Something shifted over the holidays.
Engineers who’ve spent years honing their craft are posting about Claude Code with a mixture of awe and dread. Non-coders are building their first apps. And even skeptics are admitting: this feels different.
The ChatGPT Moment
On WSJ What’s News, tech reporter Brad Olson explained why the buzz around Claude Code—powered by Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 model—is being compared to ChatGPT’s debut:
An “awakening of capability.” That’s not hyperbole from a startup founder—it’s the Wall Street Journal’s characterization.
The Existential Dread
But alongside the excitement, there’s something darker. Olson spoke with developers who are genuinely shaken:
“I’ve been doing this since middle school. Ivy League education. Expertise built over an entire life. To see a software program fully automate that was deeply shocking.”
This isn’t a junior developer worrying about their first job. It’s experienced engineers watching decades of specialized knowledge get compressed into prompts.
“It Generated What We Built Last Year—In An Hour”
On The AI Daily Brief, host Nathaniel Whittemore compiled reactions from across the tech world. The most striking came from a Google principal engineer:
“I gave Claude Code a description of the problem. It generated what we built last year in an hour. It’s not perfect, and I’m iterating on it, but this is where we are now.”
When Google engineers are blown away by an external tool, something fundamental has changed.
The Psychology of Delegation
Jason Fried of 37signals captured why the reaction feels so visceral:
“Until now, very few people have known what it feels like to delegate to total competency.”
For most people, delegation means follow-up, checking work, fixing mistakes. Claude Code offers something different: hand off a task and actually forget about it. That’s “pure joy”—and it’s suddenly available to anyone.
Will Companies Hire Less?
The obvious question: what does this mean for jobs? The WSJ asked directly:
Do companies lay off developers, or try to make them 10x more productive? “We don’t know. Every individual company is making its own decisions.”
The honest answer is that nobody knows yet. But the question is now unavoidable.
The Input Quality Problem
On The Startup Ideas Podcast, developer Ross Mike offered a more practical perspective—one that suggests human expertise isn’t obsolete yet:
“If you’re producing slop, it’s because you’ve given it slop.”
The models are now good enough that the bottleneck is human input—how precisely you can articulate what you want. That’s a different skill than traditional coding, but it’s still a skill.
It’s Not Just For Code
One of the most interesting developments: people are discovering Claude Code isn’t really about code at all.
“It’s an AI agent that can act like a combination of personal assistant and colleague that has access to your machine. Need your files organized? Need a sounding board for a presentation? Just write it out in plain text and make it happen.”
The name “Claude Code” may actually be limiting adoption. As one investor put it: “It should be called Claude Computer.”
What Comes Next
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is expected to go public this year. The tool’s viral success suggests strong momentum—but also raises questions about the sustainability of a business model built on making human work obsolete.
The printing press didn’t make monks faster at copying manuscripts. It made copying obsolete. We may be watching something similar unfold in real time.
Explore more podcast discussions about AI coding tools on Audioscrape.
