This person is not using Claude Code or Cursor. They refuse to use the tools and have convinced themselves that they are right. Sadly, they won't recognize how wrong they were until they are unemployable.
If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs.
I say this as someone who does use the tools, they're fine. I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. If the bar is code that technically works along the happy path then fine, but that's the floor of what I'm willing to put forth or accept in a PR.
> If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs.
There is absolutely reason for concern, but it's not inevitable.
For the foreseeable future, I don't think we can simply Ralph Wiggum-loop real business problems. A lot of human oversight and tuning is required.
Also, I haven't seen anything to suggest that AI is good at strategic business decisionmaking.
I do think it dramatically changes the job of a software developer, though. We will be more like developers of software assembly lines and strategists.
Every company I have ever worked for has had a deep backlog of tasks and ideas we realistically were never going to get to. These tools put a lot of those tasks in play.
> I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result.
It frequently gets close for me, but usually some follow-up is needed. The ones that are closest to pure one-shot are bug fixes where replication can be captured in a regression test.
> If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway.
I don't know about that. This PR stunt is a greenfield project that no one really knows what volume of work went behind it, and targeted a problem (bootstrapping a C compiler) that is actually quite small and relatively trivial to accomplish.
Go ahead and google for small C compilers. They are a dime a dozen, and some don't venture beyond a couple thousand lines of code.
I was a huge skeptic on this stuff less than a year ago, so I get it. For a couple years, the hype was really hype, when it came to the actual business utility of AI tools. It's just interesting to me the extent to which people have totally different lived experiences right now.
I do agree that some folks are in for rude awakening, because markets (labor and otherwise) will reveal winning strategies. I'm far from a free market ideologist, but this is a place where the logic seems to apply.
To be totally fair to them... it is quite literally in the last few months that the tools have actually begun to meet the promises that the breathless hypers have been screeching about for years at this point.
But it's also true that it simply is better than the OP is giving it credit for.
> Who you are: Strong software engineering background with TypeScript in production. Hands-on with AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Aider, Copilot)
Hilarious take. There's absolutely no advantage to learning to use LLMs now. Even LLM "skills", if you can call it that, that you may have learnt 6 months ago are already irrelevant and obsolete. Do you really think a smart person couldn't get to your level in about an hour? You are not building fundamental skills and experience by using LLM agents now, you're just coasting and possibly even atrophying.
Spivak|22 days ago
I say this as someone who does use the tools, they're fine. I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. If the bar is code that technically works along the happy path then fine, but that's the floor of what I'm willing to put forth or accept in a PR.
acjohnson55|22 days ago
There is absolutely reason for concern, but it's not inevitable.
For the foreseeable future, I don't think we can simply Ralph Wiggum-loop real business problems. A lot of human oversight and tuning is required.
Also, I haven't seen anything to suggest that AI is good at strategic business decisionmaking.
I do think it dramatically changes the job of a software developer, though. We will be more like developers of software assembly lines and strategists.
Every company I have ever worked for has had a deep backlog of tasks and ideas we realistically were never going to get to. These tools put a lot of those tasks in play.
> I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result.
It frequently gets close for me, but usually some follow-up is needed. The ones that are closest to pure one-shot are bug fixes where replication can be captured in a regression test.
locknitpicker|22 days ago
I don't know about that. This PR stunt is a greenfield project that no one really knows what volume of work went behind it, and targeted a problem (bootstrapping a C compiler) that is actually quite small and relatively trivial to accomplish.
Go ahead and google for small C compilers. They are a dime a dozen, and some don't venture beyond a couple thousand lines of code.
Check out this past discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210087
acjohnson55|22 days ago
I do agree that some folks are in for rude awakening, because markets (labor and otherwise) will reveal winning strategies. I'm far from a free market ideologist, but this is a place where the logic seems to apply.
girvo|22 days ago
But it's also true that it simply is better than the OP is giving it credit for.
Depressingly. Because I like writing code.
tonyedgecombe|22 days ago
You never see job adverts requiring VIM or IntelliJ experience, I expect it will be the same for Claude Code or Cursor.
wonger_|21 days ago
> We are AI-native and expect you to use tools like Cursor and Claude to ship significantly faster.
> Stack: Python 3.12 (Typed), FastAPI, MongoDB/Beanie, React/TS, Gemini/Claude, Claude Code,
> Who you are: Strong software engineering background with TypeScript in production. Hands-on with AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Aider, Copilot)
globular-toast|22 days ago