I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even more entrenched than before.
Then something shifted. I started experimenting. I stopped giving it orders and began using it more like a virtual rubber duck. That made a huge difference.
It’s still absolute rubbish if you just let it run wild, which is why I think “vibe coding” is basically just “vibe debt” — because it just doesn’t do what most (possibly uninformed) people think it does.
But if you treat it as a collaborator — more like an idiot savant with a massive brain but no instinct or nous — or better yet, as a mech suit [0] that needs firm control — then something interesting happens.
I’m now at a point where working with Claude Code is not just productive, it actually produces pretty good code, with the right guidance. I’ve got tests, lots of them. I’ve also developed a way of getting Claude to document intent as we go, which helps me, any future human reader, and, crucially, the model itself when revisiting old code.
What fascinates me is how negative these comments are — how many people seem closed off to the possibility that this could be a net positive for software engineers rather than some kind of doomsday.
Did Photoshop kill graphic artists? Did film kill theatre? Not really. Things changed, sure. Was it “better”? There’s no counterfactual, so who knows? But change was inevitable.
What’s clear is this tech is here now, and complaining about it feels a bit like mourning the loss of punch cards when terminals showed up.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-progra...
This might be how one looks at it in the beginning, when having no experience or no idea about coding. With time one will realize it's more about creating the correct mental model of the problem at hand, rather than the activity of coding itself.
Once this realized, AI can't "save" you days of work, as coding is the least time consuming part of creating software.
I think these days coding is 20% of my job, maybe less. But HN is a diverse audience. You have the full range of web programmers and data scientists all the way to systems engineers and people writing for bare metal. Someone cranking out one-off Python and Javascript is going to have a different opinion on AI coding vs a C/C++ systems engineer and they're going to yell at each other in comments until they realize they don't have the same job, the same goals or the same experiences.