alt Hacker NewsI work at a very prominent AI company. We have access to every tool under the sun. There are various levels of success for all levels — managers, PMs, engineers.
We have cursor with essentially unlimited Opus 4.6 and it’s fundamentally changed my workflow as a senior engineer. I find I spend much more time designing and testing my software and development time is almost entirely prompting and reviewing AI changes.
I’m afraid my coding skills are atrophying, in fact I know the are, but I’m not sure if the coding was the part of my job I truly enjoyed. I enjoy thinking higher-level: architecture, connecting components, focusing on the user experience. But I think using these AI tools is a form of golden handcuffs. If I go work at a startup without the money I pay for these models, I think for the first time in my career I would be less likely to be able to successfully code a feature than I could last year.
So professionally there are pros and cons. My design and architecture skills have greatly improved as I am spending more time doing this.
Personally it’s so much fun. I’ve made several side projects I would have never done otherwise. Working with Claude code on greenfield projects is a blast.
I think people get a bit paranoid about coding skills atrophying. I had a period where I stopped programming for multiple years and it really only took a month to get back into the swing of things when I returned, and most of that was just re-jogging my memory on the syntax and standard library classes (C++ at the time).