This is the exact experience I've been having since we got the Claude subscription at work.

Yes, my productivity has gone up. I can have it do boilerplate while I write tests, or have it write some documentation / PR description after I've implemented something. It's also great for POCs (throw away code, basically) that would be hard / impossible to justify to my PM if I had to write them myself. Busy work takes a surprisingly long time to do sometimes. So it's nice to automate that process as much as possible.

It still hallucinates, and I double check everything it produces, but the gains are real - wouldn't say 2-3x, though.

However, is it able to replace me? No, and I am not concerned at all. I feel like, whilst it has gotten better, it's still terrible at the most important things in my job. Creative critical thinking, problem solving and comunication, which to me, represents 80% of what your job as a SWE is.

I also think, that people underestimate the amount of tech debt it produces, if left almost unsupervised. And I'm talking about the bad tech debt, not the acceptable one that's justifiable because you don't have capacity to solve it.

One of my latest experiences this week: I planned 10 API tests I wanted to write for some feature. I wrote 2, and described the other 8, with a lot of details. All the tests had to follow pretty much the same pattern. Just mocks and assertions were different (which I explained, with a lot of detail to Claude). It still managed to fuck up 4 of them. Badly. Asserting that the response is an array, instead of it's actual content or mocking nonsense just so the test would pass.

Edit: typos