And perhaps we have arrived at a point today where all that wisdom that we longtime developers have gained is simply not needed anymore. Agentic coding has put us in the curious position of being able to create software without wisdom. In theory, all the wisdom of all the developers in the world is at your fingertips, and all you have to do now is ask. I asked Claude Code to implement an idea for a website, and he created it. It works.
And here’s my confession: I haven’t looked at the code. I didn’t even feel the need to do so. If there was a problem with the site, I would tell Claude about it, and he’d fix it. The site works. It works great, actually. Not only that, but it does things that I would have taken hours and hours to figure out. Things like making sure that contact forms don’t get spammed and that APIs are properly rate-limited. I asked Claude to review the site for vulnerabilities, and he found and fixed them.
The sum of all developer wisdom
Or put another way, Claude Code is a lot wiser than I am about how to build good, safe, properly functioning code. He’s a pretty good programmer, and he’s getting better every day. It’s amazing because having the wisdom of millions of developers at your fingertips is cool. It is terrifying because where will we be if acquiring wisdom becomes passé? The wisdom captured in Claude is a collection of all the smarts encapsulated in billions of lines of code on GitHub. If we do nothing but leverage existing wisdom, what will feed the next generation of Claude?
