How much of this is mass financial engineering than real value. Reading a lot of nudges how everyone should have Google or other AI stock in their portfolio/retirement accounts
The whole narrative of "inevitability" is the stock behavior of tech companies who want to push a product onto the public. Why fight the inevitable? All you can do is accept and adapt.
And given how many companies ask vendors whether their product "has AI" without having the slightest inkling of what that even means or whether it even makes sense, as if it were some kind of magical fairy dust - yeah, the stench of hype is thick enough you could cut it with a knife.
Of course, that doesn't mean it lacks all utility.
Things have changed drastically now, engineers with these tools(like claude code) have become unstoppable.
Atleast for me, I have been able to contribute to the codebases i was unfamiliar with, even with different tech stacks. No, I am not talking about generating ai slop, but I have been enabled to write principal engineer level code unlike before.
So i don't agree with the above statement, it's actually generating real value and I have become valuable because of the tools available to me.
I’ve spent the last week unwinding my coworkers slop who said the same thing.
I am not talking about vibe coding here, which is totally different and understandable. But I am talking about the professional context where the structure is already in place.
Here is my workflow, if it helps:
1. I have a system level prompt i execute(command/skill) before I start anything which says things like
i) follow SOLID principles
ii) follow TDD
iii) follow these testing principles like, don't test the implementation details etc
and 20 other things
3. I review everything, add feedback to the generated plan, prompt again, and finally finalize the plan
4. now that the plan is finalized, I would have a small alignment with co-workers and ask it implement step by step, and then before proceeding with next step, i will tell it to ask me for feedback
each steps code is reviewed and commited, before proceeding to next step
5. once all steps are done, manual testing is done, i do a local review
6. I have a specific skill which reviews everything, and gives me feedback
7. we have human reviewers who will review the code, and coderabbit
8. then we take it to the staging and uat before taking to prod
so see we have not skipped any process of "software engineering", claude code is just an accelrant
but if you are not doing most of the above steps, i see what you are saying would happen by default
However I think - Nadh, ronacher, the redis bro - these are people who can be trusted. I find Nadh's article (OP) quite balanced.
I think he’s soured a bit on the 10x claim echoing many of the quality concerns expressed by others in this thread: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/