alt Hacker NewsA principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year.
Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs.
https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m
My experience has been similar to yours, and I think a lot of the hype is from people like this Google engineer who play into the hype and leave out the context. This sets expectations way out of line from reality and leads to frustration and disappointment.
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May I ask about your level of experience and which AI you tried to use? I have a strong suspicion these two factors are rarely mentioned, which leads to miscommunication. For example, in my experience, up until recently you could get amazing results, but only if you had let's say 5+ years of experience AND were willing to pay at least $100/month for Claude Code AND followed some fairly trivial usage policies (e.g., using the "ultrathink" keyword, planning mode etc) AND didn't feel lazy actually reading the output. Quite often people wouldn't meet one of those criteria and would call out the AI hype bubble.
Yeah that was bullshit (like most AI related crap... lies, damn lies, statistics, ai benchmarks). Like saying my 5 year old said words that would solve the Greenland issue in an hour. But words not put to test lol, just put on a screen and everyone say woah!!! AI can't ship. That stil needs humans.
Humans regularly design entire Uber, google, youtube, twitter, whatsapp etc in 45 mins in system design interviews. So AI designing some toy version is meh.
You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post).
While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).
> A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year.
I’ll bring the tar if you bring the feathers.
That sounds hyperbolic but how can someone say something so outrageoulsy false.