The Impact of AI Coding on Programmers
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After using Claude Code for less than a month and spending $70 total ($20 for Pro + $50 for additional credits), the Cursor I had been using for a few months has become obsolete. Using AI well can easily help you reach the level of a senior engineer. As an engineer, I feel both amazed and concerned.
The amazement comes from how powerful AI coding has become. It has basically solved difficult technical problems in non-frontend fields that I hadn’t been able to solve well in recent years, even after continuous communication and debugging. It’s like a friend who buys equipment in a game by spending money. I can’t help but give money to Anthropic because it surprised me so much. It’s more like making a great friend who is technically proficient and kind. In the future, the so-called “solo operation” will really feel like having a very capable team in the hands of students who know how to use tools, think critically, and understand user needs.
The concern is that traditional manual coding, which I used to be confident in, has become less valuable in front of current AI. A clear trend is that pure coding ability is no longer the moat for programmers. Current AI can easily replace programmers who are purely translating requirements. This is the concerning part. In addition, the Internet industry is basically in a phase of cost reduction and efficiency improvement, which will accelerate this change.
I remember sharing two years ago, when the environment was challenging, that The Breakthrough for the Next Generation of Engineers should be to become a product engineer—someone who knows where users have needs, and can independently create good product solutions while making the product easy to use, and who is skilled at operation and promotion, attracting more people to use it. At that time, AI coding capabilities were still very limited. Today, it should be a product engineer who is skilled at using AI.
For the next generation of strong engineers, coding ability only accounts for 30% of the advantage. 20% is in quickly discovering and understanding the essence of business needs and knowing why. 20% is in architectural design—like an architect telling AI what you need and ensuring the frontend and backend architecture supports better implementation. 10% is in communicating more clearly with AI to make its execution align more closely with your intentions. And another 20% is in final product quality control and operation and promotion. Good wine is also afraid of deep alleys. No matter how powerful the AI ability is, it is also limited by users who don’t know how to leverage it.
I feel that AI coding brings more than just a doubling of work efficiency for engineers. In fact, this isn’t even the key point. The more critical aspect is being able to handle more complex product thinking and technical decisions faster, and to speed up the validation of business iteration ideas. It feels like changing from a code farmer to a digital product architect. Of course, aesthetics will be more important in current software design engineering. Perhaps if we want to identify the key ability that good engineers in the current era need to have, it is product design and aesthetics. This is also why it is very convenient for smart designers to transition into engineering roles.
However, I don’t like the kind of promotion that tells novices they can do anything with AI without understanding the principles and technologies. For computer fundamentals, software architecture design, and interaction design capabilities, these are the foundations of engineers. These are essential with or without AI. This is something that cannot be lost. What needs to be cultivated more is the ability to make products.
Perhaps the qualitative change had not yet arrived before. Claude Code made me feel that the qualitative change of AI coding has arrived. Purely wrapping a skin and calling other people’s models to make an editor is actually not a long-term solution. It has slowly become a competition of model-as-a-product capabilities. In addition, I feel that for individuals, there is another way to enjoy the benefits of AI more, which is to invest in AI.