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548 points kmelve | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.405s | source
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ale ◴[] No.45109875[source]
It’s about time these types of articles actually include the types of tasks being “orchestrated” (as the author writes) that aren’t just plain refactoring chores or React boilerplate. Sanity has quite a backlog of long-requested features and the message here is that these agents are supposedly parallelizing a lot of the work. What kind of staff engineer has “80% of their code” written by a “junior developer who doesn't learn“?
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1. vincent_builds ◴[] No.45116018[source]
Hi Ale, author here. Skepticism is understandable, but trust me, I'm not just writing React boilerplate or refactoring.

I find it difficult to include examples because a lot of my work is boring backend work on existing closed-source applications. It's hard to share, but I'll give it a go with a few examples :)

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First example: Our quota detection system (shipped last month) handles configurable threshold detection across billing metrics. The business logic is non-trivial, distinguishing counter vs gauge metrics, handling multiple consumers, and efficient SQL queries across time windows.

Claude's evolution: - First pass: Completely wrong approach (DB triggers) - Second pass: Right direction, wrong abstraction - Third pass: Working implementation, we could iterate on

---- Second example: Sentry monitoring wrapper for cron jobs, a reusable component to help us observe our cronjob usage

Claude's evolution: - First pass: Hard-coded the integration into each cron job, a maintainability nightmare. - Second pass: Using a wrapper, but the config is all wrong - Third pass: Again, OK implementation, we can iterate on it

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The "80%" isn't about line count; it's about Claude handling the exploration space while I focus on architectural decisions. I still own every line that ships, but I'm reviewing and directing rather than typing.

This isn't writing boilerplate, it's core billing infrastructure. The difference is that Claude is treated like a very fast junior who needs clear boundaries rather than expecting senior-level architecture decisions.