I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers.

It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result.

I don’t care about the beauty of the code, but I do care that nearly every app I load takes longer than it did 15 years ago. I do care that my HomePod tells my wife it’s having trouble connecting to iPhone every 5th time she adds something to the grocery list. I care that my brokerage website is so broken that I actually had to call tech support who told me that they know it’s broken and you have to add a parameter to go back to the old version to get it to work.

I care that when I use the Claude desktop app it sometimes gives me a pop up with buttons that I can’t click on.

I’ve used Claude and Cursor enough to have what I think are valid opinions on AI assisted coding. Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product. Understanding the problem is the biggest bottleneck. Knowing what to build and what not to build. The next big one is convincing everyone around you of that (sometime this takes even more time). After that, it’s obsessively spending time iterating on something until it’s flawless. Sometimes that’s tweaking an easing value until the animation feels just right. Sometimes that’s obsessing over performance, and sometimes it’s freezing progress until you can make the existing app bulletproof.

AI doesn’t help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding, diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product.

It does help crank out one off tools. It does help me work in unfamiliar code bases, or code bases where for whatever reason I care more about velocity than quality. It helps me with search. It helps me rubber duck.

All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but maybe somewhere in the order of 10% all in.

> AI doesn’t help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding, diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product.

It can actually help a lot here too.

In fact I rarely have AI author or edit code, but I have it all time researching, finding edge cases I didn't think about, digging into dependencies code, finding ideas or alternative approaches. My usage is 90% of the time assisting with information gathering, criticizing (I have multiple reviewer skills with different personas, and I have multiple LLMs run them), refining, reviewing.

Even when it comes to product stuff, many of my clients have complicated business logic. Talking multi-tenant-company warehouse software where each process is drastically different and complexity balloons fast even for a single one of them. It helps to connect the dots between different sources of information (old Jira task, discord dumps, confluence, codebase, etc).

And it can iteratively test and find edge cases in applications too, same as you would do manually by taking control of the browser and testing the most uncommon paths.

I would do much less without this assistance.

I really don't get why people focus so much on the least empowering part (code), where it actually tends to balloon complexity quick or overwhelm you with so much content and edits that you can't have the energy to follow while maintaining quality.

> Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product.

I've been saying this too. The 10x engineer stuff simply cannot make sense unless previously you were spending 90%+ of your day just writing coding and now that's dropped to single digits because AI can generate it. If you spent 20-30% of your day coding before and the rest thinking about the problem, thinking about good UX, etc, then AI coding assistances mathematically cannot make you a 10x engineer. At a push they might make you a 2x engineer.

Given this I think I realised something earlier about my own output... I'm probably just a unusually good coder. I've been doing this since I was a kid so writing and reading code is basically second nature to me. When I was a young teen I would literally take my laptop on holiday with me just so I could write code - I was just that kind of person.

So I've basically always been the strongest or one of the strongest coders on any team I've been on. I very rarely have to think about how to do something in code. It's hard to think back to a time when code was a significant bottleneck for me.

However, my output was never really faster than anyone else when it come to shipping, but the quality of my output has always been wayyy higher. And I think that was because I always spent a lot more time thinking and iterating to get the best result, while other people I work with spent far more time writing code and just trying to get something they could PR.

My problem now is that the people I work, some of whom can't even read code, are able to spit out thousands of lines of code a day. So this forcing me to cut corners just to keep up with the rest of the team.

6-12 months ago I'd get at least 2-3 calls a day from people on my team asking for help to write some code. Now they just ask the AI. I haven't had someone ask me a coding related question in months at this point.

I find this frustrating to be honest. I'm seeing bad decisions everywhere in the code. For example, often a change is hard because it's a bad idea. Perhaps a page on a website doesn't really look great on mobile or desktop. Previously you would have had to think about how you could come up with a good responsive design and implement the right breakpoints. But now people can just ask Claude Code to build a completely different page for mobile, so they do. For a human that would be a huge effort, even if someone who stupid enough to think that was a good idea they probably be forced to do something thats easier to maintain and implement, but an AI? Who cares. It works. The AI isn't going to tell you no.

I know the quality of code is dropping. I see the random bugs from people clearly not understanding what Claude is writing, but if they can just ask the AI to fix it, does it even matter?

> All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but maybe somewhere in the order of 10% all in.

I'm very much like you. AI doesn't really boost my productivity at all but that's because I care about what I build and don't find coding hard. So AI doesn't really offer me anything. All it's doing is making people who don't care what their building and don't care about the quality of their code more productive. And putting me under pressure to trade quality for velocity.

> I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result.

Why not outsource it to someone else? That way you do none of the work.

You seem to be conflating code quality with product integrity.

All those problems are caused by business decisions, not the developers. You do make a good point though that AI may enable more people to build their own when they can.

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