I just logged in with an old email address. Hadn't signed in for so long, that it actually registered as a new account ("Your first chat with Claude", it's from today). Interestingly, however, it somehow recovered one single chat conversation that I had had with Claude 2,5 years ago.
No access to sites, apps or services... this was just 2,5 years ago. Crazy to think about how big the advancements have been since then.
My team and I haven't written a single line of code in so long that I honestly can't remember the last time we did.
We're shipping more than ever, with fewer bugs. Our productivity has absolutely skyrocketed.
Requirements, technical decisions, and trade-offs are increasingly exchanged through Markdown files written by Claude and read by Claude. Human involvement keeps getting smaller and smaller.
At this rate, I genuinely feel like we won't be needed in the near future.
And to be honest, that scares me.
I spent years, practically decades, investing in myself. Getting a good education, becoming a competent software engineer, learning new technologies, keeping up with the industry. I've dedicated a huge portion of my life to developing these skills.
Now, for the first time, I feel easily replaceable. Like the expertise I've spent so many years building is rapidly losing its value.
Don't get me wrong. I love what AI has made possible. I'm more productive than I've ever been. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm actively helping automate myself out of a career.
So my question to the community is: How are you hedging against this?
Are you learning completely different skills? Moving into another industry? Starting a business? Building alternative sources of income?
If software engineering stopped being a viable career for you in the next 3–5 years, what would you do? Where would you invest your time, money, and energy today to prepare for that possibility?
If you run Claude Code or Codex on anything bigger than a one-line fix, you know the loop. You hand it a task, it starts working, and then you hover. Is it still going? Has it stopped to ask you something? Did it finish ten minutes ago?
Now the lights in my house tell me what the agent is doing. I made an app for it, AC Bridge, and I've used it non-stop since. Mine are blue while it works, a red pulse when it needs permission, violet when a plan is ready to review and green when it's done. Those are my picks, not rules: every colour and effect is yours to choose.
I can actually leave the room now. Before I go and cook, I just tell the agent: "I'm going to make dinner, flash the kitchen light when you're done." It knows which devices I have, so when the job is finished the kitchen light flashes and I know it's ready for me.
If I'm watching a film with the family and the agent needs me, the light in the room gives a gentle pulse. Nobody else is disturbed. I reply from my phone with Claude Code's Remote Control (/rc) and go back to the film.
Rules in CLAUDE.md. For things I want every time, I put rules in the instruction file the agent already reads (CLAUDE.md for Claude Code, AGENTS.md for Codex):
## Lights
- When you finish a stage of the plan, flash the desk light green.
- If the tests fail, pulse the office light red.
- When the deploy is done, flash the kitchen light.
Now the lights tell me how far through a long job the agent is, not just whether it has stopped.
Why a light beats a ping. It stays red until you deal with the request, so when you walk back into the room you know straight away whether you missed something. It's silent, so it works at 1am exactly as well as it does at 1pm. And it doesn't pull you into your phone: it sits at the edge of your vision and tells you one thing.
How it works. Claude Code and Codex both run hooks at set points in a session: when the agent needs permission, when it's waiting for you, when it finishes, and more. AC Bridge sets those hooks up and a profile for each repo decides what each light does in each state. It works with 16 brands directly on your home network, including the inexpensive bulbs all over Amazon (Tapo, Kasa, WiZ, Govee) as well as Philips Hue, LIFX, WLED and Home Assistant. Even a cheap bedside lamp with a Wi-Fi colour bulb in it will do.
How I built it with Claude. AC Bridge is built with Claude Code. Each change starts as a ticket: Opus writes the plan, Sonnet builds it test-first, and a separate Claude review agent has to pass the pull request before it can merge. Because the app runs on Claude Code's own hooks, Claude Code has been both the tool I built it with and the thing it keeps an eye on.
What would you put on a light? I'd love to hear which states you'd want to see from across the room.
I was on the pro for so many months, and of course i would run out of usage in 5 mins.
When the models really ramped up in capability 4 months ago, i bought the Max plan which was honestly pretty good for me. I felt like it was enough until my brain expanded and my IQ grew 25 points by just asking Opus to Mythos to takeover my life. automate everything, rebuild everything, no limit on subagents.
Last night, on the Max plan, I wanted a whole Rust port of my entire python codebase. Using Rust libraries within pythton code didn’t matter to me anymore bc…. i don’t read the code anymore!
