Where’s the quality?

Just over a year ago, I resigned from my position as a staff software engineer and left the industry for about 6 months, during which I substitute taught public schools. It was a great break and much needed after building a startup from 5 to 50 engineers and taking another one through an acquisition. In February I accepted a software engineering position and I’ve enjoyed it. However, the company is very much “in” on “AI”1, as it seems most every company is these days, so I’ve been making heavy use of my company provided Claude Code plan. In fact, I rarely even open my text editor anymore. Most of the code I read is in my git client and our git host. I would say I’m roughly the equivalent of a really good quality assurance engineer2. I spend most of my time reviewing Claude’s code, reviewing team member’s pull requests that were also written in Claude Code, and manually testing mine and my team member’s work. I think I probably get more “done” than I did before the AIpocalypse, which…