With today's state of LLMs and Agents, it's still not good for all the tasks. It took me couple of weeks before being able to correctly adjust on what I can ask and what I can expect.
As a result, I don't use Claude Code for everything and I think I'm able to better pick the right task and the right size of task to give it. These adjustment depends on what you are doing, the complexity of and the maturity of the project at play.
Very often, I have entire tasks that I can't offload to the Agent. I won't say I'm 20x more productive, it's probably more in the range of 15% to 20% (but I can't measure that obviously).
I share the same experience. Looking at diffs inside a terminal is as helpful as looking at diffs inside GitHub. I need code navigation to fully understand the impact of a code change or just the code base.
I exclusively use Claude Code these days, and I don't remember having accepted the result of a prompt a single time on the first shot. I always have to fix some stuff here and there, improve some tests or comments or even make the code more readable. Being in an IDE is a must for me, and I don't see how this could change.
There's no free meal and adding a dependency is far from being free. Each dependency you add needs to be carefully reviewed, each of its update as well.
Though, apparently many people just YOLO this part.
I don't disagree, and it really depends on the complexity of what you are trying to do. If it's a simple util function, it makes total sense. But for complicated solutions where open source alternatives already exist, its a hard argument to spend your time reinventing it unless just for learning purposes.
As a team you constantly need to assess whether a dependency should be brought in or of a re-implementation is not better.
Sometimes, the re-implementation is so specific to you actual problem that maintenance becomes almost free. A generic solution always open more doors to problems and require more effort to maintain.
For a rich client web application, you need a really good reason not to bring an external dependency such as React.
> But for complicated solutions where open source alternatives already exist, its a hard argument to spend your time reinventing it unless just for learning purposes.
Even if the open source alternatives already exist, does not necessarily mean that they do what you want them to do. In some cases they can be fixed to do what you need (since it is open source, that is an advantage), but sometimes it cannot really be done without rewriting it and making a new one.
> Jules creates a PR of the changes. Approve the PR, merge it to your branch, and publish it on GitHub.
Then, who is testing the change? Even for a dependency update with a good test coverage, I would still test the change.
What takes time when uploading dependencies is not the number of line typed but the time it takes to review the new version and test the output.
I'm worried that agent like that will promote bad practice.
It shows you code diffs, results of executing modified or new code in a VPS, and it writes pull requests, but asks you to hit the Merge button in GitHub.
Will this promote bad practice? Probably up to the individual practitioner or organization.
...and saves humongous amounts of time in the process. Documentations are rarely a good read (however sad, I like good docs), and we should waste less engineering time reading them.
When a sector collapses and become irrelevant, all its workers no longer need to be employed. Some will no longer have any useful qualifications and won't be able to find another job. They will have to go back to training and find a different activity.
It's fine if it's an isolated event. Much worse when the event is repeated in many sectors almost simultaneously.
Why? When we've seen a sector collapse, the new jobs that rush in to fill the void are new, never seen before, and thus don't have training. You just jump in and figure things out along the way like everyone else.
The problem, though, is that people usually seek out jobs that they like. When that collapses they are left reeling and aren't apt to want to embrace something new. That mental hurdle is hard to overcome.
What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to fill the void this time? You only need so many prompt engineers when each one can replace hundreds of traditional workers.
The capitalists are failing to redeploy capital today. Thats why they have been dumping it into assets for years. They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it. AI will skyrocket their capital reserves. There is a poor mechanism for equalizing this since the Nixon years.
> They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it.
Yes, we've had full employment for a long, long time. But the idea here is that AI will free up labor that is currently occupied doing something else. If you are trying to say it will fail to do that, that may be true, but if so this discussion is moot.
As others in this thread have pointed out, this is basically what happened in the relatively short period of 1995 to 2015 with the rise of global wireless internet telecommunications & software platforms.
Many, many industries and jobs transformed or were relegated to much smaller niches.
While it looks like a productivity boost, there's a clear price to pay. The more you use it, the less you learn and the less you are able to assess quality.
Worse, it feels productive. But I'd bet if you watched the clock and tracked progress of a non-trivial project, you'd find what we've always known to be true: there are no shortcuts.
I'm sure it's faster in the short term. Just like copy-paste-from-stack-overflow is. But it is debt. The shit builds and builds. But I think the problem is we're so surrounded by shit we've just normalized it. It is incredible how much bloat and low hanging fruit there is that can be cheaply resolved but there is no will to. And in my experience, it isn't just a lack of will, it is a lack of recognition. If the engineers can't recognize shit, then how do we build anything better? It is literally our job to find problems
All the digital artists I know don't use and want new features in Photophop. And more generally, most non-tech businesses values more stability than having new features.
Very often, I have entire tasks that I can't offload to the Agent. I won't say I'm 20x more productive, it's probably more in the range of 15% to 20% (but I can't measure that obviously).