I don’t think this is true. I’ve been doing this since the 1980s and while you might think code is fairly generic, most people aren’t shipping apps they’re working on quiet little departmental systems, or trying to patch ancient banking systems and getting a greenfield gig is pretty rare in my experience.

So for me the code is mundane but it’s always unique and rarely do you come across the same problems at different organisations.

If you ever got a spec good enough to be the code, I’m sure Claude or whatever could absolutely ace it, but the spec is never good enough. You never get the context of where your code will run, who will deploy it or what the rollback plan is if it fails.

The code isn’t the problem and never was. The problem is the environment where your code is going.

The proof is bit rot. Your code might have been right 5 years ago but isn’t any more because the world shifted around it.

I am using Claude pretty heavily but there are some problems it is awful at, e.g I had a crusty old classic ASP website to resuscitate this week and it would not start. Claude suggested all the things I half remembered from back in the day but the real reason was Microsoft disabled vbscript in windows 11 24H2 but that wasn’t even on its radar.

I have to remind myself that it’s a fancy xerox machine because it does a damn good job of pretending otherwise.