Orta Therox’s retrospective on six weeks with Claude Code is one of the most compelling accounts I’ve read of how AI coding assistants are transforming development workflows. His experience mirrors my own observations about the technology’s impact on programming productivity.1
The most striking aspect is his description of how maintenance tasks that would traditionally require weeks of dedicated effort can now be accomplished as “side projects” while working on other things:
Converting hundreds of React Native components to just React Replaced 3 non-trivial RedwoodJS systems with home-grown or mature, supported replacements Built complex REPLs for multiple internal and external projects Switched almost every db model to have a consistent ‘flags’ system for booleans Converted from Jest to Vitest Created our front-end testing strategies for React
This list represents what would typically be years of technical debt backlog, completed in just over a month and a half. The key insight is that these tasks “do not need to be treated as debt” when you have the right tools—they become manageable background work.
Orta’s comparison to the “introduction of photography” period is particularly apt. Just as photography didn’t eliminate painting but changed its role and accessibility, AI coding assistants are fundamentally altering what it means to be a programmer. The ability to “instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word” represents a new paradigm of expression.
His “Write First, Decide Later” approach is especially valuable—using Claude Code to explore ideas before fully committing to them, then deleting the experimental code if it doesn’t work out. This lowers the barrier to experimentation dramatically.
The post also touches on the collaborative aspects, with his “Two Clones lifestyle” approach and how it’s changing game design workflows at Puzzmo. The ability to rapidly prototype and iterate is transforming their development process from weeks of planning to hours of implementation.
I need to figure out Therox’s trick for getting Claude conversations into Adium-themed expandables … might have to reach out!
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I use Cursor to help me author pieces in this blog, Crafty’s Illustrated. Cursor generally does the grunt work of creating content directories and markdown stubs. I almost never let the LLM write the actual content. This post is an exception—the LLM wrote and I did post-edits—and I think whatever model Cursor selected did a nice job on this. ↩︎