[eqmvii]

A lot of people feel this way.

But IMO the most fruitful thing for an engineering org to do RIGHT NOW is learn the tools well enough to see where they can be best applied.

Claude Code and its ilk can turn "maybe one day" internal projects into live features after a single hour of work. You really, honestly, and truly are missing out if you're not looking for valuable things like that!

[lopis]

You're only missing out if that's what you want to do. Not every software developer is interested in creating new software projects from scratch in an hour, or at all. It's totally find to do software development as a job, and then close your laptop and not see it until Monday. Learn the tools that suit when when you need them.

[remus]

> You're only missing out if that's what you want to do.

Who writes software and doesn't have a list of "I'll fix this one day" issues as long as their arm?

This is honestly one of the things I enjoy most at the moment. There's whole classes of issues where I know the fix is probably pretty simple but I wouldn't have had time to sort it previously. Now I can just point claude at it and have a PR 5mins later. It's really nice when you can tell users "just deployed a fix for your thing" rather than "I've made a ticket for your request" your issue is on the never-ending backlog pile and might get fixed in 5 years time if you're lucky.

[subarctic]

Claude code makes it so easy to do things the "right way" that it also makes it really easy for you to let scope creep get out of hand. I have a personal project that I haven't deployed yet that in some ways is way overengineered for its purpose. It's hard to blame the tool though, it's always telling me I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be but I don't listen

[shepherdjerred]

I've felt this recently. I've often been bad about scope creep. CC makes it so easy.

On the other hand, I can see these tools getting good enough that scope creep doesn't even matter.

ATM I usually get stuck around the review/verification stage. As in, my code works, I have tested that it works, but it is failing CI or someone left a PR comment. And for each comment I'll have to make sure it makes sense, make the change, test again, and get CI passing again.

[lopis]

In my team we have strict rules for scope creep in pull request. Each one needs to introduce a single thing, not a dozen little refactorings. This helps, but not when you're working alone in a personal project. Maybe you can setup your review agent to help with scope creep?

[lopis]

Many people don't. You can write a ticket and the PM can deal with it. Not everyone is intimately involved in their job enough to care about stuff like that. And some projects might not last long enough for you to care. You should project your dev experience on everyone, specially as a software development enthusiast.

[stiiv]

> Claude Code and its ilk can turn "maybe one day" internal projects into live features after a single hour of work. You really, honestly, and truly are missing out if you're not looking for valuable things like that!

You're right, it's possible. But you might be both overestimating the ease of onboarding and underestimating the variety of tasks and constraints devs are responsible for.

I've seen Claude knock out trivial stuff with a sufficiently good spec. But I've also seen it utterly choke on a bad spec or a hard task. I think these outcomes are pretty broadly established. So is the expectation that the tech will get better. Waiting isn't unwise.

[smugma]

Waiting may not be “unwise” but acting now may be optimal. Even though tooling may be much better in 12 months, if it can improve quality or time now, that’s a net benefit.

Bikers in the Tour de France used to not wear helmets. They were seen as uncouth (“why jump on the bandwagon?”). Helmets today are way better than they were then. But if the utility provided is greater than the cost, of course it makes sense to act sooner.

I’m not explicitly arguing for investing in AI or other newfangled tech, I’m arguing that the premise of waiting may be “sounded” but also “leaves money on the table”, or in some cases, lives.

The author talks about vaccines as a counter example but doesn’t really address the cost/benefit in any detail.