It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones).

And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part.

It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!

Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algorithm of some unimportant subset of the system. At a high level, it's the mental labor of making thousands of small (but necessary) decisions.

Now, I work alongside Claude to fast track the manifestation of my vision. It completely automates away the small exhaustive decision making (what should I name this variable, where should I put this function, I can refactor this function in a better way, etc). Further, sometimes it comes up with ideas that are even better than what I had in my head initially, resulting in a higher quality output than I could have achieved on my own. It has an amazing breadth of knowledge about programming, it is always available, and it never gives up.

With AI in general, I have questions around the social implications of such a system. But, without a doubt, it's delivering extreme value to the world of software, and will only continue the acceleration of demand for new software.

The cost of software will also go down, even though net more opportunities will be uncovered. I'm excited to see software revolutionize the under represented fields, such as schools, trades, government, finance, etc. We don't need another delivery app, despite how lucrative they can be.

Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable.

You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.

The feedback loop of "maybe the next time it'll be right" turned into a few hundred queries resulting in finding the LLM's attempts were a ~20 node cycle of things it tried and didn't work, and now you're out a couple dollars and hours of engineering time.

Nothing more satisfying to me than thinking about nifty algorithms, how to wring out every last drop of performance from a system, or more recently train AI models or build agentic systems. From object models to back end, graphics to communications protocols, I love it all.

But that said, I am getting on a bit now and don't particularly enjoy all the typing. When AI rolled around back in 2022 I threw myself into seeing how far I could push it. Copy pasting code back and forth between the chat window and the editor. It was a very interesting experience that felt fresh, even if the results were not amazing.

Now I am a hundred percent using Claude Code with a mixture of other models in the mix. It's amazing.

Yesterday I worked with CC on a CLAP plugin for Bitwig written in C and C++. It did really well - with buffer management, worker threads and proper lock-free data structures and synchronization. It even hand rolled its own WebSocket client! I was totally blown away.

Sure, it needs some encouragement and help here and there, and having a lot of experience for this kind of stuff is important right now for success, but I can definitely see it won't be that way for much longer.

I'm just so happy I can finally get round to all these projects I have had on the back burner all these years.

The productivity is incredible, and things mostly just work. It really brings me a lot of joy and makes me happy.

My usage of Claude Code sounds different to a lot of ways I hear people using it. I write medium detail task breakdowns with strict requirements and then get Claude to refine them. I review every single line of code methodically, attempting to catch every instance Claude missed a custom rule. I frequently need to fix up broken implementations, or propose complete refactors.

It is a totally different experience to any other dev experience I have had previously. Despite the effort that I have to put in, it gets the job done. A lot of the code written is better than equivalent code from junior engineers I have worked with in the past (or at worst, no worse).

It proceeded to invent all the SQL fluff rules. And the ones that were actual rules were useless for the actual format that I wanted. I get it, SQLFluff rules are really confusing, but that's why I asked for help. I know how to code python I don't need AI to write code that then I will need to review

I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.

no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools.

studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, taking notes, make Opus check my notes. it improved a lot my studying sessions too.

I respect the different experiences each of us get from this. for fairness I share mine

Sure we can segment this into code generation models and code review models but are engineers really going to want to be questioned by a code review tool on "what are you trying to do?" or are they just going to merge and pull the slot lever again?

What I've learned so far is that AI is only as good as the average developer who writes code and is only as effective as the codebase is approachable... unless you let the AI contribute to the architecture at the ground floor it will get just as confused and write just as much spaghetti code as a human coder will.

Like other professions before us... this is a moment where software engineers must adapt or perish. It was a battle to overcome the stubborn mindset of being unchanged in my ways (and adopt AI)... but the writing is on the wall. And now I'm building and refining the very same AI tools that do the jobs of data analysts and software engineers.

That's why developers are poorly paid and viewed as disposable cogs. It feels "easy" to many people and so they internally think it is immoral to get paid and corporations ruthlessly prey on that feeling. Reality is that development is hard and requires immense mental work, constant upskilling and is not something you can switch off after 5pm and think of something else. Your brain is constantly at work. That work also is creating millions and billions that gets extracted from developers and flow to the greedy hands of the rich, who now control all the means of production (think of cloud services, regulation - try starting your own forum today, anything with user generated content etc.).

Developer did themselves dirty.

If you prompt it correctly and rigidly, and review everything it does large or small, it's a 10x tool for grinding through some very hard problems very quickly.

But it can very easily lead you into overconfidence and bloat. And it can "cheat" without you even realizing it.

Claude Code is best used as an augmentation, not automation tool. And it's best that the tool makers and investors realize that and stop pretending they're going to replace programmers with things like this.

They only work well when combined with a skilled programmer who can properly direct and sift through the results. What they do allow is the ability to focus on higher level thinking and problems and let the tool help you get there.

I completely agree when using synchronous tools like Windsurf and Cursor. This is why I much prefer the async workflow most of the time. Here you get a chance to think about how the AI should be constrained in order to have the highest probability of a "one shot" PR or at least something that would only require a few edits. I spend a lot of time on the AGENTS.md file and as well as thinking a lot about the prompt that I am going to use. I sometime converse with ChatGPT a little on the prompt as the feedback loop is very fast. Then, just send it and wait ~5 minutes for completion.

I still use synchronous tools sometime for UI and other things were it is hard to specify up front and iteration is required. But realistically, I use async 50:1 over sync.

