The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;)
While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the model enough context, full stack trace, every time.
> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output
Which stands to reason you'll need less of them. I'm really hoping this somehow leads to an explosion of new companies being built and hiring workers , otherwise - not good for us.
This is what I'm doing, Opus 4.5 for personal projects and to learn the flow and what's needed. Only thing I'll disagree with is how the work takes similar amount of time because I'm finding it unbelievably faster. It's crazy how with smart planning and documentation that we can do with the agents, getting markdown files etc, they can write the code better and faster than I can as a senior dev. No question.
I've found Opus 4.5 as a big upgrade compared to any of the other models. Big step up and the minor issues that were annoying and I needed to watch out for with Sonnet and GPT5.1.
It's to the point where I'm on the side of, if the models are offline or I run out of tokens for the 5 hour window or the week (with what I'm paying now), there's kind of no use of doing work. I can use other models to do planning or some review, but then wait until I'm back with Opus 4.5 to do the code.
It still absolutely requires review from me and planning before writing the code, and this is why there can be some slop that goes by, but it's the same as if you have a junior and they put in weak PRs. Difference is much quicker planning which the models help with, better implementation with basic conventions compared to juniors, and much easier to tell a model to make changes compared to a human.
> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output
which means either devs will take over architectural roles (which already exist and are filled) or architects will take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are already positions within the industry in addition to being hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal interest.
Can you post a repo so we can see what it's generating?
> Well now you get to read it.
Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR.
I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.