But its already the present.

For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it maintain design docs that document the software architecture choices made so far. It largely ignores them when vibing very interactively on a new feature, but it does help with the regular refactoring.

In my experience, it doubles the token costs per feature but otherwise it works fine.

I have been programming since I was 7 - 40 years ago. Across all tech stacks, from barebones assembly through enterprise architecture for a large enterprise. I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

Mainly because it does things I'd be too tired to do, or never bother because why expand energy on refactoring for something that is perfectly working and not to be further developed.

Btw, its a good teaching tool. Load a codebase or build one, and then have it describe the current software architecture, propose changes and explain their impact and so on.

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sarchertech an hour ago | parent [-]

> I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5.

If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

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aenis 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

> If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

Yup, my conclusion exactly.

With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.

	▲	sarchertech 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The thing is good code doesn’t cost more than bad code in the long run. In many cases it doesn’t even cost more in the short run. And it usually has nothing to do with being manicured or elegant. A good engineer will tell you how to spend 25% of effort to get to 90% of the result you want. With maintainable code, and importantly with less code that touches fewer systems. A bad engineer will deliver exactly what product asked for without asking questions, generate 4x the code, and touch every piece of the system. Companies are just setup in a way that incentivizes building organizations that create bad code. Most places would rather hire 100 bad engineers who can be easily replaced than 5 good engineers.