Comment by raincole
14 hours ago
> Those same engineers will have to review and understand all of the AI-generated code now and then improve it, which will take time too.
Will they? What makes you think so? If no one cared to improve it when it costed $300k/year, no one will care it when it's cheaper now.
They’ll be forced to work on it when then the bugs in the new system are uncovered.
If the system is simple enough someone might take enough time to understand and verify the test suite to the point where they can keep adding regression tests to it and maybe mostly call it done.
They probably won’t do this though (based on the situation the company was in in the first place) and people will have Claude fix it and write tests that no one verified. And in a while the test suite will be so full tests that reimplement the code instead of testing it that it will be mostly useless.
Then someone else will come in and vibe code a replacement that won’t have the bugs the current system does but will have a whole new set.
And the cycle will continue.
The same cycle that I’ve seen in the bottom 80% of companies I’ve worked for, just faster.
Fixing bugs is the goldilocks zone for ai. Especially if you have a test that the agent can use to test their fix.
AI is not a junior developer, as some analogise, but Rain Man. Ultra autistic entity that can chew through way more logical conditions that you.
As long as you can describe the bug well ai will likely fix it. Logs help.
Let me give you specific example.
Here's a fix made by claude to my SumatraPDF: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a571c0...
I have a crash reporting system that sends me crash information in text file: callstack of crashed thread, basic os info and logs of this execution.
The way I (well, claude) fixed this bug is: I said "analyze crash report: <paste crash report>" and it does it in under a minute.
Recently I've fixed at least 30 bugs with this process (you can view recent checkins).
Those are crashes that I found hard to fix because even though by human standard I'm both expert developer and expert Windows API developer.
But I'm not an autistic machine that can just connect the dots between how every windows api works and how it ties to the callstack and information from the log, in under a minute.
That fix is just the same code from earlier in that function pasted in again after another asynchronous procedure.
I feel like you’re probably just a worse engineer than you think you are if you needed Claude for this.
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