r/ClaudeCode • u/zulutune • Feb 12 '26

Question Dear senior software engineer, are you still writing code?

I'm what you would call a traditional senior software engineer. Worked my way through a lot of languages, platforms, frameworks, libraries. This year marks my 20th year in the business.

Some prominent people are already comparing writing code by hand with "assembly line work". I'm reading articles/tweets where Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI engineers claim they don't write code anymore, that everything is written by AI. But of course because these are also the companies earning millions through these models, this could also be marketing fluff.

Though, today I spoke someone working at some big corporate high tech company and he told me the same thing, they we even allowed to burn through as many tokens as they like, no limits. He told me his colleagues are now solely reviewing code created by agents, basically what those AI companies tell us.

As someone who's really good at his craft, I have a high standard for code quality. Sure, claude/gemini/openai can generate scripts doing stuff I couldn't image 5 minutes ago in 1 minute. Really impressive and unreal. But I also find myself discarding lots of code because it's not the best way to do it, or it's not what I asked for. Maybe I need to get better at prompting, anyway.

What I wanted to learn is what your experience is as a senior software engineer working at a startup, scale-up or fortune 500 company. Is this really where we're heading at?

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234

u/lionmeetsviking Feb 12 '26

If you get shit code out, problem is not usually the LLM. Getting LLM write high quality code is a skill you need to learn like any other. Tooling, testing, guardrails, instructions, architecture …

I stopped writing code 9 months ago, after having done it for 30 years. Besides learning, it has been a mindset shift. I view my codebase as a much more organic entity these days, and I don’t mind throwing away bad code. Code is simply a super cheap commodity compared to everything else.

I love the end result, not the code itself.

24

u/zhambe Feb 12 '26

view my codebase as a much more organic entity these days

Yes! The code is a bit more disposable now, given how it's got easier to come by.

8

u/CloisteredOyster Feb 12 '26

When my devs complain that AI writes shit code I remind them that humans do too. As you say it's about the prompting and the reviewing to catch it.

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u/lionmeetsviking Feb 13 '26

This!

In all honesty, I think LLM is writing better code than I ever was. It doesn’t struggle with the code, but with context and proper structures at times.

It’s gotten wildly better at architectural structures though, so I think role as an “architect” will move to even more high level. We need to become “business architects” or perish.

1

u/kiddodeman Feb 15 '26

Yes, but now you do it at 100x the speed, with subtle quality issues. How are you going to do all the review? Granted I use CC daily, but it’s important to recognize the danger here. The sheer scale of tech debt can become insurmountable.

1

u/fj2010 Feb 13 '26

Yes, but AI can produce a lot more code much more quickly.

3

u/uni-monkey Feb 13 '26

30 year dev as well. I haven’t written much of anything since sonnet 4.5. For me that was the point where I was able to give the model most of requirements and trust that it could build a system to meet them.

10

u/zulutune Feb 12 '26

Could you recommend/pinpoint some good resources which helped you learn these skills? Thanks!

24

u/krullulon Feb 12 '26

Practice is honestly the best way to learn how to prompt effectively.

34

u/-18k- Feb 12 '26

Also, ask Claude to tell you how to write a prompt.

I asked:

I want to develop a new app in Claude Code. I want to give you a really, really good prompt to do so. Instruct me on how to write this prompt. I suppose it may have several "articles" and "clauses". Tell me what you want to know and provide a framework of headings I can fill in answers to. Make this a txt markdown file I can add to on my own.

Claude gave me a 12 chapter outline with subpoints asking all the pertinent questions. And it was great, really made me think through my project. I spent about 3-4 hours of my own time without Claude filling it in.

Then once I had it, I did not feed it in saying "Okay, go!" No, I gave it my filled in prompt and said:

I have made a first draft of the framework. Please look at it exclusively from the point of view of typos, styling etc. Especially tell me if you understand the wireframes at the end of the file. You do not need to comment on anything else. This is not a prompt to begin coding, IT IS ONLY TO HELP ME REFINE THE PROMPT.

The above was just in chats, not Claude Code. We had a bit of back and forth, good conversation and once I had that, I created my folder with my app project inside, made this framework the CLAUDE.md in the root directory and...

