They can just ask Claude to upgrade it for them, completing the circle!

I wish I could disable most of these. I already hate all the "oh you're actually right, let me fix that" nonsense. Then it proceeds to burn 50k tokens on the git history instead of copying logic A from a different part of the codebase to logic B, where I want that exact logic without having to write the boilerplate myself...

Makes me think of how my Claude.md files specifies to use the built in framework code-generators (rails). Those generators are deterministically right every time. I wonder how often the Agent actually follows the guidance. I do see them follow it when I look. But it doesn't seem so every time.

A lot of the time if you're copying code from one place to another what you actually want to do is abstract it so you can reuse it in both places. The LLM can easily do this type of stuff, just tell it and it'll happily do it. This is exactly what I mean when I tell people they need to work closer with the AI, tell it how to do things. Don't just tell it what to do and get frustrated when it does it differently than you would. A good way to achieve this without writing huge prompts is tell it to plan the change first. Just give it some vague low-effort directions. It'll usually get most things right, you tell it what you want different and once you're happy you tell it to go ahead.

Nah the codebase is legacy fucked and I cant be bothered to try and optimize business flows without the fear of other stuff breaking. Claude 100% of the time even thinks we use laravel despite the project being some old lumen codebase, so most of laravels features are not available. It also gets the PHP version we are using wrong 100% of the time.

> Least important thing for a business - Takes weeks or months to get simple features out the door, and when they're out they're buggy as hell and the bugs never get fixed. Sound familiar? > I’d never touch any line of code unless I absolutely have to And this is how legacy code is made. Years of everyone "never touching anything they don't have to" leads to a giant steaming pile of shit. > unless the business is willing to face some down time How does a simple refactor cause downtime? I do this kind of stuff all the time and pretty much never cause any downtime. In the very rare cases that prod downtime does occur it's generally not because of some simple code refactor, and we have it back up in no time by just rolling it back. Unless it's not related to the code at all, in which case it also wasn't a refactor that caused it.

All enablers also enable mediocrity. That's not new. At least when the non-mediocre engineer has to work with someone, they can have a tireless responsive partner. I find this varies by individual, but the AI taking care of so much boilerplate and rote work of coding, and taking the role of architect, test designer, and reviewer is a lot more productive for me. Check the code may take the same skill, but it's an order of magnitude less work.

use ai to do that

Yep, its already quite easy to do so with tools like opencode/openrouter. Ive used some open source models and they seem … ok? Im not doing foundational math, just refactoring code, understanding existing code etc. I don’t see a future where companies blow 11% of employee compensation on a single tool; the hosted AI server + oss models will 99% win out.

~70 FTE Engineering team. We are shipping more features, especially features that previously would not have survived the cut to make it on the roadmap. Even though we are shipping more, our total amount of escaped bugs has not increased, so our escape rate has actually lowered. On top of that we are able to triage and fix escaped bugs more quickly now. And then of course there has been an uptick in internal tooling that makes the rest of the company more efficient, and we have been able to address tech debt at a higher rate than before. I don't think this would have been possible without having solid engineering culture and processes in place before bringing in ai coding tools. And I don't want to sugarcoat it, this hasn't been easy, requires continued discipline, and took well over a year to get good at. And we still have to continuously learn, experiment and adapt our training, tooling, and processes.

Imo its pretty clear that anyone who is taking the issue at least somewhat seriously knows the amount of value they provide is not non-zero. However, the problems are manifold: firstly, toolchains vary wildly, from fancy autocomplete, to engineers chatting with codebases they're unfamiliar with, to people integrating them into devops and infra, to people doing spec driven development, with a thousand philosophies inbetween. Many people suspect that those above them in the ladder are on the cusp of massive failure due to losing track of the code, and many people higher on the ladder think those below them are overly cautious. I hate to be the guy saying "oh it must be somewhere in the middle", but I will say at the very least I like being able to use it to read docs for me, and to synthesize syntax and simple scripts (give me a join that works across these tables and gives me column x, y and z - give me a python script that parses a file like this example and extracts abc data - given this api spec figure out how I can get this data from this endpoint, go) as for building actually complex software, the art of that is not in simply chaining together such scripts. Its the art of using architecture and testing to shape uncertainty, and developing requirements (and extrapolating sensibly from incomplete requirements). I don't think llms are great at this, but they arent terrible either. A lot of the more active users in the space are doing stuff where theyve realised they need more detailed specs, which like, yeah, we knew this already - better defined problems lead to better software.

