what a brilliant blog. the Lotus 1-2-3 screen brings so many memories of my childhood.
My father was a power user of Lotus back in the late 80's. He extensively used it as his job at GE. When we moved back to Pakistan, he setup a girls school and tracked everything from students to accounting to results in Lotus. In many ways, Lotus showed him the power of computers and made him buy a home computer when hardly anyone I knew had it.
Late in his life the world moved onto Excel and reluctantly he had to do it too but his love for Lotus never went away.
I've faced the same but my conclusion is the opposite.
In the past 6 months, all my code has been written by claude code and gemini cli. I have written code backend, frontend, infrastructure and iOS. Considering my career trajectory all of this was impossible a couple of years ago.
But the technical debt has been enormous. And I'll be honest, my understanding of these technologies hasn't been 'expert' level. I'm 100% sure any experienced dev could go through my code and may think it's a load of crap requiring serious re-architecture.
It works (that's great!) but the 'software engineering' side of things is still subpar.
We switched to solar in 2021 expecting a 3.5-year payback. Electricity prices rose so fast that we recovered the investment in under two years.
Also the national grid is notorious for it's frequent blackouts (load-shedding) since the early ’90s. Solar allowed us to have uninterrupted supply in the mornings and longer backups during night.
All these coding agent workflows really drive home how important a solid test suite is but who’s actually writing the tests? In my case Claude Code keeps missing key scenarios and I’ve had to point out every gap myself.
Also reviewing LLM generated code is way more mentally draining and that’s with just one agent. I can’t imagine trying to review code from multiple agents working in parallel.
Finally I’ve shipped a bunch of features to prod with Claude writing all the code. Productivity definitely went up, but my understanding of the codebase dropped fast. Three months in I’m actually struggling to write good prompts or give accurate estimates because my grasp of the code hasn’t really grown (code reviews only help so much).
Curious if anyone else has run into the same thing?
would love to look into it if any part of it is open source