alt Hacker NewsIf Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs.
I say this as someone who does use the tools, they're fine. I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. If the bar is code that technically works along the happy path then fine, but that's the floor of what I'm willing to put forth or accept in a PR.
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> If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway.
I don't know about that. This PR stunt is a greenfield project that no one really knows what volume of work went behind it, and targeted a problem (bootstrapping a C compiler) that is actually quite small and relatively trivial to accomplish.
Go ahead and google for small C compilers. They are a dime a dozen, and some don't venture beyond a couple thousand lines of code.
Check out this past discussion.
> If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs.
There is absolutely reason for concern, but it's not inevitable.
For the foreseeable future, I don't think we can simply Ralph Wiggum-loop real business problems. A lot of human oversight and tuning is required.
Also, I haven't seen anything to suggest that AI is good at strategic business decisionmaking.
I do think it dramatically changes the job of a software developer, though. We will be more like developers of software assembly lines and strategists.
Every company I have ever worked for has had a deep backlog of tasks and ideas we realistically were never going to get to. These tools put a lot of those tasks in play.
> I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result.
It frequently gets close for me, but usually some follow-up is needed. The ones that are closest to pure one-shot are bug fixes where replication can be captured in a regression test.