Some people are upset at my brave new world characterization, but yeah even as someone deriving value from Claude Code we've jumped the shark on AI in development.
Either the industry will face that reality and recalibrate, or in 20 years we're going to look back on these days like the golden age of software reliability and just accept that software is significantly more broken than it was (we've been priming ourselves for that after all)
People aren't upset about your characterization. Catch phrases, memes, or other low qualitative comments (with no context, elaboration or personal angle) are contrary to community ethos and down voted.
I agree that it's worrying that we're moving more and more towards implicit and opaque state. Hiding what exactly is getting edited, very limited tooling to check what the subagents are doing exactly, setting up scheduled and recurring tasks without it being obvious etc.
It's tending more and more towards pushing the user to treat the whole thing as a pure chat interface magic black box, instead of a rich dashboard that allows you to keep precise track of what's going on and giving you affordances to intervene. So less a tool view and more magic agent, where the user is not supposed to even think about what the thing is even doing. Just trust the process. If you want to know what it did, just ask it. If you want to know if it deleted all the files, just ask it in the chat. Or don't. Caring about files is old school. Just care about the chat messages it sends you.
Here in SF I talk to people all day who see this as a feature, not a bug, and that's the persona Claude Code and Codex are selling to.
It started being proposed as a thought experiment "why should we care about the files if AI is going to do the edits", then as Opus got better and the hype built up, the rhetorical part of that dropped and now there are plenty of people who swear they don't write code at all anymore and don't see why anyone would.
I think we're in a feedback loop caused by the fact you can totally get away with not writing code anymore for some reasonably complex topics. But that doesn't account for the long term maintainability of the result, and it doesn't account for people who think they're not writing code, but are relying heavily on the fact we haven't fully magicked away the actual code. They're watching the agents like a hawk, doing small bits and pieces at a time, hitting stop when it starts thinking about the wrong thing, etc.
My worry is the market taking the wrong lesson out of the trends and prematurely trying to force the agent-first future well before the tools or the people are ready.
Feels like just yesterday that everyone agreed that critical code is read orders of magnitude more than written, so optimizing for quick writing is wrong.
Genuinely I think that perspective is still shared by many/most engineers.
I think we’ve seen a wave of bad actors - either employees of LLM companies, or bots - pushing the idea hard of code quality not mattering and “the models will improve so fast that your code quality degrading doesn’t matter”.
I think the humans pushing that idea may even believe it, but I don’t think they’re usually employed as software engineers at regular non-AI companies, rather they have some incentive to believe it and convince others as well
Some people are upset at my brave new world characterization, but yeah even as someone deriving value from Claude Code we've jumped the shark on AI in development.
Either the industry will face that reality and recalibrate, or in 20 years we're going to look back on these days like the golden age of software reliability and just accept that software is significantly more broken than it was (we've been priming ourselves for that after all)