> AI is a key part of software engineering now.

It most certainly is not, lol. That's the hype that the parent was referring to. Most people have found AI to be a detriment, not a benefit, to their work.

You’d have to be deeply ensconced in a particular kind of bubble to hold this belief.

Speaking of bubbles...

Then how do you explain the massive growth of Claude Code?

Millions in marketing efforts? Anyways, it may be a key part in generating code, but that was always a lesser part of software engineering. If it's generating code it doesn't mean it is doing any engineering for you or becoming a "key part" of it in any way.

> AI is a key part of software engineering now

No, it isn’t. There are irresponsible voices in the community who claim that it is, but they always find convenient ways to omit the downsides (on both the tech and effects on society as a whole).

Claude Code from the terminal is servicable enough. Yet I cannot open the same project from different versions of Xcode without some manual finnagling. Xcode is at no existential risk for it is the only tool you are allowed to use to reach your audience on the app store. Don’t be ridiculous. The reason Xcode is as broken as it is today is because of the same exact reason. The developer experience need not be great, as long as you can coax the trash fire of a toolchain to upload a signed app to AppStoreConnect, there is 0 incentive for Apple to put any time into the tool.

For a certain-size project it really is not.

Single files in our codebase already blow the Copilot query token limit.

Great, Anthropic taught Claude to grep. On our project, it's still useless because it can't use the semantic search in the IDE.

> On our project, it's still useless because it can't use the semantic search in the IDE.

Zed's ACP seems to be a good solution to this - when using it, claude code has access to the IDE's diagnostics and tools, just like the human operator. https://zed.dev/acp

> Single files in our codebase already blow the Copilot query token limit.

This tells more about your code quality that about copilot, and I'm not a fan of copilot

I disagree.

Sure, it's a dumpster fire. But human engineers work on it just fine without investing man-decades into refactoring it into some shrine to the software engineer's craft.

The whole point of AI, in our parent company's eyes, is for no one to mention "code quality" as something impeding the delivery of features, yesterday, ever.

It's a 25-year-old CAD application written in very non-standard C++. I doubt it.

Certainly I have tried to accomplish tasks giving Claude guidance far outstripping "a modicum".