> 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 2 hours 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.

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sarchertech 2 hours 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.

	▲	abalashov an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. This is quite true, and it is this -- really, a special case of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- that has me worried about the implications for the labour economy more than anything else.