Re:I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has ignited a passion again
by MrDarcy on Saturday March 07, 2026 @08:30AM
(#47287462)
This is correct. Had lunch with a senior staff engineer going for a promo to principal soon. He explained he was early to CC, became way more productive than his peers, and got the staff promo. Now he’s not sharing how he uses the agent so he maintains his lead over his peers.
This is so clearly a losing strategy. So clearly not even staff level performance let alone principal level.
Think about it: when you (an expert) solve a bug, you're not just generating correct code. You're making dozens of micro-decisions about scope, trade-offs, and edge cases that an LLM won't know.
The gap between "I solved this issue" and "I can explain why I solved it THIS way" is enormous. Most devs only keep the former (the code), and lose the latter (the reasoning).
In the AI era, experts need tools that capture how they think, not just what they write. That changes the game from "LLM vs human" to "LLM + augmented human judgment."
The principal engineers who will win are those who build compounding knowledge of their own decision-making patterns.