by mjr00 | 2026-02-13 20:06:32+00:00
I'm one of those developers who is now writing probably ~80% of my code via Claude. For context, I have >15 years experience and former AWS so I'm not a bright-eyed junior or former product manager who now believes themselves a master developer.

I'm not worried about AI job loss in the programming space. I can use Claude to generate ~80% of my code precisely because I have so much experience as a developer. I intuitively know what is a simple mechanical change; that is to say, uninteresting editing of lines of code; as opposed to a major architectural decision. Claude is great at doing uninteresting things. I love it because that leaves me free to do interesting things.

You might think I'm being cocky. But I've been strongly encouraging juniors to use Claude as well, and they're not nearly as successful. When Claude suggests they do something dumb--and it DOES still suggest dumb things--they can't recognize that it's dumb. So they accept the change, then bang their head on the wall as things don't work, and Claude can't figure it out to help them. Then there are bad developers who are really fucked by Claude. The ones who really don't understand anything. They will absolutely get destroyed as Claude leads them down rabbit holes. I have specific anecdotes about this from people I've spoken to. One had Claude delete a critical line in an nginx config for some reason and the dev spent a week trying to resolve it. Another was tasked with doing a simple database maintenance script, and came back two weeks later (after constant prodding by teammates for a status update) with a Claude-written reimplementation of an ORM. That developer just thought they would need another day of churning through Claude tokens to dig themselves out of an existential hole. If you can't think like a developer, these tools won't help you.

I have enough experience to review Claude's output and say "no, this doesn't make sense." Having that experience is critical, especially in what I call the "anti-Goldilocks" zone. If you're doing something precise and small-scoped, Claude will do it without issues. If you try to do something too large ("write a Facebook for dogs app") Claude will ask for more details about what you're trying to do. It's the middle ground where things are a problem: Claude tries to fill in the details when there's something just fundamentally wrong with what it's being asked.

As a concrete example, I was working on a new project and I asked Claude to implement an RPC to update a database table. It did so swimmingly, but also added a "session.commit()" line... just kind in the middle of somewhere. It was right to do so, of course, since the transaction needed to be committed. And if this app was meant to a prototype, sure. But anyone with experience knows that randomly doing commits in the middle of business logic code is a recipe for disaster. The issue, of course, was not having any consistent session management patterns. But a non-developer isn't going to recognize that that's an issue in the first place.

Or a more silly example from the same RPC: the gRPC API didn't include a database key to update. A mistake on my part. So Claude's initial implementation of the update RPC was to look at every row in the table and find ones where the non-edited fields matched. Makes... sense, in a weird roundabout way? But God help whoever ends up vibe coding something like that.

The type of AI fears are coming from things like this in the original article:

> I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. [...] when I test it, it's usually perfect.

Which is great. How many developers are getting paid full-time to make new apps on a regular basis? Most companies, I assume, only build one app. And then they spend years and many millions of dollars working on that app. "Making a new app from scratch" is the easy part! What's hard is adding new features to that app while not breaking others, when your lines of code go from those initial tens of thousands to tens of millions.

There's something to be said about the cheapness of making new software, though. I do think one-off internal tools will become more frequent thanks to AI support. But developers are still going to be the ones driving the AI, as the article says.