These days, AI can do much more than "Cranking out boilerplate and scaffolding, Automating repetitive routines". That was last year. With the right instructions, Claude Sonnet 4 can easily write over 99% of most business applications. You need to be specific in your instructions, though. Like "implement this table, add these fields, look at this and this implementation for reference, don't forget to do this and consider that." Mention examples or name algorithms and design patterns it should use. And it still doesn't always do what you want on the first attempt, and you need to correct it (which is why I prefer Claude Code over Copilot, makes it easier). But AI can write pretty much all code for a developer who knows what the code should look like. And that's the point: junior developers typically don't know this, so they won't be able to get good results.
Most of the time, the only reason for typing code manually these days is that typing instructions for the LLM is sometimes more work than doing the change yourself.
> With the right instructions, Claude Sonnet 4 can easily write over 99% of most business applications. You need to be specific in your instructions, though.
By your own statement then this is not an "easy" task.
Software development has never been "hard" when you're given specific instructions.
Sometimes that happens:) The key is to recognize these situations and not go down that rabbit hole. But sometimes it allows me to do something in 20 minutes that used to take a whole day.
Right, and where, if I may ask, are all those business applications that write themselves? Because all I see is a clown party, massive wasted resources and disruption to society because of your lies.
I guess it turned out that coding is not the only limiting factor. Internal processes, QA, product management, coordination between teams become significant bottlenecks .
Also, they don’t help much with debugging. It’s worth a try, and I have been surprised a couple of times, but it’s mostly still manual.
BTW I never said they write themselves. My point was rather that you need a lot of knowledge, and know exactly what you want out of them, supervise them and provide detailed instruction. But then they can help you create a lot more working code in a shorter time.
At that point it seems to me that they become a distraction, a filter between you and the software you're building. Surely it must be easier to tell the computer directly what to do then to route the entire design through that mess?
I wouldn't call it a filter, unless you use it for trivial tasks ("check that the input argument is not null, throw an exception otherwise"). Sometimes it is useful for trivial tasks though, because it may do things a human dev would be to lazy to do. It also tends to be faster at finding things (as in "change the color of the submit button on the address form to #f00").
But the real value is implementing known patterns that are customized for your application. Adding a field or a new type to a CRUD application, implementing an algorithm, rendering some type of object in a UI...
Most of the time, the only reason for typing code manually these days is that typing instructions for the LLM is sometimes more work than doing the change yourself.