I’m a backend dev at a small company, around 20-ish people.
Before Claude and AI coding tools became a big thing at our company, I mostly owned one specific backend area. The work wasn’t always easy, but at least it was kind of clear and manageable.
But after Claude / Claude Opus got better, management basically started acting like one developer can now do the work of two or three people.
Our backend team got cut from 4 people to 2. Frontend went from 2 people to 1. But the amount of work didn’t go down at all. It just got pushed onto the people who stayed.
So now I’m still doing backend, but I also have to touch frontend UI stuff. My workload honestly feels like 3–4x what it used to be.
My leader keeps talking about “vibe coding” like it’s some magic productivity hack. But in my actual experience, vibe coding creates a ton of bugs. A lot of the time, I spend more time reading the generated code, finding what’s wrong, fixing edge cases, and cleaning up weird logic than I would have spent just writing the code myself from scratch.
And yeah, Claude helps sometimes. It can write code faster. But it doesn’t magically remove the actual work. I still have to figure out the requirements, check the code, fix weird bugs, connect it with our existing system, test things, deal with product changes, and take the blame if something breaks.
So instead of making my job easier, it feels like AI just gave my company a reason to expect way more from me.
I’m working longer hours now, usually at least 2 extra hours a day. Some nights I’m still working at 11 PM and I’m not even close to done.
No raise. More work. More responsibility. More stress. And I’m still worried about getting laid off because everyone keeps saying “AI makes developers more productive now.”
Is anyone else dealing with this? Like, AI tools are useful, sure, but it feels like companies are using them as an excuse to cut people and dump the extra work on whoever is left.