OK, I am gonna be the guy and put my skin in the game here. I kind of get the hype, but the experience with e.g. Claude Code (or Github Copilot previously and others as weel) has so far been pretty unreliable.

I have Django project with 50 kLOC and it is pretty capable of understanding the architecture, style of coding, naming of variables, functions etc. Sometimes it excels on tasks like "replicate this non-trivial functionality for this other model and update the UI appropriately" and leaves me stunned. Sometimes it solves for me tedious and labourous "replace this markdown editor with something modern, allowing fullscreen edits of content" and does annoying mistake that only visual control shows and is not capable to fix it after 5 prompts. I feel as I am becoming tester more than a developer and I do not like the shift. Especially when I do not like to tell someone he did an obvious mistake and should fix it - it seems I do not care if it is human or AI, I just do not like incompetence I guess.

Yesterday I had to add some parameters to very simple Falcon project and found out it has not been updated for several months and won't build due to some pip issues with pymssql. OK, this is really marginal sub-project so I said - let's migrate it to uv and let's not get hands dirty and let the Claude do it. He did splendidly but in the Dockerfile he missed the "COPY server.py /data/" while I asked him to change the path... Build failed, I updated the path myself and moved on.

And then you listen to very smart guys like Karpathy who rave about Tab, Tab, Tab, while not understanding the language or anything about the code they write. Am I getting this wrong?

I am really far far away from letting agents touch my infrastructure via SSH, access managed databases with full access privileges etc. and dread the day one of my silly customers asks me to give their agent permission to managed services. One might say the liability should then be shifted, but at the end of the day, humans will have to deal with the damage done.

My customer who uses all the codebase I am mentioning here asked me, if there is a way to provide "some AI" with item GTINs and let it generate photos, descriptions, etc. including metadata they handcrafted and extracted for years from various sources. While it looks like nice idea and for them the possibility of decreasing the staff count, I caught the feeling they do not care about the data quality anymore or do not understand the problems the are brining upon them due to errors nobody will catch until it is too late.

TL;DR: I am using Opus 4.5, it helps a lot, I have to keep being (very) cautious. Wake up call 2026? Rather like waking up from hallucination.