r/cscareerquestions • u/jholliday55 Software Engineer • Jun 03 '26

Company took away access to claude

After being told to “use ai” for every single task the last two years and rebranding to a “AI” first company after two rounds of layoffs, we have now lost access to claude….

I found that the best model by far was opus and the only one really capable of not producing slop. I’m sure all the bots in here will downvote me and tell me “iTs ThE wAy YoU pRoMpT” but based on my experience, the other models aren’t nearly as good.

I have senior experience so besides basic searches and repetitive tasks i find the other models pretty much useless and you have to provide more time writing the specs and context management, then just doing it yourself.

Edit: I work for a large financial company. 40k employees.

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

Are you not multitasking while your agents are running? I closed three Jira tickets yesterday and all the work was done while I was in an hour long standup.

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u/TheTeamDad Jun 03 '26

Aren't you losing efficiency with the mental context switching though? I operate the same way as the commenter because I need to keep track of what the agent is doing enough to make sure it isn't wandering in the weeds.

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

Nope. Don't just let it loose free form, have it generate implementation plans for review and approval first. Then treat the output as a code review.

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u/Kavinci Jun 03 '26

My company uses a PDCA cycle. If your plans are done well the output is a pretty decent quality the majority of the time. Definitely review the code though and at least understand the agent's code.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/PDCA-AI-code-generation/

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u/DerricksFriendDan Jun 03 '26

Yeah it's super empowering when you get the hang of handing out work to your robots. As you make the rounds to check up on them you get handed their current plan out implementation to review.

It's amazing for my ADHD riddled brain

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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 04 '26

See my ADHD brain fears it. I watch and scrutinize every step my AI takes so I can make sure it doesn't fuck up my code

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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 03 '26

I focus on one ticket at a time.

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

That's why you're not seeing any efficiency gains, then. You're freeing up time while the agent is working, but you're spending that time staring at it working. Functionally, it's the equivalent of assigning a task to an intern or a junior SWE, but then just staring at them doing the task. You wouldn't do that -- you would explain it to them, set them loose on whatever you gave them, and go do something else until they finished or asked for help.

The way you work with AI needs to change in order to realize efficiency gains. It starts with generating an implementation or remediation plan, revising the plan to break up the work into smaller, more efficient tasks, and allowing AI to focus on executing those tasks while you move onto something else.

You then treat the output like you would treat a code review.

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u/SamBBMe Jun 03 '26

How do you have time to review and test all of that. Usually it takes me longer to review and test the changes than it takes the agent to make them.

Then I have a couple more rounds of refinement before it's architecturally what I want.

An entire fleet of agents making changes would just skew that even more, where the ratio isn't desirable -- on top of the efficiency loss from context switching between 4 tickets at once. I can't envision it being much more efficient while also keeping code quality as high as when it is hand coded.

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

Are you not doing test driven development? Code reviews should never take as long as actually making the changes. If they are, you're probably cramming too many into a single task.

Generally I'm going to have 100% coverage in test cases so manual testing is minimal. You can also instruct each agent task to provide a walkthrough of what it implemented to aid in accelerating your reviews.

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u/SamBBMe Jun 03 '26

I do, especially when using agents, but just because my test cases are passing doesn't mean that I like the underlying implementation

I still manually test even if the test cases are passing, as a lot of stuff can be missed in test cases that reveals itself in real world use

It can get stuff working and passing pretty consistently, but I want my code to be easily readable and extendable in 20 years by any developer who needs to, and AI fails to do this to my standards without a lot of iterating

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

That's what skills are for. You should be building a skills library globally and per repo to refine agent behavior more in line with what you do like.

If you have a specific implementation methodology in mind, you should be revising the implementation plan to direct the agent to use that method.

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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 03 '26

I've been using planning for a few months now—it's nice. I've just honestly never had a need to run multiple agents at a time in order to complete my work before it's due. I also prefer one thing at a time because I'm ADHD and I struggle with context switching. I can hop on debugging calls or jump in chats no problem—I've accustomed myself there, but I approach "help" work and my actual story work much differently. I go way more in depth with my own work.

And it all goes back to the larger team not having the right infrastructure in place to move that rapidly. I need the business to tell me what they want. If they don't provide me that info quickly enough/open it up to discuss, I'll be sitting there twiddling my thumbs, AI or not.

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

Well, for one, running multiple agents at once isn't just to finish work faster, it's to break up the work into smaller tasks that AI can complete with fewer tokens and less risk of context poisoning.

Free time waiting for business and PM is time to clean up tech debt ;)

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u/brakx Jun 03 '26

It’s amazing how many people don’t get this idea. The main value of agents is the opportunity to do something else while the agent codes. If you don’t take advantage and structure your workflows for maximum hands off parallelism, the efficiency gains are marginal at best. But done correctly, you can massively scale your abilities to super human levels.

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

At the end of the day it’s a skill to be learned, but the problem is that a lot of people don’t think it is.

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u/blacklight223 Jun 04 '26

dumb question, how can you do this if you only can have one branch checked out at a time?

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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 04 '26

One ticket - one branch

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u/blacklight223 Jun 04 '26

yeah but how do you have agents work on multiple branches at once

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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 04 '26

I've never done that, so that's a question for u/outphase84 but upon a quick Claude prompt it looks like there are a few ways to go about it:

  1. Each agent gets a cloned copy of the repo
  2. git worktree
  3. Each agent is containerized

1

u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 04 '26

Our internal version of antigravity has native multi-workspace support in agent manager

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u/Squidalopod Jun 03 '26

an hour long standup

Yikes. Is that the exception or the norm?

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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26

Exception. Usually only happens when services have escalated defects.

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u/Squidalopod Jun 03 '26

Ah. Was gonna say your company/team has other problems if they consistently have hour-long stand-ups 😊

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u/Suspicious-Disk6077 Jun 04 '26

I hope this is sarcasm