Comment by OJFord
6 days ago
> There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.
This is silly, they didn't spend a year trying to crank out the right code, they spent a year not being aligned, disagreeing on approach, getting people to commit, support from other teams providing necessary integrations or platform etc. - Claude didn't help with any of that, it just did the code part, which wasn't the problem in the first place.
We're a small B2B company, been 5 devs for a long time, recently expanded to 10.
This mirrors our experience with our big customers. Minor changes requires countless meetings with a dozen people and nobody takes charge, everything has to be repeated at least three times because people rotate while this circus goes on and so on.
In the end we finally get the people who know what's up involved and it results in a brief meeting and like an hour of writing code and testing.
One of our strengths is that we've all been here so long. We know these large customers way better than they do, because we still have the dev and the project manager that worked on the last thing, even if that was 6-7 years ago. We've literally had a large Fortune 500 customer call us and as how their systems worked, systems we don't even integrate directly with. And we could inform them, since we had retained that knowledge from a project some years ago.
So yeah, the code is usually never the problem.
Just you wait. In Claude Code future, AGI aligns you!
My reading is precisely the opposite, ie that she fed it the problem without the solution and it independently came to the solution they spent months arguing over.
Unless that was a complex constraint-satisfying compromisation problem I don't think that's different though? My point is that it didn't take so long to produce the code of this solution, it took the time to agree that it was the solution. Unless you just get everyone to agree 'whatever Claude says is the solution', having Claude produce it doesn't help!
> I don't think that's different though?
It is different. You suggested that rakyll told Claude to simply implement a solution that her team already put the legwork into designing. I'm saying that it sounds like Claude produced the solution independently based on a description of the problem. Those two are completely different and if you can't see that, I'm not sure what to say.
> having Claude produce it doesn't help!
Sure. Also, it could be a coincidence that it came to the correct solution, we can't discount that possibility.
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This is how I viewed it, they spent a year, figuring out exactly what they wanted, then they gave it to the system. I think it might have been different if they had started with AI in the first place.
Does all of that stuff have to be done by developers though, or project managers?
I assume at least some of it was technical disagreement, so PMs sure but also TPMs and what have been called SWEs even if hypothetically we don't call them that any more because in the brave new AI world they don't need to directly create software any more.
(I've personally never applied to somewhere that advertised that it would call me a 'developer', because that just sounds like a very boring factory-line 'churn out the code as described in this work ticket' role to me, that I don't want and didn't get a professional degree for, even before all this LLM/'agentic' possibility.)