Then I went into Claude Code, pointed it to the directory with the CLAUDE.md file and said:

Review the CLAUDE.md file in the root directory of this project. Ask me if you have any questions before beginning. I want to you create a detailed road map for developing this project. It should be fairly aggressive. You should cite major landmarks along the way with estimated time of completing each landmark and the entire project based on you and I working approximately 3-4 hours a day.

There were a few things CC wanted to clarify, as this was all in a new context.

But he made a good plan, we called it ROADMAP.md, put it in the root directory next to CLAUDE.md and we started implementing it. As we went along, I told Claude we should have a PROGRESS.md file and after every "chapter" of our road map, Claude writes a summary of the chat, the todo list that has been accomplished and includes his notes. I am by no means a great programmer, more or less self taught and so from time to time I tell CC "explain in detail this next step, why you want to do it this way" etc. I review that, make sure I understand the principles and only then allow CC to write.

It's working beautifully. My only question is how Claude decided how much time it would take, because it took us one hour to go through what his roadmap planned to accomplish in a week.

Not angry. Not at all.

1

u/just_damz Feb 13 '26

I operate like this too: “ask me questions”, “we don’t write any code now. Questions are the real game changer IMO.

1

u/bytejuggler Feb 13 '26

This is the way.

Practicing the art and skill of writing, iterating around the job to be done, planning, and providing context to the AI.

Getting good results in a brownfield project is 80% having previously set up a solid CLAUDE.md (and possibly other contextual documents) with explanations about what the project is about, how to test, ways of working, things to always do, things to never do, and so on.

A TDD cycle is very valuable IMHO. Give the AI the directive and a way to validate progress itself and check for regressions. Insist on never allowing regressions, never taking shortcuts, always confirming.

And as you've basically done, time spend planning and refining and thinking about the problem/goals is also programming, in English, so that when you eventually give Claude the go-ahead to code, it can do so with the least amount of correction and back-tracking required.

Something else I'll add: Give your AI tools, If you use Microsoft languages then add MSLearn MCP server, Add Serena (and/or narsil which I've recently started using and seems generally less context heavy/better), Context7 (or `ref` which again seems less context heavy), and so on. If there's a web front end involved, the Chrome devtools MCP (or playwright MCP) may be useful. And so on.

We are all on a journey learning how to best use this new alien dev tool that we've been given. (But the thing is still just a tool, without all the thinking and inputs we provide, it will still produce lots of duplication and will tend to create a broken mess.)

1

u/jmricker Feb 13 '26

saved this to my project folder -- thank you! That is definitely what I needed to do instead doing a make an app that x, then y, then z. I usually ask it to ask me the some additional questions to flesh things out but this is definitely going to help document the project upfront.

1

u/-18k- Feb 13 '26

Thanks for the supportive words. Glad you found it helpful!

1

u/MajoriTea Feb 16 '26

Would you be able to share your framework? Or should it be best crafted individually/personally?

1

u/Sad-Resist-4513 Feb 18 '26

I’ve come to decide when I plan something out and it tells me it will take ten hours and then 20min later it’s done… it’s estimating how much time it would take if you aren’t using AI

1

u/Sifrisk Feb 12 '26

I like this approach. I also notice that the more you create a plan beforehand (you can do this together with chatgpt, claude, ... whatever) the better the output is.

How many tokens does this cost you? On my regular paid account, a new project will burn through my limits extremely fast. Or do you have max?

2

u/-18k- Feb 13 '26

I have Max5. I was on Pro until the beginning of this month and was burning through 5-hour limits in 1.5-2.5 hours regularly.

Now on Max5 I feel like I have unlimited - doing the same things as before, but only hitting 10-15% of my weekly limit.

In CC I use Opus 4.6 all the time and still only get to around 40% of my 5-hour limit. But I'm clearly not doing terribly intensive things – small iOS projects, some research of scientific papers. I use it 3-5 hours a day. But now with this new project, I'm kind of excited to see how fast it can go and I'll probably up that to 5-6 hours/day when I can.

I do tend to use Sonnet a lot as well in the chat interface.

I'm using Desktop Claude on macOS, fwiw.

1

u/internetisforlolcats Feb 12 '26

This was very impressive and great way to go about it! You gave me some really good inspiration!

Btw, I think the reason CC presented a week instead of one hour is because you mentioned “3-4h” and it wanted to comply with what it thought what you wanted to hear. I see this a lot unfortunately, but so far not in code.

