John Morris 🐀

Liam, I have been a professional programmer for 36 years. I spent 11 years at Google, where I ended up as a Staff Software Engineer, and now work at Anthropic. I've worked with some incredible people - you might have heard of Jaegeuk Kim or Ted Ts'o - and some ridiculously productive programmers - Eric Biggers, Jeff Sharkey and @jackinwarsaw come to mind as people who seemed to solve problems with code at a truly unearthly rate. At work, I am currently hitting levels of productivity that would put all of them to shame. Not just a rate of making code, but a rate of actually solving problems, that would have been unthinkable two years ago. And it's possible because Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is doing all the heavy lifting; I'm not doing much more than setting direction and reviewing the output. I often have three different sessions going at once, attacking three different aspects of the work I'm doing. Over the holidays I took a break from work Clauding, to do some home Clauding, writing in a few days from scratch a complicated webapp using disparate technologies I had no background in, that would have taken weeks prior to Claude. When I hit problems I just told Claude to debug them and that almost always worked. It also looks great, which is pleasing since not only have I zero CSS skill, I have zero design skill. I'm not out of a job quite yet; there are still some areas where I have better taste than it does, or better instincts. But when you talk about "AI's inability to code", this seems to me to reveal a total disconnect from reality. And this is why I'm urging you to ACTUALLY TRY IT, find out for yourself, and join the rest of us on this Earth.

@MeachamDr