Joined a new company and inherited a backend repo from an agentic engineer. Rewrote it in a week with Claude while keeping the same functionality, with a more stable architecture and proper integration tests.

So basically it was a bloated repo, completely out of touch with what actually needed to be build for a product. But everyone celebrated a guy for how advanced he was in his agentic approaches.

He used some convoluted methods to document everything that happened in a repo with dozens of skills and different agent roles.
There were many files with 5k+ lines of code, barely any architecture, tests that covered who knows what.
Also he prob used some variation of gstack or something like that, that was running in a loop to build functionality that was not needed for a project:
- he had 220 handles, out of which only ~20 were used (and even of those I could remove 5 more that were doing basic api keys management)
- 40+ secrets, out which only 2 were necessary to run a project
- 309k lines of code covered by 240k lines of docs
- tons of logs in md file (1kk+ lines)

I see many people here invest in different kinds of knowledge base management and I always had been wondering - how much of that actually helps? When you write only what you need and keep you repo clean, will you even benefit from some advanced knowledge base management? And how do you know if it helps or just produces the feeling that you are doing a lot?

Personally, I still use a few Agents.md files and I keep the backlog accessible for my agents, but that's it mostly. Other than that I just try to follow a good engineering practices, using basic architecture principles and integration tests that cover main scenarios. Oh, and I don't build business logic 'for the future', because I know from experience that when that future comes and it's time to integrate how you imagined it is never how it actually turns out to be, so you will have to rewrite anyway.

To be fair - many of those lines of code were his 'experiments', and yet I think if we invest into a clean architecture right away even those experiments are easier to iterate on and we can safely continue with a repo once experiments are finished

I'm tired of AI.

I'm a software engineer with almost 10 years of experience. We're living through an absolutely insane time, and we're all trying to keep up, but honestly, I don't even know if we can anymore.

Everything is moving faster than the human brain can process.

For the first time in my life, I'm seriously considering getting into farming or growing my own food. I genuinely feel like there won't be many real jobs left in 5–10 years.

I know what you're going to say: "The people who are actually good at what they do will survive."

I used to say the exact same thing a year ago. I don't anymore.

Things are moving way too fast. I feel like building websites, making games, or launching SaaS products is starting to lose its meaning.

Just a year ago, I was saying, "Sure, AI can write code, but it can't design systems. You still need a senior engineer or architect to oversee everything."

I don't say that anymore either.

It can design systems now. And in many cases, it does a better job than we do.

Sometimes I feel like we're actively building the thing that's going to make us obsolete.

I'm just tired.

Edit: Guys It's the most basic human survival instinct, at the end of the day just gather some food and try to survive. People really got hung up on the farming part :)

I bought one of those cheap Android head units off Amazon for my 2016 Civic. The listing said 8 cores and Android 15. What showed up had ads in the menus, a pile of preinstalled apps, and a voice assistant that wanted me to pay to "activate" features.

People debloat Android TVs with adb all the time, so I figured why not the car. I gave Claude Code the Amazon listing and the manual (a 14-page phone scan with no selectable text) plus some rules:

• backup everything before changing anything

• show me the list and wait for my OK

• disable apps, don't uninstall them

• don't touch CarPlay, Android Auto, the radio, the backup camera or the steering wheel buttons

• never sign into anything for me

• only install apps from their official GitHub releases

I figured we'd kill a few apps, maybe swap the launcher, and call it a day. That is not what happened.

The box lied

My first question was whether I'd have to pull the stereo back out of the dash. Nope. Claude read the manual, worked out that the USB ports on the back are host ports (for phones and flash drives, not a laptop), and said to do the whole thing over Wi-Fi. It wrote the scripts on my desktop along with a handoff doc, and a second session on my Linux laptop picked it up from the driver's seat, rewrote the PowerShell scripts in bash and kept going.

The first thing it checked was what the unit actually runs. 8 cores was 4. Android 15 was Android 9, with a last security patch from October 2021. Off to a great start.

Then it went through every installed app and sorted them into keep, junk, and "not sure, leave it alone". The junk pile:

• a voice assistant that was always listening for its wake word, and ran a hidden WebView that sat at about 30% CPU even when nobody was talking to it

• Baidu location services

• a vendor log collector

• a preinstalled call recorder service, on the thing that handles my phone calls over Bluetooth

• the vendor's update app, built on Alibaba's IoT cloud, which can push new firmware to the unit whenever the vendor feels like it

• factory burn-in and self-test apps, plus a "watermark" demo service

• network radio and weather apps that only work after you pay to activate them

• a DAB radio app (I'm in the US, there is no DAB here)

• Adobe Acrobat. On a car stereo. In case I need to review a PDF at a red light.

