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I am beginning to low key worry about how good the latest coding agents are, claude code and codex, within the last two weeks. I am routinely building apps in 2 hours now that might have taken me a month if I had to use my own brain.
They'll tailor make stuff to any level of customization or weirdness. Use io_uring? Do this part in x86-64 assembly? Want a JIT for you app? Want to see if we can make this algorithm run on your GPU? Sure it's all good.
If I spot a bug it will take less than five minutes to fix. They never give up.
The slowest part of the loop here is me. I can't test changes and describe features fast enough.
This latest app I've put down about 3500 lines of code and haven't looked at any of it. It may as well have been written by a total stranger in a language I don't understand, it just slows things down too much if I try to read the code.
I am guiding it using my skills and experience but it doesn't really matter. When it can rewrite the entire app in an hour there are not that many bad architectural decisions that can't be undone.
Obviously in a mature product with users and deployed infrastructure, radically changing your approach is harder. But even already it tries to steer me away from crazy stuff.
I'm sorry but software engineer grunts are cooked. If you can't design or product manage yourself, you're going to be unemployed. What does it mean to be a SWE in a world where software is built as fast as you can describe it?
Someone posted an article last week that I initially registered intending to respond to. It was throwing around a lot of breathless talk about "complete coding supremacy over humans" and don't get me wrong it's not like it wasn't getting pushback, but it also wasn't quite getting rotten eggs thrown at it the way I would have expected. I had previously gathered the impression that AI coders were still at the level of an enthusiastic but sloppy apprentice.
My impression is that the SOTA agents (Claude Code or Codex) can now, if given a sufficiently detailed specification and sufficient tools to validate their work, provide code that fully satisfies that spec for the vast majority of moderately long coding tasks now. This is a big jump in capabilities and obviously very powerful.
This does come with a lot of caveats that imo make the claims of 100% AI written code misleading at best; the creation of "sufficiently detailed" specs (which is famously difficult) fed to the agent and validation of the generated code is still dependent on engineering skill, and one-shotted code will generally be of worse quality than code written for the same purpose hand-crafted by a skilled engineer.
In the short term I think this is actually bullish for SWE, coding agent output is still bottlenecked by engineering skill and I don't believe we've yet saturated the demand for software. In the mid-long term it's unclear if there will still be value in having engineers in the loop, but imo end-to-end automation of software engineering is/requires AGI so my job isn't high up on my list of concerns in that scenario.
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