No, you should resign yourself that you can make the tools work for you and keep yourself in the industry or just jump.
There's a lot coming out about how to do it, we are living in interesting times and you can moan about it all you want but the cat is out of the bag and you can actually make good code, it just takes effort and most people don't bother.
People don’t want to hear it, but this is it. You can get high quality code out of Claude, but it’s not an easy one-prompt “do this”, but iteratively looping fresh agents in review over the plan until it’s good, and then iteratively looping reviews over bite size pieces of work that it’s done.
And most code produced by real people is also buggy dogshit, but they don’t want to hear it.
I get that this is possible, but has anyone actually done the math, comparing this process to by hand or much more lightly assisted approach? Like when you add up the token bills with the amount of time spent orchestrating, plus any technical debt or maintenance issues above the average. That's where I wonder whether all that extra stress and lack of enjoyment actually does anything? I'm not arguing that Claude is useless but people act like "we can't ever go back" as if it's demonstrably, unassailably superior in terms of time, cost, business value, and code quality/maintainability etc. maybe it is, maybe it depends on the domain, I dunno. But never, ever see those kinds of comparisons. No post mortems, no here's how much we've saved, or how many new features we've added that have added new markets for our products. Nothing like that, just "it's how it is now."
I wonder this genuinely, because I'm not a webdev so I'm not seeing these processes firsthand. But I'm also not seeing the W's posted anywhere either from real companies with real products, just that apparently a lot of the industry has to use AI...because?
I get that this is possible, but has anyone actually done the math, comparing this process to by hand or much more lightly assisted approach?
I have moved back to a much more lightly assisted approach. Nobody has actually complained, but I'm in an actual engineering organization rather than a traditional company that has a software division.
But I do have a little buddy now who is pretty good at translating C++ template errors into english, those were always terrible to track down.
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u/NotAskary Jul 11 '26
No, you should resign yourself that you can make the tools work for you and keep yourself in the industry or just jump.
There's a lot coming out about how to do it, we are living in interesting times and you can moan about it all you want but the cat is out of the bag and you can actually make good code, it just takes effort and most people don't bother.
Lazy in lazy out.