AI is making 10x developers 10x more productive and is making 0.1x devs 0.1x times as productive.
When I use Claude Code on my personal projects, it's like it can read my mind. As if my project is coding itself. It's very succinct and consistent. I just write my prompt and then I'm just tapping the enter key; yes, yes, yes, yes.
I also used Claude Code on someone else's code and it was not the same experience. It kept trying to implement dirty hacks to fix stuff but couldn't get very far with that approach. I had to keep reminding it "Please address the root cause" or "No hacks" or "Please take a step back and think harder about this problem." There was a lot of back-and-forth where I had to ask it to undo stuff and I had to step in and manually make certain changes.
I think part of the issue is that LLMs are better at adding complexity than at removing it. When I was working on the bad codebase, the times I had to manually intervene, the solution usually involved deleting some code or CSS. Sometimes the solution was really simple and just a matter of deleting a couple of lines of CSS but it couldn't figure it out no matter how I wrote the prompt or even if I hinted at the solution; it kept trying to solve problems by adding more code on top.
When I use Claude Code on my personal projects, it's like it can read my mind. As if my project is coding itself. It's very succinct and consistent. I just write my prompt and then I'm just tapping the enter key; yes, yes, yes, yes.
I also used Claude Code on someone else's code and it was not the same experience. It kept trying to implement dirty hacks to fix stuff but couldn't get very far with that approach. I had to keep reminding it "Please address the root cause" or "No hacks" or "Please take a step back and think harder about this problem." There was a lot of back-and-forth where I had to ask it to undo stuff and I had to step in and manually make certain changes.
I think part of the issue is that LLMs are better at adding complexity than at removing it. When I was working on the bad codebase, the times I had to manually intervene, the solution usually involved deleting some code or CSS. Sometimes the solution was really simple and just a matter of deleting a couple of lines of CSS but it couldn't figure it out no matter how I wrote the prompt or even if I hinted at the solution; it kept trying to solve problems by adding more code on top.