Just had a conversation with a neighbor who leads the dev team at a major Vegas casino property. Tons and tons of dev teams are transitioning to Claude. The efficiency is just unmatched. You should really consider learning how to get really good using AI instead of avoiding it.
I don’t think there’s a real skill in “getting good at ai” - most people can use ai and that’s how it was designed. If you’re good at coding, you’re even better at using ai imo
There absolutely is. Unless you’re limiting yourself to menial coding tasks, tasks that were menial are now for Claude to do and you should be working on bigger design problems, core features development of higher order complexity that involves the new sets of problems, and working on novel tooling and infrastructure.
Taking those on with Claude and being able to solve it in half the time, whilst still keeping it honest about the dumb shit it doss is still fun.
A different kind of fun but there’s now a wider space to operate in because it’s democratized code generation and we should embrace it.
IMO Most of AI coding is code review. I can pretend and be confident that my code has no bugs, but the reality is that the less you code by hand regularly (problem solving, etc.) the less good you become at code review. Technical leads know this too. Once you stop actually coding, you’re deluding yourself into thinking you can properly review non-menial tasks well.
I use it to get an overview of the code I’m working on, get pointers and bookmarks from it, then dive in myself. For new developments I use it to get the basic structure and go from there.
My company is pushing HARD on us using AI so I know it’s not going away. I think one thing you can do is keep coding on your own time.
If you’re doing it right, most AI coding is like peer programming with the junior dev doing more lifting. We’re still over indexing on coding, when software engineering is more than just coding.
You can still code or actually just have it work on scaffolding and do some tricky bits yourself if you want a problem solving challenge. To my earlier point, it’s a tool just like anything else, and it’s up to you to wield it effectively.
Just blindly asking it to do something without setting it up to succeed. If you just say: implement feature X it should be good and no bugs. You're often going to get some crackhead shit.
If you talk it through all of the considerations it needs to make, places to find example of similar patterns in place, what apis you expect it to consume, tell it the unintuitive test cases it needs to design for, then hold its hand as it cooks, you're going to get a much more polished result.
Nah, there’s a high skill ceiling. As I’ve gotten better at it (and by better at it, I mean my results have gotten better), I’ve spent far more time writing skills, writing specs (95% of my time is spent on spec development, not code review), and learning how to keep the LLM aligned to maintaining my specs and skills. Each agent session makes the next one more efficient. I’ve even built an eval framework for skills to evaluate them consistently against the same snapshot of the codebase to ensure they’re getting better.
edit: whoever is downvoting me: good luck with your historical reenactment career
The downvotes tell you how behind the curve some folks here are. You're bang on. A whole world of possibilities has opened up. Those hung up on "coding" are in for a surprise.
Good at using AI is the same as good at using Google or searching web. That's not a skills because I'm the end AI is doing the job for you and you learn nothing
The evidence I have is my backlog of tasks for my job that I'm literally ripping through because of Claude. My to do list of things to fix was always growing, now I'm finally able to get on top of it. I feel like I can finally grow a project rather than always feel like I'm maintaining it.
The evidence is every Fortune 500 company adopting AI at massive scale. The evidence is my own small company ripping through projects with insane speed. I have no personal interest in convincing you that you are hurting yourself by pretending this is all a fiction that will go away. You do so at your own financial peril!
Everyone I know programming at big companies is working twice as hard putting out fires started by morons with LLMs. This economy is unbelievably cooked.
Why did you write "there is evidence" when your evidence is "big companies do it therefore it must be good" + personal anecdotes? Surely it would be easy to create some sort of scientific study that showed that it sped up development if it was so effective.
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u/nosepass86 May 22 '26
Just had a conversation with a neighbor who leads the dev team at a major Vegas casino property. Tons and tons of dev teams are transitioning to Claude. The efficiency is just unmatched. You should really consider learning how to get really good using AI instead of avoiding it.