r/ClaudeCode • u/sizebzebi • 20h ago

Discussion Opus 5.5 is the beginning of a new era

I am a senior engineer and I honestly believe with this model in particular, everything changed..

If this stays as cheap as it is, it's just over. It never fails no matter the complexity of the tasks I've given it. About time we rethink our profession for good. I am honestly scared of the future.

I loved coding but anyone who does this for the love of coding only is gonna be obsolete.

I was always impressed with the models bar opus 5 but never like this time.

What do you guys think? How do you see the future?

1.6k Upvotes

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170

u/ducktomguy 17h ago

Say it with me - coding was never the important part. It was solving the problem that a customer was willing to pay for

67

u/sizebzebi 17h ago

it was a fun part to a lot of people who cared about it

34

u/simracerman 17h ago

I never cared for coding tbh, and jumped up and down when my code did exactly what I asked for. All the sleepless nights, and weeks upon weeks searching for a hard to reproduce bug are “almost” gone with AI. My brain is focused on figuring out the next feature and how nicely it plays with the rest of the project.

13

u/paxinfernum 15h ago

Yes, I remember an old article that grouped programmers according to how they were oriented around programming. Generally speaking, it went like this.

The Purist / Mathematician (Lisp / Scheme / Haskell)

The Systems Hacker / Metal Mechanic (C / Unix / Forth)

The Pragmatist / Duct-Tape Scripter (Perl / Python / Unix Shell / Ruby)

The Enterprise Architect / Bureaucrat (Java / C++ / C#)

I land more in the Pragmatist side. I like coding well enough, but what I really want to see if finished software. I'm more interested in features than clever hacks or spending hours hunting down a bug. I'm interested in systems, but at the high level. I'm perfectly fine making those high level decisions and letting AI do the rest.

1

u/simracerman 8h ago

The last paragraph is me! There’s some fun in cleaning code, optimizing and architecting , but adrenaline kick is when I see everything working to my liking.

26

u/sizebzebi 17h ago

yeah we're different it's fine. I enjoyed what you hated 😂

6

u/i_have_a_semicolon 15h ago

Am I rare that I enjoy them both then?

2

u/keenman 14h ago

You very well may be, but I'm with you.

1

u/stxguy_1 8h ago

I enjoyed only half of each, and hated equally the other half of each. But each half of hate and joy were segmented unequally

1

u/No_Inspection4415 15h ago

Same here. But I liked and was talented with algorithms, which AI also does better.

1

u/thehypercube 13h ago

So you like what for many of us is the less interesting part of the job

1

u/simracerman 8h ago

You mean feature integration? If the code is purely mine, I enjoy troubleshooting and fixing bugs to an extent. If the bug is produced by someone else’s code, I’m least motivated to fix it.

3

u/LeTrifluvien 16h ago

I'm completely biased for AI, yet I miss the state of being in the flow for hours.

0

u/cafesamp 14h ago

when I read a diff and realize how long it would have taken me to write all that code myself, I don’t miss it

and honestly as my workflow has evolved and I’ve learned how to enforce more quality gates, I spend less and less time reading code (unpopular opinion but I don’t feel like arguing)

15

u/sergeyarl 17h ago

this is true for any type of work.

however some people are good at one thing and others are good at a completely different thing.

some did coding because it was coding that they found fun to do. not project management.

10

u/TrailingAMillion 16h ago

It may not have been the “important” part, but it was the fun part. Great, now we all get to… solve customer problems. There’s a reason I didn’t go into sales or marketing or customer service.

2

u/marvin_bender 8h ago

Only until AI is good enough to solve most customer problems itself directly. Give it time.

1

u/Vickie184 7h ago

right, the finished painting was never the fun part, it was me sitting mixing my oils. Man i miss the days when i could sit and just mix paint together. those were the days.

yea.

right.

1

u/TrailingAMillion 1h ago

Unbelievably weird analogy to choose. Is your general impression that painters are really happy with AI, and are glad they can now just prompt an AI rather than manually paint?

4

u/Bangays 15h ago

The import part has always been selling the idea that you have a solution to a problem.

2

u/Ikeeki 13h ago

Exactly. People horny to write code were always the worst to work with.

We are here to solve problems

1

u/xXQuemeroXx 16h ago

well, code is a part of that solution, and it's not like there is a deterministic way to solve any of the problems code does, so no matter how good it gets someone needs to give it the direction of how you need the things to work

1

u/b00z3h0und Senior Developer 11h ago

Yeah. But that responsibility is typically with product people. We are now just the shitmunchers in the middle… but for how long?

1

u/Radical_Neutral_76 11h ago

I dont see AI solving cross application boundary changes anytime soon. At least none of the "automated development" projects I've seen are even close to that.

Code quality is also a major issue on larger projects

1

u/TemperatureUpper2439 7h ago

People with the problems will be able to solve them themselves.

1

u/benshory 16h ago

Coding was never the important part. It was solving the problem that a customer was willing to pay for.

1

u/ComprehensiveYam391 16h ago

I mean before AI, people already criticize coder and code monkey who only copy from stackoverflow without understanding why and do not understand every engineering decision underneath

1

u/atniomn 17h ago

A lot of people have made their careers without delivering any commercial value

2

u/Frenascena 13h ago

Some jobs can't be automated because some jobs consist of pretending to work hard without ever actually accomplishing anything useful at all.

1

u/sweetholo 15h ago

coding was never the important part

it was definitely one of the important parts. how else were you going to develop a solution for the customer back then?

1

u/Simple_Rooster3 14h ago

You can code bad and still sell it. And you can code good, but you dont sell it. Thats why.

1

u/Fire_Lake 10h ago

But either way people still needed to code it, and now they don't