Artificial Intelligence is steadily improving, with developments like Google’s Opal coding tool and a Chinese-made robot with human-like dexterity. AI is also being used to write computer code in a kind of “Frankenstein’s monster makes his own baby” scenario, and some programmers are more encouraged by this than others. On January 3, AI engineer Rohan Paul posted an ominous message about the technology to his X account. After referencing Anthropic CEO Dario Imodei’s  March 2025 prediction that within a year, AI would be writing all the world’s code, Paul passed on secondhand knowledge from “a Principal Engineer at Google [that] Claude Code matched 1 year of team output in 1 hour.”

Claude Code is Anthropic’s command-line AI assistant that helps programmers with tasks like project mapping and testing. In his post, Paul noted that “AI has already replaced a lot of the grind that used to be the regular part Software engineers: repeated debugging cycles, pattern-matching across systems, and learning the shape of messy real-world code.”

The exact method of incorporating AI into work remains an active debate in the programming community, including in the comments on Rohan Paul’s post. San Francisco-based programmer Jaana Dogan chimed in, outing herself as the Google engineer cited by Paul. “We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year,” she commented. “There are various options, not everyone is aligned … I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.” She continued with some advice for programmers curious about how AI could help them work. “It’s not perfect and I’m iterating on it but this is where we are right now,” she added. “If you are skeptical of coding agents, try it on a domain you are already an expert of. Build something complex from scratch where you can be the judge of the artifacts.”

There’s an interesting twist to the story; Dogan works on the API (Application Programming Interface) for Gemini, Google’s rapidly advancing AI technology. She stressed that Claude Code hadn’t come up with any new or creative solutions but simply managed to replicate her team’s work in a tiny fraction of the time it took them as a group.