I’ve observed a massive shift in the capabilities of AI, Claude at least, in the past few months. Last fall it felt impressive but still a toy and I shuddered to think of Claude authored production code being shipped. Over the last month we have ramped up Claude integration with our development process and my productivity is up 10x at least. I will say code quality is dropping. We are shipping more code that is not as well-tuned despite my attempts to add as many guard rails as possible because my arguments only have so much weight when the cost of rewriting is so low. The CEO who hasn’t touched the code in years is pushing up huge PRs with major features we have not had the resources to tackle and is only so receptive to my warnings. My biggest fear at this point is getting dragged into a “black-box” model for application development where there is simply too much code churn for me to have any ownership over anything but the prompts. I can’t imagine the pleasure and satisfaction in the craft remaining the same, if it remains at all.
edit: I realize this just makes me sound like every old dude gone before and AI is in some respects no different than any other technology, but I’m not so sure. Time will tell