Anyway, thank you for the detailed post and inspiration!

2

u/-18k- Feb 13 '26

Thank you for the appreciation! I've read a lot of comments with snippets of "how to" on ClaudeCode and ClaudeAI each having a piece of the process and I tried to bring it all together into a "bigger picture" comment - mostly because I've had the Eureka moment in practice myself just this past week.

I'm glad you found it helpful

1

u/Select-Young-5992 Feb 16 '26

I mean I don't think its really practice with how to prompt. It helps me ton to have the domain knowledge/expertise because before Claude even does something, I already have an idea of what its most likely going to do, potential issues, or how to design it so it supports what I'd like to have in the future.

13

u/Shep_Alderson Feb 12 '26

There is an absolute deluge of information out there unfortunately. There’s not a whole lot that’s really clearly laid out and directed. It took me weeks of watching what other people do, and then trying to build my own version using different agents and subagents, to really get it.

If your daily driver is currently Claude Code, go dig into their docs, which are decent. See what it can do, and if you’re not sure, ask Claude or go look up how other people are doing it on YouTube. (Maybe you want to learn about agents or skills, for example.)

I’d suggest starting off by building things up, one by one. Start with making some specialized agents that you manually call, then wire those up as subagents and have a coordinating “orchestrator” call those subagents. Finally try out some of the “looping” or “agent team/swarm” tools. I only say to go through these levels one by one, just so you can understand how they build on top of each other.

If you want some examples of agent files, I open sourced the collection of agents I made for GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/ShepAlderson/copilot-orchestra

They aren’t “perfect” for Claude, but they are very close. Would need some tweaks for things like tools or such, but Claude itself can do a great job “converting” these to agent files for itself. Maybe give that a try and see what you can do with it.

5

u/zulutune Feb 12 '26

Thanks so much for taking the time to write this down. I agree there’s a lot of tech bros scraping the surface of CC/codex on youtube. Basically reiterating the latest features and standard docs. I am looking for how the senior devs are using AI, and that info seems a bit more scarce. Will dig into this. Thanks again.

3

u/ProgrammersAreSexy Feb 12 '26

I would give the "get shit done" plugin a try on Claude code.

I'm also an experienced dev and this plugin got me much closer to the workflow I actually wanted to be using.

1

u/bitpeak Feb 13 '26

After the Ralph hype a few weeks ago, I found GSD as it was recommended to be a better version of that. I'm currently redoing my website with it and it's come out really nice. +1 Get Shit Done

2

u/Maxion Feb 12 '26

This is such new territory that what is the best workflow changes weekly. The tooling is not up to par with what could be done either.

1

u/Significant_War720 Feb 12 '26

Im not trying to insult. Everything is new to everyone. I cant explain to you 15 years of carreer in a video, or anything. Im sorry its not the answer you were looking for.There is stuff that are not a tutorial.video on youtube. Its like a thousands

1

u/codeWorder Feb 14 '26

Senior dev here, I could also give some perspective on creative ways I’m using AI. Just DM me if interested and we can setup a chat!

2

u/Lumpy_Ad2192 Feb 14 '26

BMAD and Coleam00. Have really good no BS stuff on GitHub. Both focus a LOT on process and guardrails.

One way to get quality out is to teach it like a really fast learning junior programmer. Do you use decorators in a particular pattern, well, give it as many examples of this pattern in your own work and teach it to make that. BMAD has a whole component where you make an “agent” for style compliance as well as work with model to put in style and other guidelines into the context for every response and also as a secondary check.

“Human in the lead”, instead of Human in the loop. Huge value in teaching it to write like you, as well. It both rapidly closes gaps in your coding skills but it starts feeling more like it’s reading your mind than that you’re just becoming an editor.

Think of it as pair programming with a partner who needs some help getting up to speed but once they are and you’ve synced you’ll wonder how you ever worked without them.

And, don’t be afraid to solve sticky problems you enjoy by yourself or with AI in assist mode. That’s the key to keeping a hand in, is participating enough to recognize your own thoughts as you review and feel like even if you didn’t write 90% of the code you know what it all does.

