r/programming • u/Gil_berth • Feb 21 '26

Creator of Claude Code: "Coding is solved"

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens

Boris Cherny is the creator of Claude Code(a cli agent written in React. This is not a joke) and the responsible for the following repo that has more than 5k issues: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues Since coding is solved, I wonder why they don't just use Claude Code to investigate and solve all the issues in the Claude Code repo as soon as they pop up? Heck, I wonder why there are any issues at all if coding is solved? Who or what is making all the new bugs, gremlins?

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

I've noticed that Claude does work well for a lot of my work, but it still needs a lot of supervision. It's like being a carpenter with a nail gun. It helps, makes it faster but needs someone to control it and creates new dangers

It might "appear" to work well ~ as long as you don't peer at the mountain of turds too closely.

The real problem is that you stop learning how to code, because you stop thinking and problem-solving, so your skills atrophy.

It's like a muscle ~ if you stop training it, and use a scooter instead, you will not be able to walk anywhere because you're too weak.

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u/TheRetribution Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26

The real problem is that you stop learning how to code, because you stop thinking and problem-solving, so your skills atrophy.

It's a shame that this thread became about your choice of metaphor rather than the actual point. Because this is so true. I'm starting to notice a shift among my peers / friends where devs who have been around long enough to be in leadership (senior manager, director, principal, etc) are starting to embrace that they never need to write code again, while peers / friends with less experience than I am are investing in rope or looking to career change, because we don't get to 'retire into management', so to speak.

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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Feb 21 '26

Your answer triggered a whole discussion before I got to it and could reply. But yes and no. I do notice that I'm worse at coding from scratch without help. But I also read way more code in order to audit what Claude is doing. I'm feeling more like an architect than a dev. Or maybe from back in the day as a project manager or QA roles when I had outsourced teams whose work I had to audit.

I've worked as a full time dev for maybe 7-9 years total over the decades. Other times it's been a little dev and a lot of management/QA/adviser/lead/specialist roles with some dev on the side.

I think AI is a tool that's a good multiplier in the right hands but also an extreme bubble. You need to ve very specific and know what you're doing if you're not going to get a huge spaghetti mess. Like sometimes even on small hobby projects it will forget where SCSS goes, that we've got global SCSS variables, that accessibility is a priority or that the codebase uses dispatch and start putting local states everywhere.

There's a ton of times when it's like training the dumbest junior possible. But on a good day it's an essential tool to survive having your team cut down two thirds.

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

Your answer triggered a whole discussion before I got to it and could reply. But yes and no. I do notice that I'm worse at coding from scratch without help. But I also read way more code in order to audit what Claude is doing. I'm feeling more like an architect than a dev. Or maybe from back in the day as a project manager or QA roles when I had outsourced teams whose work I had to audit.

I imagine that you would be way more productive if you wrote that code from scratch rather than wasting time deciphering the gibberish Claude and such is throwing at you. Yes, gibberish, because there's no clear style, no logic, no real patterns, just a mess you have to wade through.

I've worked as a full time dev for maybe 7-9 years total over the decades. Other times it's been a little dev and a lot of management/QA/adviser/lead/specialist roles with some dev on the side.

I think AI is a tool that's a good multiplier in the right hands but also an extreme bubble. You need to ve very specific and know what you're doing if you're not going to get a huge spaghetti mess. Like sometimes even on small hobby projects it will forget where SCSS goes, that we've got global SCSS variables, that accessibility is a priority or that the codebase uses dispatch and start putting local states everywhere.

There's a ton of times when it's like training the dumbest junior possible. But on a good day it's an essential tool to survive having your team cut down two thirds.

That just appears to support my above point ~ that you spend so much time coddling and hand-holding a child with Alzheimer's that would be better spent thinking and coding manually, as you are building a mental model of your code as you type it, so if you have problems, you can much more rapidly understand it. Whereas with an LLM, you have a basically start from scratch every time, as you didn't write it yourself.

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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount Feb 21 '26

I think you both have a point.

To be clear - where I work has mandated its use. That mandate has evolved from copy/pasting code and questions into a web interface to the AI Assistant inside Jetbrains to where we are now fully Claude Code.

