A hot potato: One of the many things we were promised that AI would enable was making coders super productive. But one software engineer's viral post claims it is reducing employees to little more than unskilled drones who work "12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter."
The engineer, who posted anonymously on X under the username voxium for fear of reprisal from his employer, called his new role at an undisclosed company "soul-sucking."
There are doubtlessly quite a few people who would describe their jobs the same way, but the source of voxium's misery is Claude Code.
He says that Anthropic's AI is now generating everything from product specifications and tests to tickets and reports.
– voxium (@v0xium) September 20, 2026
"Nobody knows anything here," voxium wrote on Sunday. "People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter."
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The engineer added that employees are now pressured to ship products as fast as possible, leaving them with little time to review Claude's output or understand the code being created.
Voxium said he wouldn't mind the situation if workers were given more time to check the code.
"Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude," he added. "There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore."
Some people might look at this and wonder what the problem is – who wouldn't want to be paid to do very little? But most people struggle when their work has no meaning. Voxium told Business Insider that if engineers lose the opportunity to understand the code and solve difficult problems, "there is nothing left ... Not even our soul. There will be no purpose."
He added that the real problem is corporate leaders' obsession with pushing out more features. He said management often judges success by sprint cycles, pull requests, and the sheer number of features shipped, even when those additions do little to improve the product for users.
Several other coders who replied to the message said the situation mirrored what was happening at their own companies. In addition to facing the same loss of purpose, some fear it will lead to job cuts as Claude takes over more tasks in the coding workflow.
The post received plenty of replies from high-profile figures, including Elon Musk, who added his favorite "Yikes" exclamation.
Chamath Palihapitiya, co-host of the All-In Podcast, warned that AI was turning a generation of technical experts into people "pushing a button in front of casino slot machines."
Back in 2025, a study showed that AI coding assistants were actually slowing down experienced developers. Since then, we've heard how AI coding is evolving into " loop engineering " – a system that prompts itself.
As a reminder that AI coders can get things very wrong, one agent in April took only nine seconds to wipe a startup's production database and its backups with a single API call to its cloud provider.
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