This is one of those things I like about Claude.

I’m hitting my 40th year as a professional software developer and architect. I’ve written thousands of blocks of code from scratch. It gets boring.

But then in the 2000’s me (and everyone else) started building code generators, often from ERD structures, but also UML designs.

These tools were massively useful and (initially) reduced costs. The future balls of mud problems took over ten years to arrive.

But code generation has always been considered a smart and cost-effective approach to building software.

GenAI has “issues” and those have been exposed. One of my recent revelations is that Claude is best at TypeScript and python. C# (my home turf) is much lower in its skills capacity.

So in the last two months I’ve been building my apps in TypeScript instead of C# and have dramatically increased my productivity.

Claude will definitely fail if it doesn’t have the correct information. A good example is writing Bluesky apps. The docs are a mess and contradictory. But there are up to date docs on GitHub and if you include those in your project with instructions to only use those references, Claude’s hallucinations can be eliminated.

I don’t think AGI is a real possibility in my lifetime, and I do fear the future of software development when no one has actual coding experience, but for us boomers, it’s pretty darn useful.

How are you measuring your productivity?

In many cases I have no frame of reference for the expected code, like React and css. Typescript is perfectly readable, but I’m not really a script kiddie, so I’d go very slow on the React tsx files. The services are probably a slightly faster set of work, especially if I always have unit tests.

If someone was an expert React+TypeScript programmer with decent css knowledge the productivity may be a marginal improvement.

But I haven’t been a full-time programmer in ten years.