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Comment by bluefirebrand

3 days ago

Greenfield is still such a tiny percentage of all software work going on in the world though :/

It’s a tiny percentage of software work because the programming is slow, and setting up new projects is even slower.

It’s been a majority of my projects for the past two months. Not because work changed, but because I’ve written a dozen tiny, personalised tools that I wouldn’t have written at all if I didn’t have Claude to do it.

Most of them were completed in less than an hour, to give you an idea of the size. Though it would have easily been a day on my own.

I agree, that's fair. I think a lot of people are playing around with AI on side projects and making some bad extrapolations from their initial experiences.

It'll also apply to isolated-enough features, which is still a small amount of someone's work (not often something you'd work on for a full month straight), but more people will have experience with this.

  • greenfield development is also the “easiest” and most fun part of software development. As the famous saying goes, the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the time lol.

    I’ve also noticed that, generally, nobody likes maintaining old systems.

    so where does this leave us as software engineers? Should I be excited that it’s easy to spin up a bunch of code that I don’t deeply understand at the beginning of my project, while removing the fun parts of the project?

    I’m still grappling with what this means for our industry in 5-10 years…