2025 was a weird year for Nolan Lawson.
"If you had asked me exactly a year ago, I would have said I thought LLMs were amusing toys but inappropriate for real software development. I couldn't fathom why people would want a hyperactive five-year-old to grab their keyboard every few seconds and barf some gobbledygook into their IDE that could barely compile."
"Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code."
"The models don't have to get better, the costs don't have to come down, and we don't need another breakthrough. The breakthrough is already here."
"I can already hear the cries of protest from other engineers who (like me) are clutching onto their hard-won knowledge. 'What about security?' I've had agents find security vulnerabilities. 'What about performance?' I've had agents write benchmarks, run them, and iterate on solutions. 'What about accessibility?' Yeah they're dumb at that -- but if you say the magic word 'accessibility,' and give them a browser to check their work, then suddenly they're doing a better job than the median web dev (which isn't saying much, but hey, it's an improvement)."
"And honestly, even if all that doesn't work, then you could probably just add more agents with different models to fact-check the other models."
"If it's cheaper than a developer's salary, and if it's 'good enough,' then the last half-century of software development suggests it's bound to happen, regardless of which pearls you clutch."
AI tribalism#
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