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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.
Not anymore. They're basically as good as a senior software engineer now, except they finish 100x faster. And never need to rest.
At this point anyone not using them is resisting out of inertia. Or fear. Well placed fear, perhaps.
Or because they don’t work on the kinds of apps and problems you do and detest people who insist on trying to gaslight and force them into using something you happen to like.
Well. I don't know what the rest of you do but every elite dev I know that had been skeptical and unimpressed by AI agents has been converted in the last month.
Android apps. Firmware for wearables. UNIX TUI clients. Code analysis tools. Web apps. Flight simulators. Gaussian splatters. One guy writing a functional formula language for a network message bus. 3D games for PCs. A Signal clone that doesn't require phone numbers. Bots to run trading strategies.
If you're in a niche where this hasn't happened to you yet, bless. It's probably better for your mental health to not cross this threshold.
I'm not vouching for Cursor or Copilot or the general chat experience. But Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, within the last two weeks, running the latest best models, are what are scaring the shit out of me. Before this I was mostly in "meh, loses coherence too fast, maybe in 5 years they'll figure it out" mode. No. It's here now.
IMO a lot of this effect is that you can get a lot more out of agents if you already know what you're doing, and a lot of people assume that the median person knows a lot more about their own niche than they actually do (see XKCD 2501). Right now you still need a lot of specialist knowledge to make the most out of your agent.
Even in your original post, you need to have enough knowledge to understand when to use io_uring, when you should drop down to assembly, and understand when and why you might want a JIT for your app. It's not like my mother is doing any of that even if I give her access to Claude Code lol.
As I mentioned in my other post I am quite unsure whether the reverse centaur phase will last, but at the point where someone completely non-technical is outputting the same amount and quality of software as a SWE, requirements and all, I think this is already AGI and either everyone or no-one is cooked.
It's really not worth worrying about that scenario too much imo, at least from an employment perspective.
I'm not really convinced I need to be more than "experienced computer user with good taste" in the end. Probably not much more than a product manager.
I was mentioning io_uring or JITs etc as examples of extreme customizations the agents can do. But if you just tell it what you want and then complain "it's not fast enough, make it faster" it will, on its own, come up with and implement optimizations. The standard ones like better algorithms or pre-computing stuff, but they will get increasingly sophisticated and extreme if you keep saying "make it faster".
My specialized knowledge helps us not get painted into a corner as much, but does it matter when the paint dries instantly and it can repaint the entire house in minutes?
My biggest advantage for now may be that I can approximate in my head the theoretical limit for how fast something could be physically driven on the hardware, so I'll know when to stop saying "make it faster". I'll also know that when the coding agent says "I'm going to bake in hardware assumptions and weaken consistency models" that it might be worth stopping as well.
But this edge won't last for too long.
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