The interesting thing is going to be how this all holds up in a year or five. I suspect it's going to be a lot of rewriting the same old shit with LLMs again and again because the software they've already made is unmaintainable.

I didn't get into software to labour like a factory worker day in, day out. I like to solve problems and see them deliver value over years and even decades, like an engineer.

I guess you could use them like that, but you'll do much better if you try to get an understanding of the problem beforehand. This way you can divide the problem into subtasks with reasonably clear description, that Claude will be able to handle without getting lost and without needing too many corrections.

Also, you'll still need to understand pretty much every task that Claude has implemented. It frequently makes mistakes or does things in a suboptimal way.

When you use AI properly it's a great tool, it's like an IDE on steroids. But it won't take away the need to use your brains.

do while error == true;

Write code

Run code

Read error

Attempt to fix error

Run code

Read error

Search Google for error

Attempt to fix error

Run code

Read error

done

---

Claude does all of this for me now, allowing me to concentrate on the end goal, not the minutiae. It hasn't at all changed my workflow; it just does all of the horribly mundane parts of it for me.

I like it and I recommend it to those who are willing to admit that their jobs aren't all sunshine and roses until the product is shipped and we can sit back and get to work on the next nightmare.

It may be, that all of those are OK in your scenario or use case.

I found it great to write bash scripts, automation, ffmpeg command lines, OCR, refactoring… it’s a great autocomplete.

Working in a large team I realized that even relying too much of other people’s work is making me understand the technology less and I need to catch up.

But if you have a shitty page of text, you can edit it to make it better.

With LLM tools I can get from idea to (shitty) proof-of-concept solution really fast. Then I can start dogfooding it and improve and rewrite.

But sometimes the shitty solution is enough for my purposes. It works and doesn't actively break shit. My problem was solved and I don't need to optimise the silly TUI yt-dlp wrapper it just made me.

Perhaps you mean "the fun part of building computer systems", because it sounds like you don't enjoy writing code.

Not to impede your overall point, but have you not encountered a situation where Claude gives up? I definitely have, it'll say something like "Given X, Y and Z, your options are [a bunch of things that do not literally but might as well amount to 'go outside and touch grass']."

While I was manning a booth, this software developer came up to me and said VS had gotten too good at code generation to automate data access, and we should cut it out because that was the vast majority of what he did. I thought he was joking, but no, he was totally serious.

I said something to him about how those tools were saving him from having to do boring, repetitive work so that he could focus on higher value, more interesting development, instead, but he wasn’t having it.

I think about him quite often, especially these days. I wonder if he’s still programming, and what he thinks about LLMs

On the other hand software development in the high sense, i.e. producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level. It's fashionable to claim we all have bullshit jobs, but I don't think that's a fair description at all.

You used to have to write tons of real code to stand up something as simple as a backend endpoint. Now a lot of this stuff is literally declarative config files.

Ditto frontends. You used to have to imperative manage all kinds of weird bullshit, but over the last decade we've gradually moved to... declarative, reactive patterns that let the some underlying framework handle the busywork.

We also created... declarative config files to ensure consistent deploys every time. You know, instead of ssh'ing into production machines to install stuff.

We used to handle null pointers, too, and tore our hair out because a single missed check caused your whole process to go poof. Now... it's built into the language and it is physically impossible to pull of a null pointer dereference. Awesome!

We've been "putting ourselves out of work" for going on decades now, getting rid of more boilerplate, more repetitive and error-prone logic, etc etc. We did it with programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. All in the service of focusing on the bits we actually care about and that matter to us.

This is only the latest in a long line of things software engineers did to put themselves out of work. The method of doing it is very new, the ends are not. And like every other thing that came before it, I highly doubt this one will actually succeed in putting us out of work.

Most of this work should go away. Much of the rest of it should be achievable by the domain experts themselves at a fraction of the cost.

If there's anything I've learned about software, "intelligent" usually means "we've thrown a lot of intelligent people at the problem, and made the solution even more complicated".

Machine learning is not software, but probably should be approached as such. It's a program that takes some input and transforms it into some output. But I suppose if society really cared about physical or mental health, we wouldn't have had cigarettes or slot machines.

Considering the state of today's social media landscape and people's relationship to it, this fills me with dread.

I have very similar experiences, but very often I wonder if I couldn't just have gone to an open source project on the same topic (e.g. building a toy parser) and read the source code there, instead of letting a code generator AI reproduce it for me. Because that happy feeling is very similar to early moments in my developer career, when I read through open source standard libraries and learned a lot from it.

We probably have different personalities but the former is the only part I care about. It’s the operation that bores me.

Already did management tasks occasionally, and I rather be stuck on the last step of the career laddder with a job that makes me happy, than one I have to drag myself to office (physical or virtual one).

Eventually if healthy enough close to retirement age, I might as well do something completly different than computing related.

I spent the pandemic being one of the key players in the pandemic response, writing a lot of code but also helping a load of teams over different countries collaborate, and anything else I could do to make everything work. Oh and bringing up kids at the same time.

Now I'm at a startup, finally, and getting the engineering team off of the ground. Still trying to code (it's really hard to give up chasing the highs) a bit but there's less time for it and no time for the really hard deep dives (and I'm not willing to ignore my family to no-life it as others can do).

With that context, yeah, it's not as enjoyable. Sure I could try and transition back to a full-time coding roll and yeah, I'd be working on fun puzzles and enjoying it, but that means my impact is more limited. It's a better use of my skills + experience to be doing what I'm doing. Pays more too but both pay well :-)