It's the automators dream come true. Anything can be automated, anything scripted, anything documented. Even if we're gonna use other (possibly local) models in the future, this will be my interface of choice. It's so powerful.
Here's the hope that the demand for software continues to increase as developer productivity rises, and that increases in developer productivity are partially captured in higher salaries.
Automation is now trivially easy. I think of another new way to speed up my workflow — e.g. a shell script for some annoying repetitive task — and Claude oneshots it. Productivity gains built from productivity gains.
I don’t feel Claude code helps one iota with the issue in 1319. If anything, it has increased the prevalence of “ongoing development” as I auto mate more things and create more problems to solve.
However, I have fixed up and added features to 10 year old scripts that I never considered worth the trade off to work on. It makes the cost of automation cheaper.
It's not a dream come true to have a bunch of GPUs crunching at full power to achieve your minor automation, with the company making them available losing massive amounts of money on it:
I'd like to say I'm praising the paradigm shift more than anything else (and this is to some degree achievable with smaller, open and sometimes local agentic models), but yes, there are definitely nasty externalities (though burning VC cash is not high up that list for me). I hope some externalities can be be optimized away.
The point is that it costs more than $1200, you're just not the one paying all the costs. It seems like there are a ton of people on HN who are absolutely pumped to be totally dependent on a tool that must rugpull them eventually to continue existing as a business. It feels like an incredible shame that the craft is now starting to become totally dependent on tools like this, where you're calling out to the cloud to do even the most basic programming task.
