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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.
People were saying this back in December as well. Can you explain what differences you're seeing compared to three weeks ago that is indicative of a paradigm shift?
Originally, I had kind of given up on claude code a few months ago because it was wasting more time than it was saving me. It would lose the plot pretty quickly even though my instructions and the goal were still well within the context window. I considered this an architectural limit of LLMs.
But as of the last two weeks, holy shit. claude codex (and codex), they just grind away at problems. They don't lose the plot. They back out and try different approaches. They run micro experiment to test assumptions. They'll run the tools with --help and --version and check the man page. They'll step through the code of the installed version of meson to see why the config file is not behaving the way it expects. I just give them like one simple prompt and it'll chug away for 15-30 minutes just trying shit like an overly caffeinated engineer. They'll run builds and look at errors and fix them until it's clean.
And again, they don't lose sight of the goal. It's amazing.
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