$18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer. Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.

In the old world, the refactor probably won't happen in the first place, but the effort would be put elsewhere. "Increased velocity of .. greenfield features" doesn't directly translate to additional revenue, and your number is very questionable in the first place. Software engineers like to talk as if business and finance are as easy as pushing code out and refactoring. It's not and never has been.

> The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). I'm pretty pessimistic on AI and don't have access to good agentic workflows, but refactors are exactly the thing where it seems to me like agents could be really strong - once I've refactored something architecturally, I might have hundreds of instances of a thing that needs to be updated in a predictable way, but is complicated enough that it's going to be faster for me to manually update hundreds of instances rather than writing a generalizable find/replace tool.

Sure they’re fine at that sort of rote find/replace job as long as it’s relatively straightforward. But it only really works if you do the hard parts yourself then tell the agent to go and do the rote part. Even then I’ve had it turn to slop more often than not as the agent has to start contorting the code into weird shapes to try and finish the job. It’ll never stop and be like “hey maybe this was a bad idea, let’s try something else”. And by the time you get to review it, you’ve spent 20 bucks on something that needs to be thrown away.

> The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). Absolutely false. Refactors (in my case) can be as simple as dropping old packages for newer packages with slightly different semantics. It can be moving legacy pages from jQuery to Vue. > You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself. I've 25 years coding, trust me, I don't lose anything by not finding out on my own that the semantics of a jQuery promise changed between major versions. > The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”. You have no idea of what you're talking about. There are entire classes of K8s networking issues that would have taken me a day to debug which Claude solved in minutes just because it can run 20 diagnostics commands in two minutes and deal with technical minutae that is time-consuming but ultimately irrelevant to my business goals.

I reached my own productivity limit on several projects (in my case, I'm building a fully automated microscope that uses realtime computer vision to solve a number of longstanding problems with microscopes). As much as I'd want to write the code for it, I hit a wall when it came to debugging some particularly tricky issues- either I couldn't do it, or the time investment was too high. I use Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude to do that work and it unblocked the enjoyable parts of the project while taking care of the tedium. I also find LLMs help me learn faster because they can often take a paper and turn it into working code, which I find to be a very slow process.

I'm on a $100 Claude Max plan, my usage is only about 50% of the plan limits, but in the last 30 days my usage was equivalent to API token spend of $1850. If you save all your Claude Code conversations, the saved files include API costs and you can calculate this yourself. One of my most expensive sessions cost me over $100 in token spend in a single evening. I'd just found out that the time tracking & invoicing SaaS I use is increasing their monthly pricing by 2.4x - so I assigned Claude Opus 4.8 to recreate the entire SaaS for myself, and load in 13 years of my historical data. I've only completed a full read-only implementation so far, with adding & editing of records still to come, but I do expect Claude will have fully recreated the entire SaaS for me at an API cost less than a single 1 year seat of continued subscription to their service. And since I'm actually on a Max plan, it didn't actually cost me $200 of tokens at all. coff i would not buy the Bending Spoons IPO coff saaspocalypse I could ramble on about where the other $1750 of usage goes, but I imagine it's similar for most heavy Claude / AI users. Interactive coding sessions, a daily personalized podcast, some automated overnight agentic "proactive" sessions, a daemon that wakes up if I send Claude an email or voicetext to check something when I'm out. I've also noticed that if Claude's tool-use goes haywire & Claude gets confused or lost, sometimes a single email reply session that would normally be just $1 of API might spiral to $12 of API while it bangs its head against trying to run a program that's in a different folder to the one it's currently in. Sometimes a simple 'pwd' would save you a lot of headache, Claude....