Comment by SpicyLemonZest

1 day ago

The transition is pretty complete at e.g. Google and Meta, IIUC. Definitely whoever builds the AI tools you're using every day isn't writing code by hand.

I'm literally looking at Claude in the other window telling me that the bug we're working on is a "Clear-cut case", telling me to remove a "raise if this is called on this object" guard from a method, because "the data is frozen at that point" and is effectively proposing a solution that both completely misses the point (we should be calling a different method that's safe) AND potentially mutates the frozen data.

We're 41k tokens in, we have an .md file that describes the situation and Claude has just edited the .md file with a couple of lines describing the purpose of the guards.

I don't understand, are other people working with a different Opus 4.6 than I am?

  • No, that matches my experience pretty well. Yesterday Claude implemented some functionality I asked for in entirely the wrong component, and then did it again after I clarified. If I'd been coding on my own, the clock time to a complete solution would probably have been lower - but then I would have had to be coding, instead of reviewing other people's PRs.

    A careful observer would note from when I'm posting this, of course, that this is perhaps not the only thing I get up to while Claude is busy. But I really do review PRs in a much more timely manner now. (There's people who insist that there's no need to review Claude-generated code, and to be frank I think they're the same people who used to insist that their 2000 line PRs should be reviewed and merged within a day.)

I really just don't believe it. I have not met anyone in tech who writes zero code now. The idea that no one at Google writes any code is such a huge claim it requires extraordinary evidence. Which none ever gets presented.

  • Can confirm that basically no one at Google or Meta hand writes code outside extremely extremely niche projects

  • Anecdotally me and my colleagues haven’t written a substantial line of code since January and this isn’t a mag7; I would be very surprised if mag7 were writing anything by hand unless it’s a custom DSL.

  • I'm surprised to hear that. One of us is in a bubble, and I'm genuinely not sure who. I have not met anyone in tech (including multiple people at Google) who does still write code. I've been recreationally interested in AI for a long time, which is a potential source of skew I suppose, but I do not and most people in my circles do not work on anything directly related to AI.

    • Statistically, knowing multiple people at Google is, IMO, a pretty good sign you're in a bubble. Unless you know a few thousand other software developers.

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