The important thing to remember is that for a large number of people (in the US), "work" is a place where they do things that they hate for eight hours a day, for people they hate (surveys routinely show between 40% and 60% of people are "satisfied" with their jobs). Those of us who are in the tech industry because we like actually programming computers (the "craft-lovers", in the parlance of this blog post) have been lucky enough to have jobs where where we get to actually do something we enjoy (even if it's intermingled with meetings and JIRA). If AI slop really is the future and programming becomes as rare of a job as hand-building wood furniture, then most of us are going to be living the normal experience of capitalism in a way that we are probably not well-prepared for.

Personally, I have noticed that I still produce substantially more and better code than the people at my company spending all day writing prompts, so I'm not too worried yet, but it seems plausible at some point that a machine that stole every piece of software ever written will be able to reliably turn a few hundred watt-hours of of electricity into a hallucination-free PR.

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sockgrant 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree some people go to work to work, and claude is find / good for them, but I feel that characterization of us who are loving claude is disingenuous. I’m a creative, while I loved coding and honed my craft, it was creating that always had me hooked. Claude is creating on steroids. Not to mention, it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now.

It’s not the same as writing code, but it’s fun.

If your coworkers can’t outpace your code output they’re either not using opus4.6 or they aren’t really trying.

It’s pretty easy to slam 20 PRs a day with some of them being complex changes. The hardest part is testing the diffs, but people are figuring that out too.

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ccosky 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have a suite of Claude skills all about craftsmanship. Refactoring, renaming, deconstructing god classes, detecting deleted code, etc. I've never written better, more readable, more maintainable code in my life than I have with Claude. All of that is trivial and hardly takes any time at all to accomplish.

Before moving to agentic AI, I thought I'd miss the craftsmanship aspect. Not at all. I get great satisfaction out of having AI write readable, maintainable code with me in the driver's seat.

	▲	dinkumthinkum 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But, would you feel that same satisfaction out on the street?

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g-b-r 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now.

It can help if you write poor code without it, probably

High unit test coverage only means something if you carefully check those tests, and if everything was tested

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sockgrant 11 hours ago | parent [-]

The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness is if you write poor code?

Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what code coverage is?

not gonna engage the trolling

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g-b-r 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness is if you write poor code?

No? You assert that it writes better code than the average software developer?

> Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what code coverage is?

Do you know?

Code coverage only tells what amount of the code gets *touched* by the tests.

To achieve code coverage it's enough to CALL the code, it doesn't tell you anything about the correctness of the tests: they could all end with a return true, and a code coverage tool would be perfectly happy.

So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite that the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or simply much less useful than you assume it to be, more realistically).

With "if everything was tested" I meant that you also need to check if the agent wrote all the tests that are needed, besides verifying that the ones it wrote are correct.

	▲	wiseowise 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You assert that it writes better code than the average software developer? Absolutely. It contains a lot, if not majority, of all the code available at our hands right now and can reason, whatever it means for LLMs to reason anyway, about it. It absolutely demolishes average software developer and it’s not even close. > To achieve code coverage it's enough to CALL the code, it doesn't tell you anything about the correctness of the tests: they could all end with a return true, and a code coverage tool would be perfectly happy. > So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite that the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or simply much less useful than you assume it to be, more realistically). That’s like saying that if you don’t check every line your coworker writes it becomes worthless.

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ctoth 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	g-b-r 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Stealing has been used for copyright infringement since forever, it is the correct word