My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

> The ones that praised it tended to be people who were taught or otherwise figured out how to use metadata tags like date:/onsite: , whereas the ones that disparaged it tended to be the folks who would search for things like "who won the game" and then proceed to click every scam/porno link on this green Earth and then blame Google/gdg/lycos/whatever when they were exposed to whatever they clicked.

One big warning here: search engines only became really useful when you could search for "who won the game" and the search engine actually returned the correct thing as the top result.

We're more than a quarter of a century later and probably 99.99% of users don't know about Google's advanced search operators.

This should be a major warning for LLMs. People are people and will do people things.

Whaddaya mean, don't you like the 100th live action remake of an old animated movie?

It depends... I've worked with hundreds of juniors & seniors during my consulting days.

I've had ups and downs in this situation, but on most cases it's about showing the light to a path forward.

In most cases, the software development was straightforward, and most of the coaching was about a how to behave in the organisation they were functioning in.

One can only have so many architecture/code quality reviews, typically we evacuated the seniority of the devs on their ability to cope with people (colleagues, bosses, clients, ...)

We did have a few very bright technical people as well, but those were about 10 on a 2000-person company.

The reason I explicitly mentioned the slightly autistic junior person, is because I've worked with one, who was about to be fired, because other people had issues dealing with him.

So I moved desks, sat next to him for over a month, and he ended up becoming the champion for one of the projects we were doing, because he was very bright, precise and had a huge memory, which mattered a lot in that context.

Other stories are similar, once they were about to throw out a colleague because he was taking days to do something that should have taken a few hours max. So I say next to him, to see what he was doing.

Turned out he was refactoring all the code his feature touched because he couldn't stand bad code. So we moved him to quality control, and last time I checked he was thriving...

I guess what I'm saying is that -just like with people -, you need to find a good modus operandi, and have matching expectations, but if you can figure it out, it will pay off dividends.

I think the point of the poster is that there's no need for them because as he puts it replace "the majority of engineers". Tech is about to be decimated - software as a field is about to shrink quite substantially. To be honest the way things are going it is possible IMO (although would severely disadvantage me) - 3 years ago given the amount of skill required and lifetime learning in it I would of never thought this. Why do you need juniors - well you may need them but with the oversatuation it will take maybe 20 years (a generation to retire) for the current crop of seniors to get exhausted given AI will decimate them too according to the OP. That's definitely a far enough away time for it to be someone else's problem - by then AI might be significantly better anyway; we could even have superintelligence and SWE jobs might be the least of our worries.

Great for the owners of tech companies and non-tech companies using tech (many non-technical, capital based who now scale with less cost base); not so great for people with tech skills who invested for their future. Which is the goal of these AI companies. Your pain/unemployment/cost is their profit/economic surplus.

To the OP its "exciting times" for capital - probably for many people however it seems like an impending nightmare is coming especially if they are relying on intellectual work to survive/provide/etc. Most CC articles on HN trend I've seen trend to the top; which shows it is definitely instigating either greed or fear in people. I would argue that "code" seems to be the most successful AI product to date - most others are just writing assistants, meme generators, risky operators, etc at least for me. Its code that seems to instigate this persistent fear.

On a side note, at least for me, AI has personally dissuaded me from learning/investing more in this career as a senior engineer with almost 20 years experience. I hope I'm wrong.

> The people that are happy with it and praising the avenues offered by LLM/AI solutions are creating codebases that fulfill their requirements, whatever those might be.

Ah, but "whatever those might be" is the crucial bit.

I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying. There will always be a segment of power users who are able to leverage their knowledge about these tools to extract more value out of them than people who don't use them to their full potential. That is true for any tool, not just in software.

What you're ignoring are two other possibilities:

1. The expectation of users can be wildly different. Someone who has never programmed before, but can now create and ship a smartphone app, will see these tools as magical. Whatever issues they have will either go unnoticed, or won't matter considering the big picture. Surely their impression of AI tooling will be nothing short of positive. They might be experts at using LLMs, but not at programming.

OTOH, someone who has been programming for decades, and strives for a certain level of quality in their work, will find the experience much different. They will be able to see the flaws and limitations of these tools, and addressing them will take time and effort that they could've better spent elsewhere. As we've known since the introduction of LLMs, domain experts are the only ones who can experience these problems.

So the experience of both sides is valid, and should have equal weight in conversations. Unlike you, I do trust the opinion of domain experts over those of user experts, but that's a personal bias.

2. There are actual flaws and limitations in AI tooling. The assumption that all negative experiences are from users who are "holding it wrong", while all positive ones are from expert users, is wrong. It steers the conversation away from issues with the tech that should be discussed and addressed. And considering the industry is strongly propelled by hype and marketing right now, we need conversations grounded in reality to push back against it.