Comment by ryandrake
1 hour ago
My point is that all these steps can be done very quickly by even a junior developer who knows emacs or their IDE, in a codebase with existing lint/format/test automation, without even taking their hands off the keyboard. You're already in your IDE, you can probably do it just as fast there. I don't see the cost/benefit of spending tokens and hitting a server for this kind of work.
I guess the difference may be in people's mode of AI working: Do you primarily develop in your IDE or a bunch of terminals running vim, and occasionally fire up claude to do more complex things? Or do you primarily develop in a long-lasting claude terminal, and occasionally tab over to the IDE to watch/codereview? In other words: What dev tool is on your primary monitor and what's on your secondary monitor? It's getting hard for developers in one camp to discuss coding and see eye-to-eye with developers from the other camp.
Those 11 steps would probably take me 15 minutes.
There are a lot of small refactorings that I wouldn't consider to be worth 15 minutes of my time, so I wouldn't do them.
Outsourcing those to an agent means I don't have to make that tradeoff, which means I can get better quality code.
But yes, for a lot of my work I'm now a Claude Code / Codex first developer. I run Zed so I can navigate the code and occasionally make small edits.