I actually do think that someone who already has multiple decades of experience in programming without using AI is probably not producing shoddier code after incorporating it into their workflow. Important modern software projects, whose backbones are programmers fitting that description, aren’t going to be worse in the present because of Claude usage. I remain strongly against it though, because normalizing its usage guarantees the future won’t have programmers that fit that description running the shows.

I think this can be framed as a statement about generative AI in general: If you think AI has been making everything shittier today, just wait until you see what it’s been doing to everything tomorrow.