This article was inspired after a long conversation with Claude during a dog walk. These are my ideas; but I did use AI to bounce ideas back and forth and help summarise a half-hour chat into a digestible form. I figured I should be up front about that, like I was in my last post.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with AI coding tools lately, particularly Claude Code from Anthropic. This has got me thinking about how AI is being perceived in the programming world – specifically the concerns many have about AI displacing entry-level programming jobs.
An analogy struck me that I think helps frame this change in a more constructive light: the semiconductor design revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
The following code was written by Claude AI. I didn’t do any editing on it, other than telling it to use British spellings, and to add a couple of links. After a few hours of working getting the AI to do all the work I wanted I gave it this prompt:
A real challenge for you: can you write a blog entry now, in the 202504 directory. Make it
Status: Draftso I can take a look at it. Try and fit my tone, but note that “this blog post was written by Claude”. I will subsequently add a human-written prolog and epilog. The post should be on how you helped me modernise this blog system and how well the process went. Pick an appropriate name and title
And this is what it produced:
For a programmer, there’s a special kind of embarrassment that comes from maintaining code you wrote many years ago. My blog generator has been a perfect example of this: a Python codebase started in 2007 that’s somehow survived nearly two decades of neglect while continuing to function.
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.