Turns out giving every developer five tireless AI interns doesn’t eliminate work. It turns them into unpaid middle managers of five interns who confidently submit broken code at 3 a.m. Management sees five times the output; developers see five times the pull requests. Congratulations, we’ve automated coding and scaled up the headache.
As a manager of 4, I now get 20x the AI slop PRs I have to read through and try to convince the developers they’re doing it wrong. AI use has made my job way more exhausting and while productivity increased, it’s fairly obvious that understanding has not. Even my most senior team members turn their brains off and become meat proxies.
I have to keep reminding them “I don’t care what Claude found, I care what you think about it and how you’re personally going to own a fix for it”.
They run Claude it makes a PR and even if you pay close attention, no one knows what a PR someone else wrote as well as the person who wrote it.
Turns out giving every developer five tireless AI interns doesn’t eliminate work. It turns them into unpaid middle managers of five interns who confidently submit broken code at 3 a.m. Management sees five times the output; developers see five times the pull requests. Congratulations, we’ve automated coding and scaled up the headache.
As a manager of 4, I now get 20x the AI slop PRs I have to read through and try to convince the developers they’re doing it wrong. AI use has made my job way more exhausting and while productivity increased, it’s fairly obvious that understanding has not. Even my most senior team members turn their brains off and become meat proxies.
I have to keep reminding them “I don’t care what Claude found, I care what you think about it and how you’re personally going to own a fix for it”.
They run Claude it makes a PR and even if you pay close attention, no one knows what a PR someone else wrote as well as the person who wrote it.
If you’re unpaid then why are you doing it?
If you don’t use AI you are shown the door right now at many companies. We’re EMs without the pay bump.