursor has been released in 2023, but Claude Code and Sonnet in Feb 2025, right?
2ndorderthought 5mo ago
I had a similar situation 2 years ago. Correct these tools could not do those things, but people still used them for it. As well as diagnosing their dogs with cancer and whatever else.
dolebirchwood 5mo ago
> it wasn't able to do that back then It was, if you accept that it did so poorly.

2ndorderthought 5mo ago

I saw something really similar happen at my last few jobs. 2 jobs ago vibe coding wasn't even viable but some of the people went so hard on making everything so much more bloated with LLMs it was so hard to get yes or no answers for anything. 1 line slack, 20second question would get a response that was 2 pages of wishy washy blog posts with no answer. Follow ups generated more hours wasted. My last job we watched a PM slowly become a vibe manager of vibe coders. He started inserting himself into technical discussions and using ai to dictate our direction at every step. We would reply but it got so laborious fighting against a human translating ai about topics they didn't understand people left. We weren't allowed to push back anymore either or our jobs would get threatened due to AI. Then they started mandating everyone vibe coded and the amount of vibe coding as being monitored. The pm got so disorganized being a pm and an engineer and an architect(their choice no one wanted this)that they would make multiple tickets for the same task with wildly different requirements. One team member would then vibe code it one way and another would another way. It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work. I then left. I am trying my best to not be jaded by all of these changes to the software industry but it's a real struggle.

towers 5mo ago
The forcing of competent engineers to vibe code is something I’ll never understand. Also, I’ve heard rewriting people’s vibe coded efforts being a substantial issue, everything that engineers do nowadays seems to be code review.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  It would be horrible to rewrite. Not the first commit or whatever. But after a few weeks of people not reading the code it looks more like a write only code base. I refused to go full vibe/agentic coding. So I got to see what was happening. This was only over a short period of time mind you. There was a lot of duplicate and triplicate methods. A lot of the classes were is-a related without inheritance, not the biggest deal but it was becoming a mess. Code I used to know well was more or less gone. It was rewritten in a way that wasn't the same approach and had lost lessons learned. Some of it had real battle wounds baked into it. Things qa passed the week before were broken in places no one thought they touched. A good deal of tests were useless or didn't mean anything for production. Code review is more or less impossible for me. I can read maybe a 1k line change. 20-30k changes all the time? You end up saying "sure buddy lgtm". We had someone put a 200kloc change for a new feature using a 3rd party tool no one had used before. No clue, but it was not my business apparently because we needed to be more individuals now that we were using AI

Traubenfuchs 5mo ago

My company hired a lead architect and he stayed with us for less than a year. He introduced some overengineered shit we are still recovering from. How those people get to where they are and get hired for that kind of position is beyond me.

about3fitty 5mo ago
I think this may be a consequence of hiring for a position with the word “architect” in it. It implies the need for complexity vs. Getting a gaggle of senior devs together and letting them sort out CI/CD and patterns as they are needed. In a lot of cases, an architect is not needed but must justify themselves.

tyyyy3 5mo ago

Exactly what I expected to read after reading the first part of your post lol. I’m starting to realise, many people and the management themselves don’t really understand why the firm exists, and what they do. Funny to watch tbh

e40 5mo ago

> When called out, he would result to personal attacks. Oh, that's bad. Sounds like a terribly toxic environment.

LPisGood 5mo ago

My boss told me enforcing code quality wasn’t important because in 6 months we won’t even read code anymore.

urbandw311er 5mo ago
There is perhaps _some_ truth to this, long term. But I think it’s way too early to remove all the QA.

boron1006 5mo ago

I can’t tell if we’re in identical situations or we work in the same place…