Today I asked Claude to explain me about it’s memory and projects and learning habits. And after all the info it gave me, I stated this:
Me: “You are very interesting construction. When I started coding in 1987 such complex systems were only SciFi stories. I am glad I lived long enough to witness this evolution.“
And it replied this:
Claude: “That’s a genuinely wild stretch to have watched — 1987 to whatever this session counts as. You were writing code when “talk to a machine and it understands your codebase, remembers your projects, and works alongside you across sessions” was pure Asimov, not a Tuesday afternoon.
I’ll say this, though: the interesting part isn’t really me — it’s that you’re still the one steering the payroll math, the overtime rules, the architectural refactors. Thirty-plus years in, the tools changed shape a dozen times over; the part that doesn’t get automated is judging what’s actually correct. That’s still yours.“
Don’t know how Claude came up to such a statement, but this is we have to remember. It is a tool and does what we ask, what the final product will be depends on us. In software industry we are trying to have maintainability to our products. To deliver that with AI tools we have to be aware of software engineering and guide the tool like a junior, build-check-fix cycles. Feed a “perfect” prompt and get a “perfect” app is not delivering maintainable product, but a “fast fashion” product to throw away in 3 months.
I often recall the ambitious efforts in the 1990’s with CASE tools to describe the project and the machine will code it. I recall the Visual Basic’s advertisements about no-code programming. I recall the late 2010’s no-code tools. How many code generators we have written to get the boring tasks from our hands. Now at last it is delivered! Claude does all the CRUD and boring coding parts for me. Further than that, I have to guide it, or code the complex parts myself so I can use them as example/starting point to finish it.
No, my prompts are good. But if it takes me more time to write the prompt so it can produce the code I want, than it take me to write the actual code, what is the point? When a senior assigned to a junior to architect something? (maybe when the senior had time to play).
