I work at a unicorn in EU. Claude Code has been rolled out to all of engineering with strict cost control policies, even with these in place we burn through tens of thousands of euro per months that I think could translate in 15/20 hires easily. Are we more productive than adding people to the headcount? That's a good question that I cannot answer.

Some senior people that were in the AI pilot, have been using this for a while, and are very into it claimed that it can open PRs autonomously with minimum input or supervision (with a ton of MD files and skills in repos with clear architecture standards). I couldn't replicate this yet.

I'm objectively happy to have access to this tool, it feels like a cheat code sometimes. I can research things in the codebase so fast, or update tests and glue code so quickly that my life is objectively better. If the change is small or a simple bugfix it can truly do it autonomously quicker than me. It does make me lazier though, sometimes it's just easier to fire up claude than to focus and do it by myself.

I'm careful to not overuse it mostly to not reach the montlhy cap, so that I can "keep it" if something urgent or complex comes my way. Also I still like to do things by hand just because I still want to learn and maintain my skills. I feel that I'm not learning anything by using claude, that's a real thing.

In the end I feel it's a powerful tool that is here to stay and I would be upset if I wouldn't have access to it anymore, it's very good. I recently subscribed to it and use it on my free time just because it's a very fun technology to play with. But it's a tool. I'm paid because I take responsability that my work will be delivered on time, working, tested, with code on par with the org quality standards. If I do it by hand or with claude is irrelevant. If i can do it faster it will likely mean I will receive more work to do. Somebody still has to operate Claude and it's not going to be non-technical people for sure.

I genuinely think that if anyone still believes today that this technology is only hype or a slop machine, they are in denial or haven't tried to use a recent frontier model with the correct setup (mostly giving the agent a way to autonomously validate it's changes).