[crabl]

What I've noticed from my extensive use over the past couple weeks has been Claude Code really sucks at thinking things through enough to understand the second and third order consequences of the code that it's writing. That said, it's easy enough to work around its deficiencies by using a model with extended thinking (Grok, GPT4.5, Sonnet 3.7 in thinking mode) to write prompts for it and use Claude Code as basically a dumb code-spewing minion. My workflow has been: give Grok enough context on the problem with specific code examples, ask it to develop an implementation plan that a junior developer can follow, and paste the result into Claude Code, asking it to diligently follow the implementation plan and nothing else.

[simonw]

"Claude Code really sucks at thinking things through enough to understand the second and third order consequences of the code that it's writing"

Yup, that's our job as software engineers.

[alienthrowaway]

> Yup, that's our job as software engineers

The more seasoned you are as a SWE, the higher the orders you consider, and not just on the technical aspect, but the human and business sides as well.

[cglace]

In all of these posts I fail to see how this is engineering anymore. It seems like we are one step away from taking ourselves out of the picture completely.

[bckr]

I don’t write binaries, assembly, or C. If I don’t have to write an application, I’m okay with that.

I still have to write the requirements, design, and acceptance criteria.

I still have to gather the requirements from stakeholders, figure out why those will or will not work, provision infra, figure out how to glue said infra together, test and observe and debug the whole thing, get feedback from stakeholders…

I have plenty of other stuff to do.

And if you automate 99% of the above work?

Then the requirements are going to get 100Xed. Put all the bells and whistles in. Make it break the laws of physics. Make it never ever crash and always give incredibly detailed feedback to the end users. Make it beautiful and faster than thought itself.

I’m not worried about taking myself out of the loop.

[TylerLives]

This has been my experience as well. Breaking problems into smaller problems where you can easily verify correctness works much better than having it solve the whole problem on its own.

[WD-42]

you just described how a good developer works.