prokopton
Well played. You got me to visit your version of the thing you complained about. :clapping-emoji:
Claude’s response:
The article’s central tension is real - Burke went from skeptic to believer by building four increasingly complex apps in rapid succession using Opus 4.5. But his evidence also reveals the limits of that belief.
Notice what he actually built: Windows utilities, a screen recorder, and two Firebase-backed CRUD apps for his wife’s business. These are real applications solving real problems, but they’re also the kinds of projects where you can throw away the code if something goes wrong. When he says “I don’t know how the code works” and “I’m maybe 80% confident these applications are bulletproof,” he’s admitting the core problem with the “AI replaces developers” narrative.
That 80% confidence matters. In your Splink work, you’re the sole frontend developer - you can’t deploy code you’re 80% confident about. You need to understand the implications of your architectural decisions, know where the edge cases are, and maintain the system when requirements change. Burke’s building throwaway prototypes for his wife’s yard sign business. You’re building production software that other people depend on.
His “LLM-first code” philosophy is interesting but backwards. He’s optimizing for AI regeneration rather than human maintenance because he assumes the AI will always be there to fix problems. But AI can’t tell you why a decision was made six months ago when business requirements shift. It can’t explain the constraints that led to a particular architecture. And it definitely can’t navigate political and organizational context when stakeholders disagree about priorities.
The Firebase examples are telling - he keeps emphasizing how well Opus knows the Firebase CLI, as if that proves general capability. But Firebase is extremely well-documented, widely-discussed training data. Try that same experiment with your company’s internal API or a niche library with poor documentation. The model won’t be nearly as capable.
What Burke actually demonstrated is that Opus 4.5 is an excellent pair programmer for prototyping with well-known tools. That’s legitimately valuable. But “pair programmer for prototyping” isn’t the same as “replacing developers.” It’s augmenting someone who already knows how to build software and can evaluate whether the generated code is good.
The most revealing line is at the end: “Just make sure you know where your API keys are.” He’s nervous about security because he doesn’t understand the code. That nervousness is appropriate - it’s the signal that tells you when you’ve crossed from useful tool into dangerous territory.
Given how much trouble you can cause with an Internet connection, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened already.