What's Left When AI Writes the Code

The software engineer job is changing drastically and more quickly than people realize. But I think people have the wrong idea of what the job is in the first place: it's solving problems with software, not writing code. Code is just a means to an end, and now it's not even the time-consuming part.

Recent models like Anthropic's Opus 4.5 can ship code as well as (or better than) a mid-level engineer. More importantly, it can write code that would take weeks in minutes. That allows us to learn faster, iterate faster, and ship faster.

In the last couple of months, I've written about 5-10% of code. In the last week, I didn't even open an editor and just worked through Claude Desktop Code. While that's anecdotal, I recently looked at some data of commits to main comparing pre-Claude and post-Claude. We had an 80% increase in contributions to main -- almost twice the output with the same team.

So what's left for us to do? At least for now, the higher leverage stuff: vision, architecture, and taste.

Vision is clarifying what you're building and why. Knowing what makes your product unique; the subtle things that differentiate you from competitors who technically do the same thing. Claude can read your docs, your ADRs, your past conversations. But it doesn't have the empathy you've built through every user conversation, every competitor you've studied, every feature you decided not to build.

Architecture is designing sound technical systems and thinking about consequences. Claude will solve your problem, but it might overcomplicate something that should be simple, or pick an approach that doesn't meet your business where it is. It's not that Claude makes bad choices; they're usually defensible. But defensible isn't always appropriate for the context you're building in.

Taste is the squishiest one: having conviction in whether it feels right. Depending on context, it might be about UX, developer experience, the cognitive model of your product's nouns, or some flow that just feels off. Models can produce technically-correct solutions all day. They don't have feel. Vision tells you that you need good UX. Taste tells you this UX isn't good enough.

I haven't seen the current generation of models be really good at these 3 things, even with historical ADRs, access to all the code, and clear goals/non-goals of problems to solve. I suspect we'll see models get much, much better at these areas too. Where we focus our time as engineers once they are capable in these areas, I'm not yet sure.

At least for me, there's still a lot of guidance and hand-holding I need to do. Fortunately, most of it at the planning level. Once the plan and architecture is aligned with my worldview, I let Claude auto-edit and I don't look at the code at all while it's developing. I act as QA in the areas it can't figure out automated testing.

With tools like Coder and now Claude Desktop's Code feature (with git worktrees -- thank you), I'm able to drive several sizable projects in parallel. I'm unfortunately pinged constantly by the dozen or so Claude tabs that need permission to run some bash command that wasn't allowed. I'm getting more and more bullish on pure yolo mode given how much autonomy Claude has while developing.

Once it's done, I tell it to put up a PR and that's where I focus my time. I focus primarily on the architectural decisions it made during the process of development, which I have it write as ADRs. I double-check the data models and API contracts to align with our general direction. I'll do a cursory pass on the implementation and leave review comments; which I then tell Claude to iterate on. Depending on what's being changed, I'll look a bit more closely at certain areas, but I'm mostly caring about the overall shape than the code itself.

If you're an engineer wondering what to focus on: develop your vision, your architectural instincts, your taste. The code part is getting easier. The judgment part isn't (yet). Where we go from here, I'm not entirely sure. In the meantime, I'm shipping faster than I ever have.