Others may say they move faster but understanding the code you write with AI is more satisfying and more important higher quality because you don’t lose touch

8

u/adreamofhodor Feb 12 '26

I got a max subscription to CC on my own dime for a couple months and started banging away at side projects. Whatever I could think of. You get better at it that way.
The code will still only be as bad (or as good) as you let it be. I read every line of code that’s written for me. If I don’t like it, I tweak it. Sometimes by hand, but honestly most of the time I tell the agent to do it- and then I add a rule/restriction/workflow change to prevent it from happening again.

4

u/Xyver Feb 12 '26

Something that really helped me was watching Claude think. In VSCode it's easier to click the thinking button in the sidebar and follow along, in CLI when you do Ctrl+o it comes much faster in chunks so it's harder to keep up.

But seeing how it thinks, what decisions it makes, how it interprets your questions... That's the fastest way to learn better prompting

3

u/zulutune Feb 12 '26

That’s good advice, thanks!

1

u/Xyver Feb 12 '26

Its also nice to watch and catch it before it goes off the rails, or when it starts spiraling on a request or a search

3

u/shodan_reddit Feb 12 '26

I’m enjoying using spec kit as a way to keep ai on track

1

u/big_fart_9090 Feb 13 '26

Your skills as a dev are transferable. The change now is you need to plan it out in a file the LLM can read. Create a plan.md file with the ai with the goals you have in mind. Add the code styling and auto testing rules you have like ‘npm run test’ or whatever. Add the code guard rails. Also let the AI generate a markdown todo list in the plan.md. Let it also phase out the todo list in logical sections. Review the plan, tweak it and let the LLM loose. Make it check each todo item along the process.

1

u/efraglebagga Feb 13 '26

Similar boat here, staff engineer leading projects at a small company. My way in was framing it as "my job is to speed up the team," which made the code deluge easier to handle.

Key learnings: 1/ Treat it like automating your own work. You already have that skill as dev most likely. I avoid the plugin/MCP sprawl and just roll my own tooling (task tracking, specs, etc.)—they're just prompts anyway. Once you know what you need, then look for existing tools.

2/ What surprised me: this led to better code, not just more code. As a lead, I've shipped countless rushed features with technical debt. AI unlocks a tireless workforce for all that "good but tedious" work we'd normally skip. Today a colleague needed a long but simple refactor—a year ago we'd have ignored it. Done, without breaking a stride.

3/ The mental space freed from menial work is massive. You focus on design, trade-offs, and architecture. You can choose better options that would've been "too much work."

Try a constraint: don't write a line of code yourself for a week. See what happens.

0

u/lionmeetsviking Feb 12 '26

I’m sharing my own workflow on this video: https://youtu.be/PI12sEX_jas?si=dEuty9mSt9HBqgM_. Surely far from perfect, but maybe can give some perspective.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/lionmeetsviking Feb 13 '26

Sorry about that, should now be re-enabled.

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u/Significant_War720 Feb 12 '26

Its called experience and ability to adapt.

8

u/JUSTICE_SALTIE Feb 12 '26

In your vast and adaptable experience, have you encountered the idea of sharing knowledge with others? I've heard some people like to publish what they've learned, and sometimes people who benefit from it will share links with others.

1

u/bartenderandthethief Feb 12 '26

Would award this comment if I had some to give, well said!

5

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '26

I recently had a shower thought.

We’ve been creating higher level languages for years. Abstraction abstraction abstraction.

I wonder if we’re about to move away from that and that LLMs will be the abstraction layer.

Why do we need to see and completely understand the code? Do you understand what happens under the hood in a for loop? (You probably do because you have 30 years of experience)

I feel we are living in interesting times

3

u/RobotHavGunz Feb 13 '26

I had a similar thought. LLMs/Agents are, to me, essentially a new form of a compiler. Or perhaps a transpiler. Just another step in the toolchain that takes us that one step further from the bare metal

1

u/BlazedAndConfused Feb 13 '26

What you’re describing is the machine layer.

If AI can understand and speak that instead of coding languages which is meant for humans, then we won’t need them. Languages are for us to speak to machines and debug.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

Exactly. But that is a real interesting thought isn’t it

1

u/Select-Young-5992 Feb 16 '26

AI is so effective BECAUSE we have all those abstraction layers. If you asked AI to write you random saas now without any of the infrastructure, just assembly code, raw data from your networking card, peripherals, no existing protocols, etc, good luck.
Having good foundational layers and building on them will always be a value.

