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I work for <large software company> that provides me access to Claude Opus 4.6. My work is primarily in a several-million-line-of-code legacy service written in C#. I use Claude itself generally via the GHCP CLI. I broadly agree with the analogy that it is comparable to having a junior dev or intern to hand to actually write changes you need done. My best results at one-shotting a change are when I give Claude a change that's probably in the few dozen up to 100 line of code scope. Beyond that, it can be hit or miss as to whether Claude itself will successfully break up a change into smaller chunks or whether I need to do that preemptively. Probably the biggest benefit Claude enables is improving parallelism. I spend much less time actually typing code and more time getting other things done. If all I did was sit and stare at Claude doing changes I could otherwise be doing, I would probably be less productive by using it but I largely don't have to be. I can tell Claude to make a change and then go do something else, come back and iterate, rinse and repeat.
For now, it seems like a very useful tool but I am not particularly worried about it taking my job. I also have not used it in a context where I am exposed to how much it costs so it's unclear to me if the ROI is there either. I will say that I often have better results when I do things like give it more context, especially specific in-repo examples, and the different harnesses I've used (VSCode integration, Cline, CLI) do seem to make a substantial difference to its output.
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