alt Hacker News> Anyone claiming "Writing code is no longer needed for the most part" is not a serious software engineer.
You need to recalibrate. Six months ago I would have agreed with you, but Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 represent a very real change.
I would phrase this as "typing the code out by hand is no longer needed for the most part", which I think is what antirez was getting at here.
And I'm sure if you go back to the release of 3.5, you'll see the exact same comments.
And when 5 comes out, I'm sure I'll see you commenting "OK I agree 6 months ago but now with Claude 5 Opus it's great".
It's really the weirdest type of goalpost moving.
I have used Opus 4.5 a lot lately and it's garbage, absolutely useless for anything beyond generating trivial shit for which I'd anyway use a library or have it already integrated in the framework I use.
I think the real reason your opinion has changed in 6 months is because your skills have atrophyed.
It's all as bad as 6 months ago, and even as bad as 2 years ago, you've just become worse.