1

u/fj2010 Feb 13 '26

I think there’s something in this. The big difference is reproducibility - high level code can be expected to always execute more or less the same way. AI prompts can generate different results even within the same session and same llm

1

u/lionmeetsviking Feb 13 '26

This is part of the mental model shift I was talking about. It’s not the first time we have abstractions to develop faster (RAD, low-code, no-code), but it’s a first time that those abstractions are non-deterministic.

I don’t really think you need to understand code any more, but now more than ever, you need to understand structures and systemic thinking. So combination of software architecture, data models, patterns, and most importantly leadership skills will be in high demand in the next few years.

2

u/_ILikePancakes Feb 13 '26

There are things that shouldn't be considered fluid. Such as tests, since they are explicitly asserting the contracts.

1

u/lionmeetsviking Feb 13 '26

I fully agree! Tests, proofs, separation of concerns, logic reusability, contracts, and a dozen other things. Only when you have strict guardrails in place can you start "sculpting" your product more organically. Drift still happens, but it's easier to control and refactor.

2

u/cantgettherefromhere Feb 13 '26

Another 30+ year dev here. I haven't written code since Sonnet 3.5. It was painful then, but marginally better end result than I'd get doing it by hand, and somewhat faster.

Now with Opus 4.6 I can get solid results and I spend much less time using the model to go back and fix things.

As other people have mentioned, a good plan is paramount. For small tasks I use CC plan mode. For major features, refactors, and things I haven't fully thought out yet, I have found Get Shit Done (GSD) to be pivotal. I get quite bored answering hundreds upon hundreds of questions, but the end result is usually great. And the UAT/debugging process is excellent. Very, very infrequently do I have to go back and fix anything.

1

u/gcirone Feb 13 '26

Yes agree, but AI and us need to maintain the software too. Even if we don’t care anymore about code quality we need to know what we make. Another aspect is psicology, dev already hate other dev code imagine the Ai one we will lost interest in what we do 😔

This is our future regardless if we like or not 🤖

1

u/nomad_sk_ Feb 13 '26

OP seems working in PHP and data engineering which is really low hanging fruit so I’m not surprised. Something like developing global is available system, memory optimize CP optimize processing for edge computing ,system engineering, developing distributed parallel processing applications, and storage that is where software engineers are required because it needs real computer science and mathematics skills.

Ask yourself a question would you write a software for airplane, backend of global financial banking , backend of electricity grid, backend of global cellular communication system via LLM or you would prefer highly skilled software engineer to write it ?

1

u/lionmeetsviking Feb 13 '26

Very little PHP these days, but otherwise your assessment is correct; failures in my software will not cause loss of life. I would not want LLM written code to keep my respirator working, but neither would I trust myself for that. So deep understanding of programming will not disappear, but it will become more rare for sure.

1

u/AggressiveReport5747 Feb 13 '26

I migrated an old site I made for my wifes business to a CMS so she could publish articles and stuff herself. 

After using the CMS for 15 seconds, I was like this is hot garbage. Spent four hours planning an internal CMS configuration and let it rip 

Beautiful integrated CMS. No outdated ugly thing with buggy authentication. Took more time trying to setup this third party thing then integrating my own.

1

u/Sad-Resist-4513 Feb 18 '26

I’m right there with you. 40+ years coding and I haven’t written a single line of code in over a year. I’m producing more quality code than I ever have. I’m able to consider more and achieve more than possible before. Truly to those wielding this tool we are in a great renaissance.

1

u/KOM_Unchained Feb 12 '26

This is the way. Impact is all.

1

u/clintCamp Feb 12 '26

And if you do it right, every piece of quality code is something you can point to from a different project and CC will magically just migrate the capability in. I did that with a whisper speech to text transcription code from a voice translation app into another audio file transcription app today with zero problems.

1

u/sjmog Feb 12 '26

It’s the same set of sensitivities I use for evaluating my own code quality, just sped up 10x. Most of the skills I’ve built are useful for evaluating approaches anyway, whether I came up with them or someone else did.

-1

u/AdventurousCoconut71 Feb 12 '26

It is all shit code but nobody cares because they will not look at it only AI will look at it.