I've heard a theory that cheap labor is also why Japan is so nice. Not that Japan is a low income country, but rather that for complex structural reasons Japanese workers are underutilized, so everyone in low productivity jobs is overqualified, and it makes everything nice.

Or in short, Japan has isolated itself from The Sort.

Claude Code doesn't work that well if you're not an experienced programmer. I mean, it works okay, but it has no taste, so it just produces syntactically correct stuff that is only randomly useful by default. It takes active steering to get good code out of it.

Also, I'm rarely trying to solve algorithmic problems, I'm trying to build production software, which is mostly about managing abstractions and plumbing different systems together to produce something useful to customers. All the hard algorithm work happens somewhere else by someone else because, while it's essential, it adds very little marginal value for our customers. If algorithms to do something don't exist, the solution is often to just wait for someone to figure it out, then build a feature on top of them. When I do get to work on algorithms, it's usually solving complex concurrent execution problems, which Claude is okay at helping with but not great on its own. Luckily, I mostly design smartly to rely on systems that manage these details for me so I don't need to work them out all the time.

Thanks! I've yet to see much value in this approach. I find the time to run the agent to generate the code is pretty short, and what it produces in these unmonitored runs takes more work for me to clean up than just iterating with Claude directly. But, I do expect that the tech will keep improving and that eventually this will be the superior workflow!

Oh sure over time expectations will change and the free lunch will end. Right now I get the benefit of Product just being happy that Engineering finally does something that looks like hitting timelines at all. I'm sure the situation is already different at some other companies. I also have a lot of latitude to work on tech debt because of my high degree of seniority. In some sense my job is to pay down tech debt and otherwise improve the engineering organization to make the company machine better; the feature shipping is incidental.

I don't use an IDE. My setup is tmux with claude running in one pane, nvim in another, a bash shell in a third, and another bash shell in a fourth where I run our local development environment (it prints logs to console I sometimes need to see).

This is roughly my expectation as well.

I'm not keeping a quantified record, if that's what you mean, but yes I have a strong sense of how much debt there is in the code base and how it's been trending.

I'm consistently confused why contra dance people are so concerned about events being "fragrance free", however the policy is implemented. This is something I encounter no where in my life, I go out and do plenty of things, and only hear about it from people who attend contra events. Is this just a random local norm that reached fixation? How do these chemical sensitive people go shopping or otherwise live their lives in places that aren't fragrance free? I'm not trying to be rude here, but I'm confused why there's such a strong norm at such a niche event that I never see even attempted anywhere else.

My 5x number is because I can do roughly as much work as I used to do in a week in a day, if I hold the quality bar steady. In reality, I wouldn't normally end up being able to do that, and would trade off quality for speed to impact and just live with tech debt to be paid down later. With Claude, I essentially never accumulate tech debt (other than the kind of debt that creeps up because I don't notice it) and actively pay it down with each PR.

In terms of deliverables, though, it's as I say more like a 1.5x improvement. The real productivity gains are coming from putting more effort into quality than I'd otherwise get permission to.

(Of course, I could just be wrong because I don't have great ways to measure counterfactual code quality.)

Hard for me to evaluate this. It's a lot of speculation that might be right, but doesn't really supply a model by which I can evaluate it.

Sure, dropping it seems fine. I'm a bit hesitant to address your points too directly because I anticipate the conversation would require something like explaining our entire worldviews and me trying to convince you of mine, so I've been doing something more like just explaining my worldview as I see it as relevant to the points here in the hopes that it gets you to see what I'm pointing at, but if that's not working no reason to continue since I'm not excited right now about making time to explain the whole thing.