Unless what you work on is very simple and mostly mindless, using tools like Claude Code is the exact opposite of how to make the current SotA LLMs useful for coding. The models can help and boost your productivity, but it doesn't happen by letting them do more stuff autonomously. Quite the contrary.

And when what you usually work on actually is very simple and mostly mindless, you'd probably benefit more from doing it yourself, so you can progress beyond the junior stuff one day.

Where it really has value is if what you work on is like 33% extremely difficult and 66% boilerplate/tedious. Being able to offload the tedious bits can make more senior engineers 2-3x more productive without the coordination effort of "find a junior engineer to do this, schedule their time, assign the work, follow up on it".

(The problem of course is you still need these junior engineers to exist in order to have the next generatino of senior engineers, so we must now also think about what our junior folks should be doing to be valuable AND learn).

"real programmers use ed", 2025 edition: you're forever stuck with "junior stuff" if you let a language model handle language

god forbid I don't have to read 10k lines of logs to fix a typo