Thanks for posting this. It's a nice reminder that despite all the noise from hype-mongers and skeptics in the past few years, most of us here are just trying to figure this all out with an open mind and are ready to change our opinions when the facts change. And a lot of people in the industry that I respect on HN or elsewhere have changed their minds about this stuff in the last year, having previously been quite justifiably skeptical. We're not in 2023 anymore.

If you were someone saying at the start of 2025 "this is a flash in the pan and a bunch of hype, it's not going to fundamentally change how we write code", that was still a reasonable belief to hold back then. At the start of 2026 that position is basically untenable: it's just burying your head in the sand and wishing for AI to go away. If you're someone who still holds it you really really need to download Claude Code and set it to Opus and start trying it with an open mind: I don't know what else to tell you. So now the question has shifted from whether this is going to transform our profession (it is), to how exactly it's going to play out. I personally don't think we will be replacing human engineers anytime soon ("coders", maybe!), but I'm prepared to change my mind on that too if the facts change. We'll see.

I was a fellow mind-changer, although it was back around the first half of last year when Claude Code was good enough to do things for me in a mature codebase under supervision. It clearly still had a long way to go but it was at that tipping point from "not really useful" to "useful". But Opus 4.5 is something different - I don't feel I have to keep pulling it back on track in quite the way I used to with Sonnet 3.7, 4, even Sonnet 4.5.

For the record, I still think we're in a bubble. AI companies are overvalued. But that's a separate question from whether this is going to change the software development profession.

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arcfour 3 days ago | parent [-]

The AI bubble is kind of like the dot-com bubble in that it's a revolutionary technology that will certainly be a huge part of the future, but it's still overhyped (i.e. people are investing without regard for logic).

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ryandrake 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

We were enjoying cheap second hand rack mount servers, RAM, hard drives, printers, office chairs and so on for a decade after the original dot com crash. Every company that went out of business liquidated their good shit for pennies.

I'm hoping after AI comes back down to earth there will be a new glut of cheap second hand GPUs and RAM to get snapped up.

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libraryofbabel 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right. And same for railways, which had a huge bubble early on. Over-hyped on the short time horizon. Long term, they were transformative in the end, although most of the early companies and early investors didn’t reap the eventual profits.

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nl 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But the dot-com bubble wasn't overhyed in retrospect. It was under-hyped.

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arcfour 3 days ago | parent [-]

At the time it was overhyped because just by adding .com to your company's name you could increase your valuation regardless of whether or not you had anything to do with the internet. Is that not stupid?

I think my comparison is apt; being a bubble and a truly society-altering technology are not mutually exclusive, and by virtue of it being a bubble, it is overhyped.

	▲	retsibsi 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		There was definitely a lot of stupid stuff happening. IMO the clearest accurate way to put it is that it was overhyped for the short term (hence the crazy high valuations for obvious bullshit), and underhyped for the long term (in the sense that we didn't really foresee how broadly and deeply it would change the world). Of course, there's more nuance to it, because some people had wild long-term predictions too. But I think the overall, mainstream vibe was to underappreciate how big a deal it was.