[hiq]

Not sure what you mean by spec and design, but around me, that's always been paid more than simply coding. If you have a clean technical spec that's detailed enough, the code naturally flows and is often left to more junior engineers, with more senior folks reviewing the code but rarely writing it.

[porridgeraisin]

That, and it also needs to be mentioned that if an engineer is given a tool like claude, they will be given _more_ work. As an example, you might give an intern the following task:

"we have service A that receives a request, it now has a new flag in it, we need you to pass it through to in the call A makes to service B, and then add it in the where clause of the query that B makes".

and expect it to take 2 days including manual testing.

Now you would expect the same much quicker. Any weird bug of the kind "flag not showing up in B because its another weird place where the request _actually_ goes through" that would before suck up 5 hours, would now be found out by the LLM in 2 minutes. "Oh because of this feature being activated in <random yaml file>, this new path is used, so you have to add the flag passing logic there". And the next day they get a new task.

This was an extreme example, and it's also not a silver bullet, since now you need to ensure that the intern does the task in a way that they still learn the codebase and the service structure (ideally, they learn quicker) and doesn't become completely beholden to the LLM. So that will also become a skill teams look to hone, how they use tools like this.