[embedding-shape]

> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)

As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for that.

Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers now.

[apsurd]

The official declaration came about in a team-meeting. We're a tiny startup, 3 full-time eng with the CTO co-founder driving the AI transformation. We have scheduled onboarding meetings to get the entire company finding automation opportunities with specifically Claude (CC, Cowork). For eng specifically, there is "acknowledgement" that we all may have different setups, but we should all be unifying our prompts, strategies, pipelines, Agents, and so... it's CC. I still use Cursor so I'm the only one not on CC; my eye-brow was especially raised.

I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate, on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of the industry, less so company specific.

Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your feature output, because that's how we're going to win.

I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the mandate is literally more features, more code, because it gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles, surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things considered, might as well ship more code!

[blipvert]

I shall wait your collected thoughts. I’ll suggest The Mythical LLM Month as a title.

[apsurd]

You made my day with this line =P.

tbh I have been struggling with the state of software in the agentic era. I'm pro LLM, there's undeniable leverage in its coding abilities. I do want to write this post! I'll start with hopefully this distillation:

In the agentic era, if shipping code is a commodity, then why ship more code? we can say this for the entire concept of "build" - we've commoditized building anything software related, i don't understand how this translates to therefore BUILD MORE.

So then the more nuanced conversation is that taste and judgement is the leverage. i agree with this. But its hand wavy in that we can't agree on what taste is. and also accelerationists hold true that all can be encoded. more agents. i don't even disagree with this entirely.

What I'm missing is that AI-native software engineers are going to brute force their way to PMF, to judgment, taste, enlightenment, consciousness.

But why is this a straight line? Just add more agents. add a "designer", a "sales" and "user researcher" agent. just add more agents.

You don't know what you don't know, is my retort. It's surreal to me that we're living through the equivalent of the smartest software engineers effectively giddily prompting, with full conviction mind you, "add more pop!" to make their thing better.

Just needs more pop!

[rafterydj]

Man, I completely agree with your thinking here. I've been trying to be more active in online communities, to try to discuss this exact idea.

LLM code can be leveraged, but pretending that tokens are just going to turn into money printers at some point is not productive. The primary source of software's value to an end user is the thought that was placed into it. Where does that go for the AI-natives? As you say, they are seemingly brute forcing software engineering, at least so far.

One thing I have been considering is how LLMs primarily change the "build vs buy" calculus for a fair number of software niches, particularly things like developer tooling and small libraries and packages. Partially due to a projected increase in supply chain attacks, and partially due to the changing standards of engineers. There's no longer anything stopping someone from working with an ugly or clunky syntax, presuming it's a well documented standard. So many "developer experience" tools are going to hit this - Tailwind primarily comes to mind.

It's a sort of "erosion" of niches in the current landscape - although to me this does not really work out for the worse in the long term, since again, the thinking in the process will need to just go somewhere else.

[blipvert]

You’re welcome! At least I did something productive with my day :-)

[observationist]

How about The Million Dollar Mythos Month Some of these AI trends are starting to look more like gacha game moneysinks than productivity tools.

[seer]

We did a similar Claude code mandate a few weeks ago.

Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation, that making them use superpowers produced better code, but also started adding a test pyramid.

The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you must produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it you can use cc to bridge the gap.

Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher quality code, but will not understand why, how to measure the “quality” and steer towards it themselves.

At this point though the founders were pretty adamant with the code quality and lack of tests so this seemed like a reasonable way for the company, and I am curious to see how such a mandate affects code, deliverables and individual’s knowledge.

So far it seems to be working as intended, but it is early days.

[bluefirebrand]

> Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation

Frankly if your devs weren't doing this stuff before, forcing them to do it with AI assistance is probably going to be counter productive. If it is possible to produce good quality code and tests and such with LLMs, it is not likely by forcing LLMs on people who didn't care about code quality or tests before