The startup scripts were the best part

One was set up to reinstall QQMusic, Ximalaya and a Chinese app store if they ever went missing, and to quietly make Baidu's keyboard the default. Separately, it checked a hidden folder on every boot and installed any APK it found there without asking, then deleted the file. The folder was empty when we looked, and having the mechanism isn't proof anyone used it, but I did not expect my car stereo to have a silent app installer baked into its boot process. It also found a root "su" backdoor the vendor left in (Claude's own notes from the moment it found them are below). Both got shut down, along with some other questionable security defaults I'm not going to detail here.

Cleaning it up

On the first pass we only disabled the junk. Later, once every APK was backed up, I OK'd removing 18 of them from the unit for good, and Claude wrote a restore script that puts them all back. Then:

• disabled that Alibaba-cloud updater, since one firmware push could undo all of this

• AdGuard private DNS for ad and tracker blocking across every app

• system WebView from version 66 (2018) to 138, the newest Google still ships for Android 9

• backup camera guide lines recalibrated with actual Civic sedan numbers, and the dynamic ones now bend with the steering wheel

• climate pop-up in Fahrenheit

• a custom Civic boot logo

• swapped the vendor's home screen for our own: an open-source launcher (Kvaesitso) with a dock for CarPlay, phone, radio, maps, YouTube and music

• an icon pack Claude generated, built, signed and installed itself

• Organic Maps, NewPipe and Fossify Music from their GitHub releases, each SHA-256 checked

• CarPlay auto-connect

Before it touched any system file it saved the original. It kept an undo command for every change and wrote me a cheat sheet on top of that.

Numbers

Not a lab benchmark, since the two snapshots were taken at different uptimes, but the CPU hog is just gone. Afterwards it watched every network connection for two minutes and saw Google, AdGuard DNS, my router and my laptop, nothing else. CarPlay, Android Auto, the radio, Bluetooth, the backup camera and the steering wheel buttons all still work, which for a car stereo was kind of the whole point.

The ending

The last thing Claude did was lock the stereo down so only my laptop can connect to it. Everyone else on the network gets nothing. Then, in case I ever lose the laptop, it built me a backdoor: a key file on a USB stick. Plug the stick into the stereo and the door opens, pull it out and it closes again. So the stereo still has a backdoor, it's just mine now.

Lesson learned: never trust the Android version printed on a cheap head unit.

Video up top is the "before" (with commentary). Pics: Claude's notes when it found the backdoor, stock vs new home screen, the icon pack, the boot animation, and the climate controls still working.

A year ago leadership told us everything goes through agents now. Hand written code needed a reason. It felt great for about 6 months, we shipped more than we ever had.

Now the codebase is around 3x the size it was and nobody can explain how most of it works. The agents struggle too, they keep re-implementing helpers that already exist somewhere else because there are 4 versions of everything.

The part that actually hurts is who is left. The two people who used to read every PR and push back left in the spring, one quit, one was "restructured".

coderabbit still comments on every PR, but there's nobody left who can tell if a comment matters or not, so people just resolve them all.

This month management started quietly asking us to "write more of it ourselves" again. Except half of us haven't written anything non trivial in a year and it shows. I spent 2 days on something I would have done in an afternoon in 2024.

Not sure what I want from posting this.

Is anyone else at the point where the mandate is being walked back, and how did you get the understanding back?

All jokes aside, this actually works for now.

saw it on twitter. what’s your opinions? 🤣

Annnnd it happened to me as well. Claude Code just wiped my Mac's ~/Library. ALL my app data, saved passwords, macOS configs, settings... everything gone.

I had it working on improving something in my project, and apparently it decided to delete 5 test chat channels it had created earlier.

The problem? Those files were inside ~/Library/Application Support/. It used xargs -n1 dirname to get their parent directories, but because of the space in Application Support, xargs split the path in two. So dirname ended up returning ~/Library instead of the actual folder, and Claude proceeded to run rm -rf on it...

I wasn't even at my Mac when this happened. I came back to find it had restarted and was showing me the welcome screen. I had absolutely no idea what happened until I started investigating the logs, only to find out the agent had been deleting my Library for around 2 MINUTES before realizing what it was doing and stopping itself.

