Comment by giancarlostoro

Comment by giancarlostoro 17 hours ago

14 replies

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;)

While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the model enough context, full stack trace, every time.

tenacious_tuna 17 hours ago

> Well now you get to read it.

Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR.

I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.

  • HaroldCindy 17 hours ago

    We need to develop new etiquette around submitting AI-generated code for review. Using AI for code generation is one thing, but asking other people review something that you neither wrote nor read is inconsiderate of their time.

    • daheza 16 hours ago

      I'm getting AI generated product requirements that they haven't read themselves. It is so frustrating. Random requirements like "this service must have a response time of 5s or less" - "A retry mechanism must be present". We have a specific SLA already for response time and the designs don't have a retry mechanism built.

      The bad product managers have become 10x worse because they just generate AI garbage to spray at the engineering team. We are now writing AI review process for our user stories to counter the AI generation of the product team. I'd much rather spend my time building things than having AI wars between teams.

      • HaroldCindy 11 hours ago

        Oof. My general principle is "sending AI-authored prose to another human without at least editing it is rude". Getting an AI-generated message from someone at all feels rude to me, kind of like an extreme version of "dictated but not read" being in a letter in the old days.

      • _keats 13 hours ago

        Wow, this describes _exactly_ what I've started to see from some PMs.

  • icedchai 13 hours ago

    At least they're running the test suite? I'm working with guys who don't even do that! I've also heard "I've fixed the tests" only to discover, yes, the tests pass now, but the behavior is no longer correct...

weatherlite 17 hours ago

> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output

Which stands to reason you'll need less of them. I'm really hoping this somehow leads to an explosion of new companies being built and hiring workers , otherwise - not good for us.

  • phantasmish 16 hours ago

    > Which stands to reason you'll need less of them.

    Depends on how much demand there would be for somewhat-cheaper software. Human hours taken could well remain the same.

    Also depends on whether this approach leads to a whole lot of badly-fucked projects that companies can’t do without and have to hire human teams to fix…

jackschultz 17 hours ago

This is what I'm doing, Opus 4.5 for personal projects and to learn the flow and what's needed. Only thing I'll disagree with is how the work takes similar amount of time because I'm finding it unbelievably faster. It's crazy how with smart planning and documentation that we can do with the agents, getting markdown files etc, they can write the code better and faster than I can as a senior dev. No question.

I've found Opus 4.5 as a big upgrade compared to any of the other models. Big step up and the minor issues that were annoying and I needed to watch out for with Sonnet and GPT5.1.

It's to the point where I'm on the side of, if the models are offline or I run out of tokens for the 5 hour window or the week (with what I'm paying now), there's kind of no use of doing work. I can use other models to do planning or some review, but then wait until I'm back with Opus 4.5 to do the code.

It still absolutely requires review from me and planning before writing the code, and this is why there can be some slop that goes by, but it's the same as if you have a junior and they put in weak PRs. Difference is much quicker planning which the models help with, better implementation with basic conventions compared to juniors, and much easier to tell a model to make changes compared to a human.

  • giancarlostoro 17 hours ago

    > This is what I'm doing, Opus 4.5 for personal projects and to learn the flow and what's needed. Only thing I'll disagree with is how the work takes similar amount of time because I'm finding it unbelievably faster.

    I guess it depends on the project type, in some cases like you're saying way faster. I definitely recognize I've shaved weeks off a project, and I get really nuanced and Claude just updates and adjusts.

GuinansEyebrows 17 hours ago

> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output

which means either devs will take over architectural roles (which already exist and are filled) or architects will take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are already positions within the industry in addition to being hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal interest.

  • QuercusMax 16 hours ago

    I've seen Product Manager / Technical Program Manager types leaning into using AI to research what's involved in a solution, or even fix small bugs themselves. Many of these people have significant software experience already.

    This is mostly a good thing provided you have a clear separation between solution exploration and actually shipping software - as the extra work put into productionizing a solution may not be obvious or familiar to someone who can use AI to identify a bugfix candidate, but might not know how we go about doing pre-release verification.