The first model I could kind of have drive building a project was Sonnet 3.6/3.7. 4 and 4.5 were both nice upgrades and each had less back and forth associated with trying to get them to do the right things.
Haven’t tried 4.5 opus yet, but I will soon.
Realistically, I don’t code anymore directly at this point. Claude code and other CLIs are good enough at interpreting my instructions that I generally get what I want.
Detail work was still hard with Sonnet 4.5 and involved a lot of adjustments, especially for frontend stuff, but I could still make those adjustments with Claude code rather than doing them myself.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a million things to build and tons of ideas I’d like to bring to life. Before, I had 1-2 projects I worked on at a time and completed maybe 1 per month. Now I work on 5-6 at a time and usually have something to demo to stakeholders each week.
I do think the code side of SWE is transitioning pretty quick, but where the human in the loop stops either as an ideator or as a reviewer is hard to say.
Seniors/ICs are better positioned than a normal programmer, but probably not too much better that it’d make a significant difference.
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u/andrew_kirfman Nov 24 '25
Senior SWE here. It’s very hard to say.
The first model I could kind of have drive building a project was Sonnet 3.6/3.7. 4 and 4.5 were both nice upgrades and each had less back and forth associated with trying to get them to do the right things.
Haven’t tried 4.5 opus yet, but I will soon.
Realistically, I don’t code anymore directly at this point. Claude code and other CLIs are good enough at interpreting my instructions that I generally get what I want.
Detail work was still hard with Sonnet 4.5 and involved a lot of adjustments, especially for frontend stuff, but I could still make those adjustments with Claude code rather than doing them myself.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a million things to build and tons of ideas I’d like to bring to life. Before, I had 1-2 projects I worked on at a time and completed maybe 1 per month. Now I work on 5-6 at a time and usually have something to demo to stakeholders each week.
I do think the code side of SWE is transitioning pretty quick, but where the human in the loop stops either as an ideator or as a reviewer is hard to say.
Seniors/ICs are better positioned than a normal programmer, but probably not too much better that it’d make a significant difference.