I’m a software engineer of about 8 years, climbed my way from entry level to an architect position in about 4 years and taken over and turned around a number of teams at this point. I have loved using AI so far for my personal projects as I now have 2 kids and almost no free time. What AI has allowed me to do is plan out tons of features and tasks like I would with a junior dev on my team, just talking, poking holes, asking questions in designs/implementations to end up with a plan I have it execute. I think this so far has been very helpful, I have paid $0 to do this and my experience has been really good. Any time I have “let AI take the reigns” though I have always been disappointed with the results. I deeply enjoy building software and think I have a number of side projects, with this new found boost in productivity I have now, I’m running out of stuff to build. I guess my question is who are these people with Max subscriptions hitting limits and building entire games/projects with a single prompt? It seems like most things posted are vaporware or just so unbelievable with very little depth that I just have a hard time understanding what is even real anymore. Are people actually so busy making new stuff, that is wildly better, that they actually are finding valid, useful things to spend all this money on? Are people that insanely creative that they actually have new ideas that work or is everyone just making copies and clones of a 1000 different things with all their tokens? It doesn’t help that most of the AI news shames you for not doing the “hot new thing”, and then 2 weeks later the same companies/influencers have discovered issues with the previous thing and are now on to the next “hot new thing”. It just shows that even the companies pushing these tools don’t know how to properly use them. TLDR: For software engineers and people who actually know how software works, is the best way to use these tools still “pair programming” style of conversation, giving a baseline of what your repo is, your coding style, your expectations in skills that YOU made? Or is having a ton of agents and sub agents going off and dissecting a prompt made actually beneficial to make maintainable, good code that actually even does what you wanted? The main tools I have used is just OpenCode Zen because it is free and can do everything I want with the mobile app. submitted by /u/No_Equipment_6875
Originally posted by u/No_Equipment_6875 on r/ClaudeCode