I was about to run out of my weekly 2 and a half days after my reset, and so instead of burning the resets from anthropic, i upgraded so my resets would mean more.
it felt so good to hand over my cash to anthropic.
EDIT: I am not suggesting disabling tests all together or even stopping TDD. I’m saying superpowers+ opus is a bad combo.
I’ve been using super powers for sometime now but more recently I’ve noticed my CI times take longer and upon inspection I found that it’s writing mountains of tests. My codebase went from 1400 tests - already kind of enormous but written over months, to nearly 4000 in about 2 weeks.
The worst part is that over 70% of those tests didn’t test… anything useful. Most of the tests tested specific implementations rather than behavior, or just didn’t fail at all when critical things broke. Further more, it made simple features take ages to deliver
I worked on adding gates, setting rules to write tests better but none of it helped.
It turns out that the TDD rules in superpowers were the cause. I’ve since deleted them and really simplified my setup and getting much better token economy. I’d encourage anyone else using superpowers to take a look at this. It’s now a nightmare to unpick which tests to keep and which to delete.
I'm trying to resolve the problem with Claude Code, where it keeps "blocking" work and presenting me with decision cards, and forcing constant context switching between threads that are never finished.
I know this is not the correct term, but it seems fitting - the "inversion of control", where instead of me controlling the coding agent, it starts to control me do work and digest its context (why is it asking for that decision?).
I believe it has to be in reverse - agents digest MY context and implement it with sufficient authority to prevent these unnecessary escalation.
I'm testing this now, the whole PM - reviewer - agent - rework cycle, but it's running for about 4 hours, and I'm looking at a black box that does something, but I don't really know what.
I see some "i'm so burned out" or "I'm so productive, but I'm burned out" - are you managing your coding agents, or is it inverted and the coding agents are managing you?
I run Claude Code and Codex all day, often as multi-agent workflows with dozens of subagents. I could see each session but never the whole picture, so I built an open-source tool, coding.sh, and pointed it at my own runs. What it found:
Cache breaks and idle subagents Across 57 workflow runs (666 subagents, ~$2,500 API-equivalent):
Broken prompt caches cost $106 extra, about 4% of the spend.
41 of those breaks were agents sitting idle at a barrier, waiting for siblings, until their cache expired. That's $21 for doing nothing.
40 subagents failed outright.
coding.sh workflows stats shows the critical path, how many agents ran at once and idle time at barriers. The viewer draws each run as a timeline, one bar per agent.
Does that plugin help? I A/B tested a popular "be concise" plugin: 10 tasks, 6 runs each, paired, with 95% intervals.
Replies: 17% shorter
Output tokens: −8%
Cost per run: +11% [+7%, +15%]
Pass rate and clarity: no change
The plugin adds its style guide to every request, and that costs more than the shorter output saves. Most of what a coding agent writes is tool calls and code, not prose. coding.sh compare and exp run your own tasks with and without a change (a rule, a skill, a plugin, a model).
Your own sessions Mining 3,600 of my sessions turned up a find-and-replace typo in my AGENTS.md that sent Codex looking for a folder that doesn't exist, in 92 sessions.
The tool It hooks into Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Copilot CLI, Aider and more, and stores prompts, tool calls, diffs, tests, tokens and cost in SQLite on your machine. There's an MCP server so your agent can look up its past sessions. Free, MIT, no account, nothing leaves your machine. npx coding.sh to try it. GitHub: https://github.com/jackulau/coding.sh
I've been using Opus 5.5 since the last month, enjoying it a lot, but the token usage..... I use the Pro plan cuz the Max costs 2/4 of our minimum wage (Brazil) hahahaha....
This is my dream, affordable models with high intelligence such as Gemini 4 Hydrogen
The idea is simple. You see a plane and think, where did it come from, where is it going, how fast, what make is it. I wanted to hold my phone up and just know.
I built Overhead took edge with Claude Code. The iPhone Duo support went in over about a week in September, which I would never have managed alone after work.
What it didn't do is decide what the app should be. Every time I let it choose the design, I got something that looked like every other app, and I had to push back hard.
Apple then added it to Great Apps on iPhone Duo. It's free if you want to see what came out of it.
For those shipping real apps with Claude Code, where do you still do the work by hand?
I have a feeling that the current generation of models, starting from the 5 series, has overindexed on coding and reasoning performance and regressed severely in other domains like prose or "intuition."