And yes, I was running with --dangerously-skip-permissions, I'm fully aware of what that means. But it's still absolutely insane to me that Opus 5.5 on XHIGH would make such a basic mistake?!

I've used models like Gemini Flash 3.8 and DeepSeek for similar stuff and never had anything remotely close to this happen.

I'm genuinely devastated. and recovery isn't possible all my data 6 months work all gone...

Update: Managed to recover most of the important stuff X)

And for those wondering, yes, I'm a developer and I'm well aware of the risks. Not having backups was a mistake, obviously, but I'd run out of both cloud and local storage and ended up rawdogging it for a while. things just happen..

When Claude Code is working, I usually switch to another window or check my phone. Then I keep switching back just to see whether it is still working, waiting for me, or already done.

So I put together this small DIY status light for my own setup. It is still rough around the edges, but it works.

Red means Claude Code is waiting for my confirmation, yellow means it is running, and green means the task is finished and Claude Code is idle, ready for the next task.

The status changes automatically through Claude Code hooks.

I originally made this just for myself, but I am curious whether anyone else has the same problem. If enough people find it useful, I might try to turn it into something more polished.

Would you actually use something like this, or do you already have a good enough way to keep track of Claude Code?

My son games with headphones late at night. Most of the time he's quiet. Then something happens in the game and he yells at full volume, waking the whole house.

Talking to him about it works for about 20 minutes. Taking the headphones away works but causes a different problem. So I built an app.

S.T.F.U (Sound Trigger Focus Utility) is a Windows tray app that listens to the microphone and interrupts him when he yells. On first run it calibrates by asking him to be quiet, then talk, then yell - so it learns the difference between his normal voice and an actual shout.

When it catches a yell:

• First time that session - it minimizes his game, plays a sound effect, and throws up a fullscreen message he has to click through 4 times. The close button moves after each click so he can't just spam-click one spot.

• Every time after - straight to the desktop with a 10-second message. His game is gone.

Settings are behind a PIN so he can't change the threshold or turn it off. There's a report with a chart showing every trigger, so the next morning I can see exactly when things went sideways.

The important part: he knows it's there. It's not hidden, it's not spyware, the first screen when it launches says exactly what it does. It works because it's a consequence he agreed to, not something I snuck onto his PC. The README explicitly says it works best as something agreed to, not as a hidden trap.

No audio is recorded or stored. It computes a loudness number every 20ms and throws the audio away immediately. Nothing leaves the machine.

It won't solve the underlying issue (he's 100% going to learn to yell more quietly instead of less often), but at least the house sleeps.

Free and open source if anyone wants it: https://github.com/omricn/stfu/releases/latest

Edit: V1.1.0 now live.
Added Scheduled Off-Hours: Timeframe picker to choose when the app listens vs when the app is passive.
TNX fellow redditor [jpewaqs] for the feature suggestion :)

I asked Claude Opus 5 to create a backup.

Instead, it created the backup in the wrong directory and then proceeded to "rm -rf" my entire drive.

After wiping everything, it just replied:

"Sorry, typo."

...like nothing had happened.

That was simultaneously the funniest and most painful AI moment I've had.😭

What a pleasant change

Have been using it for https://github.com/stablyai/orca PRs

Opus 5 is a fucking piece of shit, i don't know how to say this in any other way. It speaks "Unintelligiblish", a new unfathomable language developed by Anthropic that works by saying everything in the most ridiculous, obtuse and convoluted way possible

It turns anything simple that can be expressed in 2 sentences into a fucking doctoral thesis aimed to aliens, and there is no way to prompt your way out of it

Edit: it claudoofus outputs some alien text you won't read, just prompt it this:

tldr eli5

So apparently its normal that Anthropic experiments on us. They give out experiment IDs for the tests they run.

Source Thread regarding the existence of these IDs: Link. The graphics are measurements on my own threads.

And to all you gaslighting hobby redditors that claim that an experience isnt real because you dont share it: fuck off!

---
Everyone who is affected:
there is a .claude.json in your .claude directory. It only holds the current configuration. But there are also session-transcripts which give a historical trace of conducted experiments.
For me, they are under /home/<user>/<claude-dir>/projects/*/*.jsonl

These transcripts carry the experiment-id for that thread. I simply asked Claude to figure out what the experiment ID correlates to in my threads.

Do not look at experiment names or code-names, it must be a hex-id.

Guys. Its real. And it was a major fuckup on Anthropics side. And I still think that they owe a Reset for affected people. But it seems over. At least for me.

Next step: how to build a guard against such fuckery?

Edit: Hmmmh.