A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

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“?

IMO “junior developer who doesn't learn“ is not quite right. Claude is more like an senior, highly academic engineer who has read all the literature but hasn't ever written any code. Amazing encyclopaedic knowledge, zero taste.

I've been building commercial codebases with Claude for the last few months and almost all of my input is on taste and what defines success. The code itself is basically disposable.

If the code is disposable then where do all the rules and reasoning etc live apart from in your head?

In the spec.

Hmm... my code is the spec. It just happens to be executable. Is writing a precise spec in English easier than in a programming language?

The spec contains ambiguities and the code contains bugs. Clarifying ambiguities in the spec with stakeholders, allows one to reduce bugs in the code.