Trigger warning: AI hype and worries. sorry everyone

It’s been about a year since I’ve been Claude Coding. That is, “open a terminal, tell Claude what I want to do, let it whirr away for minutes.” I think in early 2025 I was using Cursor to pretty good effect, writing my PRs and asking it for help on parts of it. And if Cursor was all we got, it’d still be a productivity doubler or more. But Claude Code has made coding qualitatively different.

as a software maker, this rules

It is so much more fun to work on side projects these days. Side projects always have a balance between A. the excitement of having a thing in the world that you want to exist, and B. the pain having to look up API documentation and all the other grunt work. If A > B, the project happens, but usually B > A and it doesn’t. Nowadays, B is almost zero.

I hacked together Closeness To Things in a small number of hours. Usually it would take me that many hours just to figure out what geocoders exist, try to compare them, realize there is no one best one that fits all my needs, and get frustrated and quit. Claude just implemented four different ones for me! And three routing engines! And maps and UI buttons and all the annoying little bits. The People loved it.¹ I loved it! I have the satisfaction of website out in the world, almost for free!

as a skilled software user… hard to say but I’m optimistic

We all have to use so much software in our lives, and so much of it is awful. Your bank gets your accounts confused, the DMV can’t spell your name, your employer’s HR site just doesn’t effing work.

Given how much less I have to care about bugs, I assume other people also have to care a lot less about bugs, because their agent just fixes them before they even happen. That’s not to say there won’t be bad software, but I have to think there will be less of it.

Of course, there is much more slop out there. Web search is glutted with slop (though it was pre-Claude/GPT anyway) and I assume every other platform that can be slop-filled will be. But I’m used to that? There’s no way I’m going to take algorithmic recommendations for… anything… so the fact that 90% of youtube/amazon/etc is just noise doesn’t bother me, if it means the DMV website Actually Effing Works.

Eventually. Give it 20 years to diffuse.

as an unskilled software user, though, slop world is a nightmare

Spam, phishing, weird kids’ youtubes², etc. If you don’t know what you’re doing, good luck!

as a software worker: huh

I think it’s, net, a blessing, but it’s mixed. Why?

do more business, faster

Imagine you work at Toyota, and your engine supplier ToyEngineCo announces that they’ve created a Double-Good Engine. It’s twice as fast, twice as efficient, twice as everything.³ Is your life better?

Not really. Pretty soon ToyEngineCo is going to sell Double-Good engines to Honda and Ford, or else HonEngineCo and ForEngineCo are going to figure the technology out as well. Then you’re in the same race you were last year, but you’re both putting out products that are twice as good. You can’t start working 20 hour weeks just because you’ve got Double-Good Engines. Your stock options probably go up in the short term, but not in the long term, because everyone will have Double-Good Engines.

Not that I’m trying to do less work; just, you’d think 10x-ing your productivity would make you super rich or successful or something. It doesn’t, because everyone else has 10x-ed too!

Claude’s eaten the meat out of the sandwich

Here’s the Decide-Execute-Deliver sandwich (from here).

Software involves these 3 tasks: deciding what to do, writing the code, and then delivering it (testing, deploying, maintaining). The middle part costs maybe 10% of what it used to. That’s great if you like the Deciding and Delivering parts, and kind of a bummer if you like the Execute parts.

I did like the Execute parts. I liked writing the code. I certainly can do the Deciding and Delivering, but the Executing was the most fun. I didn’t like writing all the code, so I’m glad to miss the bits where you had to look stuff up, but the parts where you were in flow, edit-test-debugging, that was why I got into software engineering.

Autism brain, ADHD brain

Autistic people like to focus on one thing intently, like a chess grandmaster. ADHD people like to handle a bunch of stuff all at once, like an ER doctor.⁴

Arguably, software engineering used to be an autist’s job. Figure out the problem, think deeply about it, focus on that Rubik’s Cube until you’ve figured it out. Now, you’re better off having 5 Claudes go figure it out while you babysit them (and your Slack and Linear board to communicate with the team).

upskill relatively instantly

That said, AIs help you be autistic too. When I’m trying to learn a whole new thing, I have the best learning environment: an expert I can ask, ad nauseam! In this job over the last half year-ish I’ve gone from b2c tech and internal apps to b2b data warehouse platform, and there’s no way I could have learned all that as fast as I have without LLMs.

as all of these people

I don’t know. I do feel frazzled by the amount of context switching at work required by LLM life, and I don’t think we’re ever going back. I wish I had the type of mind that worked well in that kind of “ER doctor” environment. But I do have a lot less drudgery and a lot more possibilities, and tbh the time spent programming is probably less frustrating all in all.

The joy from “figuring out exactly how to make the code work” is gone, but the joy from “having an idea and then seeing it exist in the world” is still fully present, and I suppose the way to flourish now is to focus on that as much as I can.