'Everyone Just Talks to Claude': An Engineer's Anonymous Complaint from a Big Company

Simon Willison, well known for his notes on artificial intelligence, shared a short but striking piece of testimony from a developer going by voxium. It is not analysis or a report but a voice from the inside — an account of what engineering work becomes when generative models are placed at the center of the process.

According to the author, he joined a big company just half a month earlier, only to find that "nobody knows anything here." Specs, code, tests, product requirement documents (PRDs), tickets and their resolution, reports — all of it is made by Claude Code. The human role has been reduced to running the model and accepting the output.

His team dislikes the situation, but they have no choice: they are being forced to ship as much as they can. Higher management, voxium says, has repeatedly insisted that "pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow?" As a result, engineers spend twelve to thirteen hours a day essentially just pressing Enter.

The most unsettling part of the account is not the workload but its content. "Nobody is reading anything," the author writes. And he adds that this cuts across seniority: from an L1 engineer up to L7, literally everyone is doing the same thing — talking to Claude.

Willison offers the quote without much commentary, but his choice of it speaks for itself. Behind the enthusiasm around AI assistants and the talk of soaring productivity, a different picture emerges: a team that generates ever more code while ceasing to understand it, and management for whom shipping speed has become an end in itself.

Source: Simon Willison