An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

It also coincided with the hollowing out and offshoring of practically all US industrial and manufacturing capability.

I will be very happy if the result of AI means we go back to how things should actually be - where technology/IT is used to support real world things and acts as a backstage enabler to get shit done. Not the main event.

I often said since the early 00’s my dream would be to have made enough money in the insanely stupid “tech for tech sake” world to go back to just being one of a few “IT guys” supporting a factory and keeping the machines running. These jobs of course exist, but due to tech salaries very few small manufacturing businesses could support hiring such a person.

There is now a generation or two of technologists who don’t understand that the job isn’t to learn the latest hot web framework or yammer on about best practices or whatever. It’s to support a business in shipping actual products to customers.

> His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.

I don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradicts it.

In the interview the engineer says "When Claud Code came out almost a year ago, I started dabbling with web based tools ..." and "When it first came out I had so many ideas and tried all these different things", so he had clearly already used extensively it for a year. I would also guess the engineer was somewhat technically minded from the get-go, since he claims he was "really good with excel" before starting with Claude Code, but that is beside the point.

The interviewer later asks "How much of those 8 weeks was learning Claude Code versus actually building the thing?", and the interviewee answers "Well, I started Claude Code when it first came out so the learning curve has really gone down for me now..." and then trails off to a different subject. Which further confirms that the summary in the post is false.

It really seems like the engineer has spent the year prior learning Claude Code and then spent 8 weeks on solely building this specific application.

The interviewer also claims "This would normally have taken a developer a year to build", which seems really unsubstantiated. It's of course hard to judge without all the details, but looking at the short demo in the video, 8 weeks of regular development time from a somewhat experienced developer doesn't seem too far fetched if the objective is "don't make it pretty, just make it work".

As I said, it's a really interesting case study about a paradigm shift in how software is developed, and it's clear this app would never have existed without Claude Code. So I don't really see the need for the blatant lying.

I find that scalability is usually overblown because computers are fast now, which is not to say you shouldn't make it run fast on one computer.