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I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it making making subtle mistakes, all the time.
Are you really being more productive (let’s say 3x times more), or just feel that way because you are constantly prompting Claude?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t buy it.
I'm talking Claude Opus 4.6 here.
Didn't we make subtle mistakes without AI?
Why did we spend so much time debugging and doing code reviews?
> Are you really being more productive (let’s say 3x times more)
At least 2x more productive, and that's huge.
But since I have a strong rule about always writing unit tests before code, my confidence is a lot higher.
I agree that the test harness is the most important part, which is only possible to create successfully if you are very familiar with exactly how your code works and how it should work. How would you reach this point using a dashboard and just reviewing PRs?
the bottleneck now is testing. that isn't going away anytime soon, it'll get much worse for a bit while models are good at churning code out that's slightly wrong or technically correct, but solving a different problem than intended; it's going to be a relatively short lived situation I'm afraid until the industry switches to most code being written for serving agents instead of humans.
I guess that's why Claude Code has 0 open issues on Github. Since software engineering is solved, their autonomous agents can easily fix their own software much better and faster than human devs. They can just add "make no mistakes" to their prompt and the model can solve any problem!
Oh wait, they have 5,000+ open issues on Github[1]. I'm yet to be convinced that this is a solved problem
PS: All in for AI agents I use all the time but sorry - SE is not a solved problem. Yet.
To me, code is both the canvas and deterministic artifact of deep thinking about program logic and data flow, as well as a way to communicate these things to other developers (including myself in the future). Outsourcing that to some statistical amalgam implies that the engineering portion of software engineering is no longer relevant. And maybe it's not for your run-of-the-mill shovelware, but as a profession I'd like to think we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that.
Also, does the sum total of software engineering done up to this point provide a sufficient training set for all future engineering? Are we really "done"? That sounds absurd to me.
I think people spouting absolutist statements like "software engineering is a solved problem" should largely be ignored.
Sincere question, how do beginners to the field (interns, juniors) do this when they don't have any best practices yet?
Unless you want to be a solopreneur (terrible idea while you don't know what you're doing and don't have the means to hire someone that does), look at pretty much any other comment in this thread.
...but since it's so easy to deliver stuff without actually knowing anything, learning means putting in the effort to resist temptation and use the agent as a teaching aid instead of an intern savant.
I don't necessarily disagree with your advice, but goodness, I don't look forward to using any of the low quality software in the next decade. I hope the shareholders remain happy.
??????????
write a thousand md files with detailed prompts (and called them skills)?
is that what would get juniors hired? and paid real money? a stack of md files?
It's harder and harder to detect sarcasm these days but in case you're being serious, I've tested a similar setup and I noticed Claude produces perfectly plausible code that has very subtle bugs that get harder and harder to notice. In the end, the initial speedup was gone and I decided to rewrite everything by hand. I'm working on a product where we need to understand the code base very well.
But now with Claude, the mental model of how your code works is not in your head, but resides behind a chain of reasoning from Claude Code that you are not privy too. When something breaks, you either have to spend much longer trying to piece together what your agent has made, or to continue throwing Claude at and hope it doesn't spiral into more subtle bugs.
An example I have of this is when I asked Claude to copy a some functionality from a front-end application to a back-end application. It got all of the function signatures right but then hallucinated the contents of the functions. Part of this functionality included a look up map for some values. The new version had entirely hallucinated keys and values, but the values sounded correct if you didn't compare with the original. A human would have literally copied the original lookup map.
There is no way this is true. People make fewer bugs with time and guidance, but no human makes zero bugs. Also, bugs are not planned; it's always easy to in hindsight say "A human would have literally copied the original lookup map," but every bug has some sort of mistake that is made that is off the status quo. That's why it's a bug.
LLMs don't make mistakes like humans make mistakes.
If you're a SWE at my company, I can assume you have a baseline of skill and you tested the code yourself, so I'm trying to look for any edge cases or gaps or whatever that you might have missed. Do you have good enough tests to make both of us feel confident the code does what it appears to do?
With LLMs, I have to treat its code like it's a hostile adversary trying to sneak in subtle backdoors. I can't trust anything to be done honestly.
Claude code skills represent a new type of AI native program. Give your agent the file system, let it build tools to sync and manage data.
Gamedev, systems programming, embedded development, 3D graphics, audio programming, mobile, desktop, physics/simulation programming, HPC, RTC, etc.. that’s all solved based on your experience?
> I mainly work as an individual or with one other person - I'm not working as part of a larger team.
like, we've had this technology for several decades now, and none of these AI tools are like: "This is so great, let me show everyone how to write a CRUD database with a notepad and calendar app" or whatever.
Several decades ago, we barely had the internet, rockets were single use only, and smart phones were coming any day now. CRISPR was yet to be named, social media meant movies from Blockbusters or HBO that you watched with friends. GLP-1 was a meh option for diabetics.
I agree with your overall point but...your time frame is way off.
If AI really is all that, then whatever "special" thing you are doing will be automated as well.
We're discovering so much latent demand for software, Jevon's paradox is in full effect and we're working more than ever with AI (at least I am).
Their comment about people who don't operate like them being out of a job might be true if AI doesn't progress past the current stage but I really don't see progress slowing down, at least in coding models, for quite some time.
So, whatever relevance OPs specific methods have right now will quickly be integrated into the models themselves.
Building AI systems will be about determining the right thing to build and ensuring your AI system fully understands it. For example, I have a trading bot that trades. I spent a lot of time on refining the optimization statement for the AI. If you give it the wrong goal or there's any ambiguity, it can go down the wrong path.
On the back end, I then judge the outcomes. As an engineer I can understand if the work it did actually accomplished the outcomes I wanted. In the future it will be applying that judgement to every field out there.
Though I don't know of any algo trading shop that relies purely on algorithms as market regimes change frequently and the alpha of new edge ends up getting competed away frequently.
(And personally I'm a believer of the jagged intelligence theory of LLMs where there's some tasks that LLMs are great at and other tasks that they'll continue being idiotic at for a while, and think there's plenty of work left for nuts and bolts program writers to do.)
You from 2 months ago:
>LLMs are great coders, but subpar developers". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434304
Interesting. That's a lot of progress in 2 months!
I'll believe it when AI can tell me when a project will be done. I've asked my developer friends about this and I get a blank stare, like I'm stupid for asking.