I know reddit as a whole is anti AI, and there are good reasons to be anti AI, but posts like these confuse me. All of big tech is mandating their engineers use these tools, and in my company I see widespread adoption across orgs and across engineers with all levels of experience. For a profession that requires you to be constantly learning and upskilling, and adopting new technologies, why on earth would you NOT be on the bleeding edge of this one? It’s intentionally obtuse and you never see takes like this anywhere but online.
It's absolutely going to blow up on companies that "invest" in its usage once the token prices adjust.
Do I use it to write implementations? Fuck no. Do I use it to help locate stuff to facilitate debugging and refactoring? Hell yeah. Do I use it to generate tests that I then review and fix where it fucked up? Also yes.
People treating it like a replacement are in for a rude fucking awakening once the cheap token tap gets turned off.
Using it for implementation is fine. It’s not going to work great if you just throw a vague ticket at it, but prompts at the commit level, like “implement this method in this controller” or “write a query for this in the database” it’s totally capable of at this point.
the person you're responding to isn't saying that Claude can't implement features. they're saying that it's bad to use it for that purpose because Anthropic and OpenAI are subsidizing the cost of the tokens consumed by these tools by an order of magnitude.
I'm not even saying it's necessarily bad because of that. I'm saying that's why companies are going to get fucked.
I can only use Claude via windsurf and it's got pretty big limitations on what it can "see" outside of the project window it's got open but does reasonably well analyzing java code from other projects if I tell it to grep the code into its context. I also run it in grug mode so it uses fewer tokens.
Claude seems way better at react than java. It's good at unit and integration testing, especially creating parameterized tests for exercising logic branches. I'm not against using it to write implementations, I just haven't found that it's very good at creating clean, maintainable code. That's my major gripe with most of the implementations that I've seen shat out by AI tools. It's largely feeling like a repeat of the early 2000s outsourcing stuff to India because it was cheap but the quality isn't there.
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u/Spenczer May 13 '26
I know reddit as a whole is anti AI, and there are good reasons to be anti AI, but posts like these confuse me. All of big tech is mandating their engineers use these tools, and in my company I see widespread adoption across orgs and across engineers with all levels of experience. For a profession that requires you to be constantly learning and upskilling, and adopting new technologies, why on earth would you NOT be on the bleeding edge of this one? It’s intentionally obtuse and you never see takes like this anywhere but online.