Eat my words

Oh man, how wrong was I?

Time to eat my words!

Back in late 2022, I wrote up my thoughts on AI making developers obsolete and how this was not an attainable goal…

Well, I wasn’t exactly wrong but I wasn’t correct either. The truth is somewhere in between, going by the available evidence as of today. While it remains to be seen if AI can get rid of software developers completely, it’s true that AI has made software development a lot more faster & productive - for someone who knows what they are doing. That’s the key point here.

While all the PMs or wannabe PMs in this world can open Lovable or Cursor and crank out an app quickly without needing a UX designer or a UI developer, most of these have ended up being purple-gradient-loving throwaway demos or if someone tried to build a respectable product out of them - just AI slop. I’ve also personally seen the less-than-optimal PRs generated by mediocre or junior developers. In the hands of a mediocre person, this has become a menace & a nightmare for senior developers reviewing PRs.

But it’s undeniable that a senior developer who knows their tools and builds structures methodically, now can easily become >10X productive. I have some empirical evidence in this context, having personally built a bunch of decent-sized tools for my own use - just working with Claude Code & not opening the IDE…even once. In retrospect, the work done at times was equivalent to 2-3 weeks of heads-down coding and the actual time taken was….hold it…6-7 hours!

Of course, this is not one-shotting. I work with Claude starting from exploring the idea space, writing out a spec, figuring out the common framework components, writing out a step by step plan, executing it, testing it and so on and so forth. But the gains working with just one instance of Claude Code are amazing to say the least.

Yes, it does take shortcuts at times to optimize for token usage I guess - but if you review its output and keep course-correcting, it gets what you want it to do & gets it done!

Personally - I’ve still not advanced to the level where I get sub-agents to work on specialized operations as a part of my developer workbench setup OR keeping a shared memory across agents, but I’ll get there…soon. That being said, the amount of progress made in this area is pretty eye-opening for me. And it’s fairly clear that software development teams and the process of creating software as it used to be would never be the same.

It has also opened up a wealth of opportunities for me - which I used to consider impossible. But that’s a conversation for another time.

Can’t start counting the chickens before they hatch - can we? 😉