More than anything, it depends on the developer using it. In my experience, most are just slop shovelers that don’t read or review what Claude does. Then it falls on the PR reviewer (me) to be an asshole: Did you review your own code? Do you understand what this part over here does? Why did you choose this method versus alternatives?

Unless you tell Claude/Opus otherwise, it’s not going to take the initiative to refactor things, tidy up parts it didn’t touch, or hell, it won’t even spellcheck things. Can you really call it a language model if it outputs misspelled words? Its unit tests are great boilerplate but never comprehensive enough for me.

Claude is the developer that puts zero pride or effort in their work beyond the bare minimum to not get fired.

Prompting for refactoring, requirements, specifications, unit tests, integration tests, distribution / install scripts, all of those “good ideas” are things you need to nudge even Claude to do. Once you get it in the habit of doing them it does them automatically more often but still requires the occasional nudge.

Yes I agree, and honestly code review is now the key skill.

My company recently started exploring “AI interviewing”, to test candidates on “AI proficiency”, and the questions are all around prompt engineering (is that even a thing anymore?) and stuff. Like no, make sure they can read the fucking code!

The lemmysphere will never agree

I used to be of that mind as well. But the newer models are just too good to deny it any longer.

Same. There’s an overwhelmingly negative opinion here.

I’m not terribly concerned if people write code and test it with AI, so long as they verify the results themselves.

I recently saw someone try to add a PR to something on github with thousands of lines of changes and then they got mad when people didn’t want to do the free labour verifying it. That is a bullshit use of AI

AI or far-east coders, we encourage them to keep their PRs as small as possible.

Opus in my experience sucks for writing code.

What are you trying to have it do? I work in a very large and complex codebase, and it honestly scares me sometimes.

Refactoring and consolidating a big preexisting codebase. I try to introduce new concepts on a semantic level and it tries to give me interfaces and abstractions that would obstruct my work in the long run.