These models are now terrible at communication and I'm beginning to find that it is also regressing at designing architecture and features now when it comes to "intuition." At this point I think it truly is out of touch with humans (ironic as it's an Anthropic model) and does not grasp extremely basic common-sense ideas (for example, instead of implementing a feature that calls the backend server twice, it should have implemented it in a way that calls the server only once by refactoring the client code (that it itself made in the same session FYI)). It also does not proactively seek to implement the best solutions. I constantly have to tell it to look up specific papers for the algorithms. Left to its own device, it chooses the garbage you see in most GitHubs. You constantly have to tell it to pick high-quality algos/methods. It's like babysitting.
At this point I do not think Anthropic is capable of making models that can communicate clearly. They seem to be high on their own supply and have gone all-in on RSI, so expect models to degrade even further on communication quality, and very possibly "intuition."
Opus 4.5 and prior used to have great "intuition" IMO, even if they sucked at coding. Now in my work I really feel that I am talking to an alien. I have to dumb everything down for Fable/Opus because you cannot trust that it understands what a human would want or do. You even notice this lack of human intuition in Claude Code now. For example, look at /advisor.
Advisor set to Opus 5.5 The current conversation keeps Fable 5.2 as its advisor model until /clear or /compact, so the tool it has already declared stays unchanged; turning the advisor on or off applies right away.
Why is there an aside on "turning the advisor on or off applies right away" after a semicolon? It's maximally confusing because that sentence both says 'you cannot change [something] within a session' and 'you can change [something] within a session immediately.' This is horrible UX because that aside has NOTHING to do with /advisor [model]. The person invoking that command is changing a model. Why are you giving them information that confuses them, that turning on or off the advisor feature itself applies right away?
Also, the key information is buried in the MIDDLE of the sentence: "the tool it has already declared stays unchanged." And this information is also presented in a maximally confusing way. "Tool"? What Anthropic means is the model. AI semantically substitutes "model" for "tool" here for no reason.
---------------------------------
To make this not just a pure complaint, these are some things that I find to be extremely critical with the latest models:
You cannot let it write user-facing text. Trust me on this. It will confuse your users if you let it do so.
You cannot let it design features with minimal guidance. It has no intuition for what a user wants and expects out of a feature.
You STILL cannot trust it to design architecture (not that you could in previous models) by itself. It will create overcomplicated architecture that is simultaneously too complex where unnecessary and still miss out on critical details that are necessary to account for.
You cannot trust it to write its own harness. You also cannot trust its own diagnosis of why it performs poorly.
You cannot trust it to fix the root cause of bugs. The latest models, I've found, love to patch the symptoms. Its default lean is to patch around the problem by adding retries, timeouts, etc., rather than actually dealing with the root issue.
Now, I'm aware most of these things were things the models were already bad at in the first place, but I find that [1] and [2] in particular have regressed pretty severely lately, while there has been no improvement in [3], [4], or [5].
Caveman and ponytail teach Claude to write terser output. That's one axis. Chisle does that too, then adds the two axes they skip:
Tool-output compressor: a hook that shrinks tool results before they enter context (strip ANSI, keep head/tail + error lines, dedupe). Tool output is the majority of a session and gets re-billed every later turn. Runs behind a safety allowlist so it never touches Read/Edit/Write.
Context Diet: grep-then-read-the-slice instead of whole files, don't re-read files already in context. Prevention over cleanup.
It's a descendant of caveman and ponytail: both credited in the README, directly above the benchmarks where it bills less and backfires less often than either.
Claude just told me to 'Please stop closing windows I have open.' and then asked, 'How do you expect me to get things done if you are always in my way?'
I've embarrassingly been working on this project for 2 years so wanted to finally share (as I saw others posting Youtube-only versions).
on Youtube it transcribes text to identify checkable claims -> web search retrieves sources to base Claude's verdict on, to avoid hallucinated sources.
it's a free Chrome extension, and works on news or social media sites as well.
let me know what would make this something you'd use, or what else you'd like to see!
Edit 1: I realized someone not following could misread the video (here Biden was correct, and Trump was incorrect, but the Trump section is before I started the recording).
I am making my own chord detector app. I asked it to add a feature where I can paste any YouTube URL to detect, and it was coding all the details. Then, out of its own choice, to test if everything was actually working, it tested its work with "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. I laughed so hard when I saw it was testing "on the Rick Astley video," which I of course never specified. I only asked it to add YouTube URL support. 😆 It's justification when asked about it is hilarious too.
