Engineer’s ‘unhappy post’ that says, ‘state of engineering right now is horrible, it has been …’; goes viral, gets millions of views
A frustrated engineer’s candid rant about the state of modern software development has gone viral, amassing 7.9 million views in a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter). The post, shared by the account voxium, declared: “I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible.” the engineer described starting a new role at a large, unnamed company roughly two weeks earlier — and finding the entire workflow already handed over to Claude Code. According to the post, specs, code, tests, product requirement documents, tickets, ticket resolutions, and reports are all now generated by the AI tool, with barely any human oversight involved.The engineer painted a picture of a team stretched thin under constant pressure to ship, describing colleagues working 12 to 13-hour days largely to approve AI-generated output rather than build anything themselves. Management, the post claimed, has repeatedly insisted that writing code isn’t the bottleneck anymore — leaving employees confused about why delivery still feels slow despite the AI doing most of the heavy lifting.
‘AI took the meaning out of my job’
What seemed to resonate most widely wasn’t just the workload, but the emotional toll. The engineer said engineers across every level at the company, from entry-level to the most senior are essentially doing the same job now: talking to Claude and pressing enter. They described the work as devoid of any real sense of accomplishment, arguing that nobody is actually resolving bugs or thinking through problems anymore, since AI is handling that layer of the job almost entirely.The post also drew a distinction that struck many readers: the frustration wasn’t with AI assistance itself, but with not being given time to actually review and understand the code being shipped. The underlying complaint was less “AI took my job” and more “AI took the meaning out of my job.”
Read the complete X post here
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
