Senior engineer changes his tune after hands-on testing of Claude Code
Understand this story
A senior engineer who left Google due to dissatisfaction with its AI-related priorities admitted after hands-on testing of Claude Code starting in September 2025 that his earlier judgment was wrong, saying AI programming is "astonishingly good." He said Claude could accurately use the proprietary terminology and DSL of his Ruby command-line framework Toys to complete code reviews, and migrated a 1990s PHP static website to Jekyll within an hour, with only one content hallucination, which it corrected on its own during review.
AI overview based on source reports · Updated 1 hr ago
Coverage timeline
Follow the coverage to explore different perspectives.
- Hacker News AIConfessions of an AI Skeptic
A former Google engineer recounts how, after leaving the company in 2025, he tested Claude Code on tasks ranging from code review and a PHP-to-Jekyll migration to a from-scratch Ruby client for the Hermes agent gateway API, and found it succeeded at novel work at the level of a good mid-level engineer or better. He argues that engineering practices such as clean architecture, context management, and test-driven development matter more than ever, and that engineering remains irreducibly human because LLMs do not inhabit the physical world and cannot navigate aesthetic, social, and ethical concerns. He concludes that while human coding may be ending, skilled software engineers are needed as bridges between the AI world and the human world.
Activity for this story
Not enough continuous observations to show a trend yet.