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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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My company also uses Claude Code, in my case including Opus. It is quite useful: if I give it a feature, then, step by step, have it create the tests to verify the feature is complete and write code based off of the tests then its pretty helpful. At the same time, I need to review all the code and say "ok, you need to simplify here. You made an assumption there that is not quite accurate, and we need an adjustment there." It has gotten more useful, and my company has a lot of solid documentation that helps Claude, but there is a fundamental dynamic of me doing the actual engineering, Claude implementing the architecture, me reviewing and suggesting changes, and just iterating through that loop. It's quite useful, and Claude has improved over the past few years, but I don't think the fundamental relationship between software engineer and LLM has changed in the past few years even with its improvements. For additional context, I work in FinTech so error tolerance is very low.

While Claude can IME make software engineers more efficient, and thus either decrease employment and/or cause Jevon's Paradox, I think actually replacing software engineering as a whole is probably AGI-Complete. I imagine with medical doctors it's a similar situation where it can let them help more patients, but the buck ultimately has to stop with the Doctor until AGI.

The core question, to me, on if/when we get AGI seems to be this: can we reach AGI through iteratively improving LLMs and adding in supporting models to fill in gaps, or do we need an entirely new type of model to reach there. If the first, AGI may be coming pretty soon. If the second, the timeline gets a lot harder to predict. I'm not confident which of the above two paths, or a different path, is what will happen.