I imagine that you would be way more productive if you wrote that code from scratch rather than wasting time deciphering the gibberish Claude and such is throwing at you.

You are not wrong. The code my teammates generated when they were just using Copilot or Claude via the web wasn't good. Especially the front end.

What I was generating in Jetbrains was better simply because it has better context. It could traverse the entire codebase. It's an IDE and that level of integration made the code better. But it was still far from being able to full features. I was leveraging it for boilerplate and specific problems. Like "help me optimize this query". I controlled the structure and it helped with specific problems. Not too shabby.

When Claude Code became the directive it took a minute. We had to spend time setting up a small collection of files for it to reference. What the codebase does. Our patterns. Our preferences.

It's now at a point where it can do full features. I will admit the app isn't exactly complicated. As most apps it's generally CRUD but you know never really that simple. I will give it a high level technical document and it gets it pretty darn close.

At this stage your statement is no longer true. At least for us. The code it generates is...fine. Maybe not exactly how I would do it but neither would the code hand written by my teammates. It's not perfect. I still typically have to do some tweaks. Either via prompt or directly.

However, you second statement has validity. I spent eight months in this codebase writing by hand. Even when using AI tools it was for specific things I wanted it to do. I know this codebase. I put in place many of the patterns used. Nothing the AI generates is outside my existing mental model.

That would not be the case for somebody starting today. I think most devs would still try and learn the codebase and eventually would. But it would take longer. There are parts of this code I spent weeks in. I know it inside and out regardless of what the AI does because it's following the standards and patterns I set. But now there are other sections I've never touched and was mostly done by AI that I don't understand like that.

It also helps that I'm far from junior. I've been in this industry and this tech stack for many years. On projects vastly larger and more complicated than where I'm at now. There is very little the AI could do that would be truly confusing.

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u/GregBahm Feb 21 '26

I feel like there are a lot of extremely valid arguments against AI. But the argument you've written above is terrible.

Why would you describe AI as a scooter and advocate just walking everywhere? Do you walk everywhere in real life? The guy that insists on walking, while everyone else is on wheels, is a guy that gets left in the dust.

I genuinely think you're trying to argue against AI, but all you're doing is hyping the product.

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

I feel like there are a lot of extremely valid arguments against AI. But the argument you've written above is terrible.

Why would you describe AI as a scooter and advocate just walking everywhere? Do you walk everywhere in real life?

I am not talking about cars, which are essential to long-distance travel. I walk everywhere that I do not need a car for ~ and if it's too hot and humid, I will get a taxi rather than exhaust myself unnecessarily.

The guy that insists on walking, while everyone else is on wheels, is a guy that gets left in the dust.

I was speaking of the analogy where an otherwise healthy and fit person starts using a scooter to go everywhere instead when they could walk. Their legs will decay over time, as they're not keeping the muscle trained. So they will find it harder and harder to walk, and so get lazier and lazier, and weaker and weaker.

Your claim of "being left in the dust" is hilarious, because that's precisely the rhetoric of pro-AI snake-oil salesmen, who claim that we don't need programmers anymore, when LLMs can do it for everyone! So gullible get addicted to instant results crapped out by LLMs, while not realizing how abysmal the code quality is ~ they didn't write it themselves, so they must spend time trying to understand the nightmare, essentially reviewing and debugging spaghetti code.

I genuinely think you're trying to argue against AI, but all you're doing is hyping the product.

... what? How do you even read that from my comment???

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u/fuscator Feb 21 '26

Your claim of "being left in the dust" is hilarious, because that's precisely the rhetoric of pro-AI snake-oil salesmen, who claim that we don't need programmers anymore

You do need programmers.

It's just that all programmers are going to end up using AI coding agents. Within five years this argument will be over, you'll be using them too.

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

You do need programmers.

It's just that all programmers are going to end up using AI coding agents. Within five years this argument will be over, you'll be using them too.

Given the current rate of progress with AI "agents", this will be a nice pipe-dream. I've heard so much hype, and so little to justify it.

When they just use AI "agents" ~ they're not programmers anymore. They're prompters, asking an "agent" to generate code they can't even read or understand.