...and it still tells me when it is time to open the window.
It's a Qingping Air Monitor Lite (air quality monitor with a 160×128 OLED and a touch strip) that shows dog in a beret (Claude) instead of boring sensor numbers.
I'm the author. Nothing to sell, the repo is just files.
The 4,500 hours is my estimate (about 6 hours a day for a bit over 2 years), not telemetry. Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI and a few others, mostly Claude Code lately. The failures never change:
- the agent critiques its own plan and finds it great
- it over-engineers
- it claims tests pass without running them
- it touches files it shouldn't
My fix is process, not better prompting. Two parts:
Global rules. One CLAUDE.md in ~/.claude/ (or ~/.gemini/GEMINI.md for Gemini CLI), loaded in every project. Small fixes skip the ceremony, architectural changes go through a pipeline, and anything destructive or financial needs approval.
Three prompts I append to the task:
Plan. Inspect the repo, write a plan, stop and wait for approval.
Critique. Fresh context or subagent. Same session means self-confirmation bias.
Readiness. Audit git status, git diff and untracked files, then run the tests. Trust the diff, not the agent's summary.
Limits: the approval gates are just instructions. If you want real enforcement, use Claude Code's permission settings. And some rules are tuned to my backend work, so expect to cut things.
I wanted to get better at chess and couldn't find a place I liked. So I opened Claude Code, just to see how far we'd get. After an hour it already looked fun, so I gave it two more weeks. That got a little out of hand.
Four weeks and 139 commits later it's called Pupilmate: pupil as in student, and pupil as in the eye that watches you play.
The video isn't me playing, by the way. It's a script Claude wrote that opens the site, reads the board, solves the puzzles and gets one wrong on purpose.
My favorite thing on the site is Pupil Frenzy: five minutes of puzzles against the clock. Every tenth puzzle is a boss, a mistake costs you 15 seconds, and in the last 30 seconds everything counts for more while the music speeds up.
You can also play the computer while a trainer explains your moves, or import your own Lichess and Chess.com games and practice the positions where you went wrong.
How we built it: I describe what I want, Claude builds it and takes screenshots of its own work, at phone and desktop size, and I tell it what's off. Then we go again. Along the way it wrote about 70 small scripts that play the site in a headless browser and check what happens. The one in the video is just the prettiest.
What surprised me is where the time went.
The chess itself was the easy part. Analysing positions, deciding what counts as a blunder, getting Stockfish to run in the browser: Claude did all of that faster than I expected.
The opponent was harder. Stockfish turned down doesn't feel like playing a person. It plays perfectly and then suddenly gives away a piece. Letting Maia-2, a network trained on human games, pick the moves made it feel much more like someone sitting across from you.
The UI took the most rounds by far. Claude builds a screen in minutes, but making it obvious where to start, and making it feel natural, took a lot of looking and saying no. The Frenzy start screen alone went through 14 rounds.
It's free, there's no account, and your games stay in your browser.
Hey folks! I’ve been playing with agentic coding and wondering if it’s actually worth adding Python-specific skills to my setup.
For those of you using them: which ones are genuinely useful? Any examples where a Python-specific skill noticeably improved the result vs just letting the agent figure things out on its own?
Since I started building with Claude Code, the speed is wild, but so is the number of changes. One session can touch the sign-up, the billing page, the settings and a migration, and the agent says "done, tests pass".
The problem: the tests it wrote check what it just changed, not the rest of the app. Twice now a change that looked fine broke something unrelated: once the sign-up for new users, once a page only admins see. I found out from users, not from tests.
Clicking through everything after each change doesn't scale anymore. Writing Playwright for every flow and every kind of user (visitor, member, admin, paying customer) doesn't either, because the UI changes every day and the tests break with it.
So, for people coding with Claude / Cursor / Codex:
Do you let the agent write and maintain e2e tests? Does it hold up, or do you end up fixing tests more than code ?
Do you test as each kind of user, or mostly as yourself, signed in as admin ?
What's the last thing your agent broke that you didn't catch, and how did you find out ?
I'm trying to figure out what a sane workflow looks like at this pace. Thanks in advance :)
Update: to be clear, I have CI and unit/integration/e2e tests, all green on every PR. Both bugs shipped with green CI because no test covered that flow as that user type. My question is how you get coverage per role without hand-writing and maintaining it all.
