You’re forgetting the “economics” part of the argument. Let’s assume that you are actually producing better code than say Opus 5.5. You’re probably slower, you very likely have less “stamina,” and you probably cost more than 200x more per month than a $20 subscription.
You’d have to be pretty unbelievably stellar to produce code 200x better than Opus. I can get a lot of business value out of not-great $20/mo coding. The people writing our checks do not care about the same things we care about.
And I say this as someone who is very upset about what this stuff is doing to my career and hobby.
I don't get this. I work in a part of the industry where "passes 80% of the test suite" is worth approximately $0/mo, which is the best opus can do without a human hand holding it.
But I read the OP's argument to mean that your responsibility as an engineer is now to understand the tasks an agent can accelerate. And in many cases that might be the task that you previously enjoyed, like working out some tricky variable length encoding serialization scheme, or tracking down some nefarious race condition by stepping through code and reasoning. (The eureka moment is a big dopamine hit for me, dunno about you.)
If you can't get Opus 5.5 to pass more than 80% of your test suite, then you're probably holding it wrong. Not "holding it wrong" as in Apple's "we designed a defective product and try to put the blame on you", but as in *"this is an incredibly sophisticated tool which takes skill and practice to use to its fullest extent".
LLMs, even in a good harness, are deceptively simple, but in reality rather complex tools. They're good at grasping intent, but they can't read your mind, they might not have access to the full context of your business, and they require learning how to use them properly.
No, not "hand holding". If you insist on anthropomorphizing the AI, "guiding it on a high level" would be more fitting. In a team of 1 architect and 5 software developers, Opus 5.5 + Claude Code replaces the 5 developers, not the architect. You don't have to "hold its hand" anymore than you have to hold the hand of a competent software developer — though you will have to figure out a workflow that suits you personally, including configuring Claude Code to follow that workflow (through skills, for example) so you can work ergonomically with it.
I have never worked on a team with one thinker and 5 minions, so, again, more evidence I work in a different part of the industry than wherever your line of thought originates.
Your error lies in thinking Opus 5.5 is equivalent to a "minion". The "5 software developers" in my example were meant to stand in for "reasonably competent, above-average developers", and not that the architect is the only one on the team who can "think".
Of course, it may well be the case that you are working in an elite sector of the industry where even the bottom rungs are filled by the top 20% of software developers. Possible, but unlikely, so I'm still leaning towards "you're holding it wrong".
Opus has to be 200x worse for them to sell that subscription. If their AI is as good as they claim, they should charge way more, like one dollar less per month than a human developer costs.
"I don't, generally, think in words" is not the same as "I don't think in words".
Like I already said, if thought was exclusively in words for humans, humans wouldn't have the "It's on the tip of my tongue" problem. It's blindingly obvious that thought does not occur exclusively with words.
You’d have to be pretty unbelievably stellar to produce code 200x better than Opus. I can get a lot of business value out of not-great $20/mo coding. The people writing our checks do not care about the same things we care about.
And I say this as someone who is very upset about what this stuff is doing to my career and hobby.
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