[throwaway13337]

You're correct that it doesn't answer the why.

But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.

So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.

[sebmellen]

In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.

[throwaway13337]

With my own tiny company, I used to answer questions about my code to support. Supporting the support. I remember doing that when working at big companies too.

Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.

Maybe we've had different experiences.

[sebmellen]

I love it. And no doubt, the smaller your company, the more profound the impact of “agentic” tooling can be.

But I am skeptical that people who have not seen a complex corporate environment understand how different it is.

[kakacik]

> I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company.

In banks its rather 10%, at least in mine is.