I’m an “old school programmer” just like you, but still use Claud code.
For greenfield projects it’s absolutely faster to churn out code I’ve written 100 times in the past. I don’t need to write another RBAC system, I just don’t. I don’t need to write another table implementation for a frontend data view.
How Claud helps us is speed and breadth. I can do a lot more in shorter time, and depending on what your goals are this may or may not be valuable to you.
What kind of projects are you working on that aren't amenable to the sort of code reuse or abstraction that normally addresses this sort of "boilerplate"?
There are lots of projects like that, especially when doing work for external clients.
Very often they want to own all the code, so you cannot just abstract things in your own engine. It then very easily becomes the pragmatic choice to just use existing libraries and frameworks to implement these things when the client demands it.
Especially since every client wants different things.
At the same time, even though there are libraries available, it’s still work to stitch everything together.
For straightforward stuff, AI takes all that work out of your hands.
Writing boilerplate code is mostly creative copy-pasting.
If I were to do it, I would have most of the reusable code (e.g. of a RBAC system) written and documented once and kept unpublished. Then I would ask an AI tool to alter it, given a set of client-specific properties. It would be easier to review moderate changes to a familiar and proven piece of code. The result could be copied to the client-specific repo.
The author of the initial comment mentioned that customers of contract work prefer code which is 100% theirs, purpose-written, not a dependency, even vendored.
I’m always suspicious of comments like yours. You’re written the same thing 100 times in the past and don’t have the base on a snippets manager or a good project you can get the implementation from? Did you really rewrite the same thing 100 times and are now preferring to use a tool which is slower and more resource intensive than just having been a little bit efficient in the past in saving something you reuse all the time?
Your questions have been the focus of religion since the dawn of humanity. I don't see how you can think nobody tries to figure this out or considers the question.
Go ahead, begin. What do you say about it? I could find the Wikipedia page, and put a name on the question I guess, some philosopher must have written some discussion of the matter. I kind of doubt it went anywhere.
You are commiting category error. "Why are we here/why does anything exist" implicitly assumes an impetus, a do-er with motivations. And "what IS this reality" contains it's own answer(and the refusal to accept it): It is 'this reality'. It is IS-ness itself. It's like saying "Perfectly describe the entirety of Moby Dick, leaving out not a single word or punctuation", and refusing when someone hands you the book.
Buddhism, Yoga, the more esoteric parts of the Abrahamic religions and many more all have you covered with an extensive corpus if you want people who are asking the same questions you are.
I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
In short I went from a small company position with very little growth and constant paycheck delays to a job with very clear monthly metric goals and a manager that lets me pursue projects for our office and client that actually help and improve everyone’s experience.
My field is really small and most hiring managers/HR people frankly have no clue how to hire for it, so I have a genuinely great resume and still got ghosted for many positions I was easily qualified for.
So hopping from a low paying position I was very tired with, to a job with daily activities I actually enjoy, that pays way more appropriately, was a several year process when it would be a 2 month process in a bigger field.
Realistically if I had to attribute anything in particular it’s these two things:
1: knowing what kind of work would actually fulfill me, which turned out to be fairly repetitive grunt work with 10% special projects.
2: learning our primary software VERY well. I have not met any other analyst who knows the quirks and tricks as well as I do, but that mostly just comes from 8 years of struggling with it and their nonexistent customer support.
The low standards are important for this as well because I am making 15% over the median personal income, and many people on here have ambitions WAY higher than that. But my partner makes double what I do, we have no kids, and we have cheap rent for our area so I really am thankful for what we have.
Pursuing what actually interests me is easy as well because I’m happy with a job that’s 90% assembly line work and 10% actually novel project work.
Depending on the company's product (and this is a wide range), somewhere between employee 10 and employee 100, the founder needs to decide "Am I CEO of the company? Or CEO of the product?" (As in, that "and" needs to become an "or").
Oh my god you just perfectly described the frustration of working in enterprise SaaS. It’s been fun in some ways but the constant churn of almost-but-not-entirely-production-grade software is soul crushing. We celebrate and reward speed to market and lack of process in a way that feels unhealthy and unrewarding.
I’ve worked at consumer facing companies but also other enterprise SaaS and have to say I’ve never seen it done like this before. Just ruthless pursuit of features over polish, craft, etc.
Can your customer switch to another product, yes or no. If no, then polish won't happen.
Do customers actually value 'real' polish and not just a slick looking UI? If no, then real polish doesn't matter.
As a software writer you'll get your ass kicked into the ground by another company that writes catchy features and nice looking interfaces 9 times out of 10. So few actual customers know out to measure 'polish' that it's almost a non consideration.
How does it compare to Cursor with Claud? I’ve been really impressed with how well Cursor works, but always interested in up leveling if there’s better tools considering how fast this space is moving. Can you comment to how Codex performs vs Cursor?
Claude code is Claude code, whether you use in cursor or not
Codex and Claude code are neck and neck, but we made the decision to go all in on opus 4, as there are compounding returns in optimizing prompts and building intuition for a specific model
That said I have tested these prompts on codex, amp, opencode, even grok 4 fast via codebuff, and they still work decently well
But they are heavily optimized from our work with opus in particular
LLMs are actually terrible at generating art unless they're specifically trained for that type of work. Its crazy how many times I've asked for some UI elements to be drawn using a graphics context and it comes out totally wrong.
Wow. I’ve never actually heard this take before but I think you’re spot on. Vibe coding has serious limits as the scale of the project grows. As the complexity grows, human language becomes a crude tool compared to just coding and you will find your efficiency falls off a cliff trying to get the LLM to understand and effectively change or implement what you could have done by hand.
For greenfield projects it’s absolutely faster to churn out code I’ve written 100 times in the past. I don’t need to write another RBAC system, I just don’t. I don’t need to write another table implementation for a frontend data view.
How Claud helps us is speed and breadth. I can do a lot more in shorter time, and depending on what your goals are this may or may not be valuable to you.