A junior cloud engineer’s real struggle with Claude-assisted work
This is a firsthand experience from a cloud platform engineer four months into a first development job. After graduating in 2024 and working in IT support, the move into development has been exciting, especially automation work, but frequent mistakes have created real doubt about job performance. There has still been clear progress: the company’s infrastructure now makes sense, the assigned complex deployment system can be debugged, explained, and described in detail. One automation project was meant to let people fully tear down workflows across all environments, but it took nearly two full sprints to build and close to three with testing and refactoring. Claude and other AI tools were needed throughout the work, and the team uses AI heavily enough that senior engineers say they do not really code much anymore. The process itself is understandable, but the work missed how slowly some buckets could be deleted.
Key points
- A new developer can make real progress in four months while still feeling unsure.
- Claude and other AI tools helped with a complex automation project, but the work still took several sprints.
- The team’s senior engineers also rely heavily on AI instead of hand-coding everything.
- Testing and refactoring added major time beyond the first build.
- Automation work must account for slow cloud operations, such as bucket deletion.
Quick term guide
- Cloud Platform Engineer
- A person who builds and manages the cloud systems that software runs on.
- performance
- How fast and smoothly a site loads and works.
- infrastructure
- The technical systems that keep a website or app running.
- deployment
- The process of putting software changes into a running system.
- refactoring
- The process of reorganizing and cleaning up the internal code of a program without changing what it actually does on the outside.
- Solo developer
- An individual who handles all parts of creating a project or product alone.
- developers
- Developers are people who build software, apps, or websites.
- outsourcing
- Paying someone outside your own business to do work for you.