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Comment by qwertyastronaut | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if it’s 90%, but I’m shipping in 2 days things that took 2-4 weeks before.

Opus 4.5 in particular has been a profound shift. I’m not sure how software dev as a career survives this. I have nearly 0 reason to hire a developer for my company because I just write a spec and Claude does it in one shot.

It’s honestly scary, and I hope my company doesn’t fail because as a developer I’m fucked. But… statistically my business will fail.

I think in a few years there will only be a handful of software companies—the ones who already have control of distribution. Products can be cloned in a few weeks now; not long until it’s a few minutes. I used to see a new competitor once every six months. Now I see a new competitor every few hours.

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I have no idea how you could debug something in two days that is sufficient to ship. I certainly think that an LLM could write a few thousand lines, but who could read them?

Are you shipping things you haven't reviewed at all, and pronouncing them high quality?

I find these threads baffling. I haven't seen a glut of new software anywhere. I certainly haven't seen a bunch of companies fixing the same bugs that have been sitting in their trackers for years. People keep telling me there's this deluge of LLM code happening, but it (the actual code) is all a secret and behind closed doors. Why in the world would you keep it a secret? Why would any multibillion dollar company that ships AI features have any known bugs left in their flagship products?

I haven't seen a difference anywhere when looking outwards. I personally find it useful, but I have to constantly force refactors and rearchitecting to make the code intelligible. When I add features, bugs get reinserted, refactors get reverted, and instrumentation silently disappears. If I don't do the constant refactors, I wouldn't even notice this was happening half the time.

I feel like I have have heard this exact statement about model FooBar X.Y about a half dozen times over the last couple of years.

Just out of curiosity, what software product were you making in two weeks before using AI? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of shipping.

Shipping features, not entire products.

Agreed. Opus 4.5 does feel like a real shift and I have had exactly your experience. I've shipped stuff that would have taken me weeks in days. And really to a much higher quality standard - test suites would have been far smaller if I'd built manually. And probably everything in MVP Bootstrap CSS.

Yeah, I really think software engineering is over. Not right now, but Opus 4.5 is incredible, it wont be long before 5 and 5.5 are released.

They wont automate everything, but the bar for being able to produce working software will plummet.

I'd love to hear what sort of software you are building.

This is my anon account so I prefer not to leave any identifying details. Niche solo-dev SaaS that makes $50k a month.

this is roughly same for me

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