I use claude code on a daily basis, but honestly it becomes more annoying the more I use it. Why? I think because I ask it to do something and unless I'm extremely specific, either the code is verbose or the feature I'm designing is done in a poor way. For me, the productivity gains aren't that great and I'm even considering whether to go back to doing things by hand to save myself the frustration. Sure, if you don't care about code quality or scalability, it's a great thing to generate code. And yes, there are times when I don't, but for real projects, I actually do because I know as an engineer those things do matter in the long run. So, to be honest, I still haven't had that moment.

From a technology perspective LLMs are absolutely bonkers, blows my mind it works as well as it does.

From a programmer perspective, I'm starting to like it less and less. It's useful for sure, but doesn't really live up to the hype. In many ways it's the opposite, my bet is still that programmers will be in high demand in the not so distant future after all of this settles.

Might be wrong, time will tell.

It has seemed to me that with each step from Opus 4.6, to 4.7 to 4.8 Claude has gotten worse at building good solutions. Like perhaps it is more "capable" in the small scale than 4.5 was but it's much worse at knowing what to do.

Yeah I'm the same way. They seem great when you ask it to build something unspecified, like "build me a todo app" or something. It's like magic. But when you know what the code needs to look like and can't accept anything else they just become so frustrating to use, and I doubt there is a productivity improvement there.

I think we will find ways to make them useful though. I imagine eventually it'll just be built into our editors and we don't even be thinking about AI or "agents" or "prompting", our tools will just be more capable.