May 2026

Sunday, 10 May 2026

claude code is not making your product better

Ethan Ding: “if using claude code gives you a genuine product velocity advantage, and anthropic had it exclusively for 7 months, the gap between claude code and every competitor should be unbridgeable. codex would be irrelevant. instead, people are still actively debating which one is better. the compound advantage isn’t showing up. something else is bottlenecking product quality, and it was never the code”

Programming Is Real Engineering, And AI Proves It

Jeremy Bowers: “Those of us who live in the programming world can end up with a very skewed view of the capabilities of AI right now, because in our world, they are incredibly useful in ways that are much more difficult to extend into other domains. … But now what I consider the basic minimum acceptable engineering for any project that goes into source control is substantially more than was even available to me in 1997. … The AIs bang along all our bumpers; failing compiles, failing tests, failing integrations, error messages, all the bumpers we’ve built into our engineering process, and in the end they get a good result. But that good result is as much a result of all the solid engineering processes we have installed as anything else, because the AI without those protections rolls into the gutter relatively quickly.”