This reminds me of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption.

Disruption happens when firms are disincentivized to switch to the new thing or address the new customer because the current state of it is bad, the margins are low. Intel missed out on mobile because their existing business was so excellent and making phone chips seemed beneath them.

The funny thing is that these firms are being completely rational. Why leave behind high margins and your excellent full-featured product for this half-working new paradigm?

But then eventually, the new thing becomes good enough and overtakes the old one. Going back to the Intel example, they felt this acutely when Apple switched their desktops to ARM.

For now, Claude Code works. It's already good enough. But unless we've plateaued on AI progress, it'll surpass hand crafted equivalents on most metrics.

Maybe it'll work. Yes, disruption usually starts from the low end, but plenty of low-end alternatives die out without ever disrupting the high-end option.

Right now it's making crappy, unmaintainable code, and while you can make a lot of money with crappy, unmaintainable code, the need for good code hasn't gone away.

This isn’t the narrative, at least in any circle I speak to. The narrative is currently that everyone needs to strive to be using hundreds of dollars of tokens a day or you aren’t being effective enough. Executives are mulling getting rid of code review and tests. I’ve never seen such blind optimism and so little appreciation for how things can go wrong.

Even if AI progress plateaus, I'm confident we would build tooling and patterns around the current models that would surpass hand crafted equivalents.