To be honest, this is less about Claude Code per se (or any other coding agent) and more about business and corporate culture. In my experience, if you work at a company whose culture is to deliver as fast as possible, then this is ultimately what you get when those same managers start to realize we can also ship 10x faster (no matter the costs). The "Delivery Pressure" is very real in _some_ corporations, and I _believe_ things like Claude/Codex just accelerate this even more, which is what we're seeing in some places. In a fast-place industry, can you blame 'em?
Idk about that. I work for myself and I cannot stand coding with LLMs. Even if it were faster (I have only noticed slowdowns long term when using them), the experience of arguing with a slot machine is far more stressful and soul-sucking than even the gnarliest bug.
Yes coorporate “ship as fast as possible” is draining, but that doesn’t mean LLC coding isn’t also to blame.
I freelance too and I have been struggling personally for a while for other reasons but I absolutely recognise this. I have only about eighty lines of code in production that I fully did not write (thanks Muse Glimmer).
The difference between corporate salaried programming and freelance programming is who is on the hook in a direct sense for the bug the LLM introduced, or for maintaining the massive pile of code or the cognitive burden of ownership.
My experience of freelancing is that most of the people I am competing against for the work care less about the code (and things like quality, security, appropriateness, user burden), are faster, are happy to nickle-and-dime the bill, will charge more to fix their own bugs, churn out meaningless requirements specs that they cannot stick to, and rely on lack of client knowledge to get through.
So there has always been a problem of competing against the slapdash; they always win the quote. I care about longer-term maintainability, cost control and quality, and I lose out because of it. (I'm often asked to maintain or finish the work of people who beat me to the quote and then failed; nowadays I say no.)
The problem is, those people now use LLMs. For the immediate future, LLMs may actually be improving their output, certainly at the prototype stage, and they will now be including one-shot, vibe-coded demos with their quotes.
So what is a freelancer who still has a sense of ethics to do?
The long bet is that those people who do not care for quality will still be disappointing their clients, but how do you avoid using LLMs while still getting, at least, back to where you were in competing with them?
I sympathise with you. I do feel that consultancy and freelance had always had this issue where bad practices in client systems introduced by careless people ended in your shores when clients phone you asking for help. This used to happen with poorly maintained codebases or broken implemented projects done by competitors. Most potential customers are likely to be past or future victims of careless rivals of yours. Is it sustainable for you to ignore past customers that were victims of careless rivals?
I am not judging here just curious about your thoughts on this.
prologic · · focus · HN ↗
barrell · · focus · HN ↗
Yes coorporate “ship as fast as possible” is draining, but that doesn’t mean LLC coding isn’t also to blame.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
The difference between corporate salaried programming and freelance programming is who is on the hook in a direct sense for the bug the LLM introduced, or for maintaining the massive pile of code or the cognitive burden of ownership.
My experience of freelancing is that most of the people I am competing against for the work care less about the code (and things like quality, security, appropriateness, user burden), are faster, are happy to nickle-and-dime the bill, will charge more to fix their own bugs, churn out meaningless requirements specs that they cannot stick to, and rely on lack of client knowledge to get through.
So there has always been a problem of competing against the slapdash; they always win the quote. I care about longer-term maintainability, cost control and quality, and I lose out because of it. (I'm often asked to maintain or finish the work of people who beat me to the quote and then failed; nowadays I say no.)
The problem is, those people now use LLMs. For the immediate future, LLMs may actually be improving their output, certainly at the prototype stage, and they will now be including one-shot, vibe-coded demos with their quotes.
So what is a freelancer who still has a sense of ethics to do?
The long bet is that those people who do not care for quality will still be disappointing their clients, but how do you avoid using LLMs while still getting, at least, back to where you were in competing with them?
bossyTeacher · · focus · HN ↗
I sympathise with you. I do feel that consultancy and freelance had always had this issue where bad practices in client systems introduced by careless people ended in your shores when clients phone you asking for help. This used to happen with poorly maintained codebases or broken implemented projects done by competitors. Most potential customers are likely to be past or future victims of careless rivals of yours. Is it sustainable for you to ignore past customers that were victims of careless rivals?
I am not judging here just curious about your thoughts on this.