Have you seen their status page ? Every single month is littered with yellow and red.
For those of us old-school programmers it makes little difference, only the vibe coders throwing away $200 a month on Claude subs will be the ones crying !
For greenfield projects it’s absolutely faster to churn out code I’ve written 100 times in the past. I don’t need to write another RBAC system, I just don’t. I don’t need to write another table implementation for a frontend data view.
How Claud helps us is speed and breadth. I can do a lot more in shorter time, and depending on what your goals are this may or may not be valuable to you.
Very often they want to own all the code, so you cannot just abstract things in your own engine. It then very easily becomes the pragmatic choice to just use existing libraries and frameworks to implement these things when the client demands it.
Especially since every client wants different things.
At the same time, even though there are libraries available, it’s still work to stitch everything together.
For straightforward stuff, AI takes all that work out of your hands.
If I were to do it, I would have most of the reusable code (e.g. of a RBAC system) written and documented once and kept unpublished. Then I would ask an AI tool to alter it, given a set of client-specific properties. It would be easier to review moderate changes to a familiar and proven piece of code. The result could be copied to the client-specific repo.
I would put myself in the bridge between pre internet coders and the modern generation. I use these type of tools and don’t consider myself a vibe coder.