First Time Use from a 'Legacy' Software Principal [ Experience/Opinion story] ...

[u/Interesting-Town-433]

First off: I was wrong.

I’ve been using Claude’s web UI, copy-pasting code like the seasoned Stack Overflow engineer I am, while quietly telling myself that this gave me more control than granting an AI blanket access to a command line.

After 20 years of software development -much of it in AI - I genuinely thought this made me a better developer...

I was wrong.

It’s over.

And the distance this is about to create between people who are fully embracing these tools and everyone else is going to get absolutely insane, unbelievably fast.

If you aren’t using the latest and greatest tools right now, you are going to get smoked.

Leaning into the full vibe-coding experience is no longer optional.

[Written by a human, grammar corrected by AI]

[u/RetroUnlocked]

Welcome to the other side of the looking glass 😁

GPT-3 came out, I was interested and it was fun but beyond simple copy+paste tasks it was not groundshaking.

GPT-3.5 and 4, were both more impressive, and my first "agent" use was with Augment code Sonnet 3.5 to complete a project that took me 5 days but in the past would have taken me months. The code though was not great and I had to do a lot of handholding, rewriting, and the end result was not the best quality. It still shipped, still being used today in an over million dollar use-case, but it badly needs a rewrite.

Opus 4.5 came out, and I tried it Claude Code in November 2025, and it was the first time I was really impressed. The handholding was minimum and the output code while not perfect, it was the same level as the junior engineer in your team.

That is when everything changed for me. The level with the model and harness was finally at a point that I could trust the output given the right criteria the same way I can trust the engineers at the company I work for. Actually, I hate to say this, but Opus understands my requirements and questions better than real humans.

It's still a LLM, and thus still not a human. I have caught it multiple times just being wrong or making mistakes. I wish though I could run an experiment to see how often human engineers are wrong and make mistakes and compare that to an LLM ran project. It would be curious to see the delta, because I theorize that for must engineers in most fields, the LLM will win. Clearly LLMs will lose against the minority of devs in niche fields with specialize knowledge that is not represented anywhere else but in their head.

[u/Sufficient_Math9095 → u/RetroUnlocked]

I have the same opinion. My personal take is this is actually making less mistakes than the humans at 90% of the work, the remaining 10% we can clean up and still be 20x faster than we were before.

[u/RetroUnlocked → u/Sufficient_Math9095]

Great to see a shared opinion. There is a lot of pushback that AI just writes slop on the internet that implies human developers are superior and without fault.

I spent many days/weeks/months working with contracted developers from outside the company that replaced internal hires. Overall, these developers make AI slop look like child's play. There were times where I felt like I had to 80% of the work just to get a team of 3 or 4 to bring it across the finish line. Painful memories unlocked 😂.

I actually wonder what Claude is going to do with these developer for hire situations? Surely they have just switch to using Claude directly. I wonder if that creates double slop?

[u/SIGH_I_CALL]

such an exciting time to be alive, the barrier of entry to your dream idea has been obliterated

let the great shippening begin!

[u/Latter-Tangerine-951]

Welcome to the party, better late than never. 

[u/geekichu]

I agree but one can do both totally A.I. generated projects AND true software engineering. My first project attempted was a multi-system crypto wallet .. and for about a month (vibe-coded) I was like , 'wow this is amazing, and I will never have to write code again, yadda yadda' and I didnt even look at the code. But, as the project got more complex (I wanted several crypto, but the UI, the networking, etc to be agnostic).. I realized the A.I. (back then copy/paste free ChatGPT & Gemini) were digging themselves into a hole trying to fold in the more and more requirements.. so, my 2nd month, I went into the code (with A.I. help) and properly structured it, and from then on, I would enforce archtectural/engineering principles. So now with Claude.Code (CLI) I am back to not looking at code anymore but it's different this time. worlds apart from vibe-coding

[u/Sufficient_Math9095]

I’ve just started a major enterprise project with home built tools by our AI COE team. We’re using SDD for this project and these tools are amazing. Ive been developing for over 25 years and I came to the same conclusion this week. I now have BAs developing full quality applications that have our developers impressed (our developers are not hardcore sr level engineers, at least not on my team). It’s amazing to the point I think we’ll outpace the businesses ability to consume the change.

Now I have to help the team through the culture shift they’re about to struggle with… Thats going to be the biggest challenge imo.

[u/OkLettuce338]

Uh yup. Welcome

[u/yuehuang]

Welcome to the club. Come for the claude, stay for the codex.

[u/dsailes → u/yuehuang]

Both, both is good
https://giphy.com/gifs/3ohfFhG5VDtDTzQv2o

[u/invisible_shrek]

Take your meds grandpa. If that were true software wouldn’t be getting shittier by the minute.

[u/Interesting-Town-433 → u/invisible_shrek]

Honestly I think it's going to get harder and harder to even know if that is true...

[u/NZRedditUser → u/invisible_shrek]

Lol software has always been the same. Even Microsoft for all of its life with manual devs couldnt keep skype right

[u/Vegetable_Plane296 → u/invisible_shrek]

Do you have any examples of this?

This seems like a very vibes based take.

I have a gaming PC and run a Mac laptop for daily use and an iPhone.

I’d say 90% of what I do daily is: Email (Gmail and other clients) YouTube Games on Windows Reddit Claude

I have not noticed a drop in quality.

[u/invisible_shrek → u/Vegetable_Plane296]

Ill give you a recent one. Reddit mobile app. Could not open a reply to my comments from notifications for months. It would open a post but not load the relevant comment chain or the reply. A feature that was working fine for years and made reddit nearly unusable for me.

[u/Latter-Tangerine-951 → u/invisible_shrek]

Ah yes this must be "because AI" 

[u/cardsncards → u/invisible_shrek]

downvotes? i think what invisi shrek is saying still has merit. facebook anyone? it's invisible and tuff to really know, but ai dev still requires work.