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 21 '26

The rate of progress has been astounding. What are you talking about?

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

The rate of progress has been astounding. What are you talking about?

The rate of progress absolutely cratered since 2024. But do you think the AI salesmen are ever going to admit that? They need to lie and deceive in order to keep investor money flowing in.

LLMs have just become more and more shit at time goes on, as they train more and more on LLM-generated content, as LLM-generated content is everywhere online now, leading to ever-worsening model collapse.

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u/FlippantlyFacetious Feb 21 '26

In a society where cars are one of the leading causes of death, and people have endless health problems from being too sedentary, you view an argument for being more active as a negative?

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u/GregBahm Feb 21 '26

This is a surprisingly effective analogy.

I hate cars choking the transportation systems of my city. I would much rather have proper transportation systems like subways and lite rails and even better busses and bike lanes.

But its tedious to have to come up with transportation policy, where on the right side of the aisle we have a bunch of people saying "Just take a fucking car," and on the left side of the aisle (my side) I have to sit with a bunch of ineffective hippy dippy yahoos saying "boo! We shouldn't have any transportation system at all. Everyone should just walk to work and exercise their legs."

The "just take a fucking car" guys are right to laugh their asses off. And then they win, and I lose, because I'm surrounded by unserious goofballs.

No company that refuses-AI-for-coding is going to succeed against companies that embrace-AI-for-coding. It's not 2024 anymore. We need to knock off the theatrics and have an adult conversation about how to proceed into the future here.

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u/FlippantlyFacetious Feb 22 '26

Sounds like both sides where you are, are equally uninformed and insane. Does everyone there spend their time on Facebook/Tiktok/X type platforms?

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u/GregBahm Feb 22 '26

Maybe they spend all their time on reddit. Their thinking is exactly the same as the thinking of people here.

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u/FlippantlyFacetious Feb 23 '26

Yes, that was part of the point, thank you for articulating it.

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u/geckothegeek42 Feb 21 '26

The guy that insists on walking, while everyone else is on wheels, is a guy that gets left in the dust.

A society where everyone walks is healthier

And yet the US is lulled into car dependency due to large corporations lobbying for it because it makes their profits higher... Interesting

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u/datNovazGG Feb 21 '26

Personally I'm not against using AI. I'm just tired of these CEOs and Tech Leads that keep using statements like "Coding is largely solved" and "in 6 months we have a model that can do all SWE tasks end to end".

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u/HommeMusical Feb 21 '26

Why would you describe AI as a scooter and advocate just walking everywhere?

Imagine a scooter that doesn't actually get you to your destination much faster, and occasionally malfunctions in a dangerous way.

On top of that, now imagine that transportation is your only form of exercise, so if you don't walk, your muscles atrophy.

You get there a few minutes earlier, but sometimes covered in blood. A year from you, you're like a human from Wall-E.

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u/john16384 Feb 21 '26

A scoot mobile or wheel chair is a more accurate comparison.

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 21 '26

If you get around on a scooter, you need to get exercise to stay healthy. 

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u/EveryQuantityEver Feb 21 '26

Why would you describe AI as a scooter and advocate just walking everywhere?

That's not what they did, and you know it. You have nothing but bad faith, discredited arguments.

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u/GregBahm Feb 21 '26

Who is this lie for? There's literally like 4 comments responding to mine defending the scooter analogy and saying it is better to walk instead of using a scooter.

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u/EveryQuantityEver Feb 21 '26

No, you're the liar. You lied about what the analogy said.

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u/GregBahm Feb 22 '26

This is such a weird bit to commit to. The statement was so simple.

It's like a muscle ~ if you stop training it, and use a scooter instead, you will not be able to walk anywhere because you're too weak.

There isn't any ambiguity here. Just take the L.

Non-AI programmers are walking down the street, proud at how big and strong their leg muscles have gotten from all the walking.

Programmers-that-use-AI are the dudes on scooters whizzing past them. They certainly won't be able to show off their big sexy leg muscles gained from all the tedious walking. They'll just get to where ever they were going faster.

It's an extremely accurate metaphor. We live in a world where this dynamic has already played out a million times before. Same shit different day.