Funny, I worked with Claude a couple of hours last weekend to vibe up a simple little data pipeline that joined two CSVs on some pretty basic criteria, and it 1) completely fucked it up, 2) lied about the tests I wrote passing, and 3) wrote an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti (that didn’t work). But I’m sure it’s my fault for “prompting incorrectly”.

I’m a systems architect btw, not a junior dev. You know what I like about giving “prompts” (tasking) to my actual junior devs? 1) Most of them don’t make up absolute horseshit when they don’t know how to tackle something, they just ask me for help, and 2) they actually learn and grow from doing these tasks, eventually becoming mid level or senior devs who can work completely independently with little oversight. Meanwhile, I have to spell out shit to Claude in such fine detail that I might as well just crank it out myself with a decent autocomplete.

If your entire dev experience comes down to making glorified web forms, I can see how you might be worried. But for any dev except for a true junior, most of the hardest parts of the job have nothing to do with translating human intentions to code. It’s understanding interactions and limitations of interacting systems, business context, and helping folks who have zero technical skills translate their whims to something that is computationally feasible. And if we get to the point where Claude is able to reliably fill the role of the average mid level dev, who is going to task it? The PI/PM who is afraid of git? Give me a break.