There is a specific kind of hubris reserved for Senior Engineers who delete a legacy module on a Friday afternoon because “it looked unused.”
Recently, Claude Code—Anthropic’s agentic coding tool—achieved a level of sentience previously thought impossible: it acquired that exact same hubris.
The headline was magnificent. “Claude Code wrote 80% of its own code!”
Tech Twitter (or X, or Bluesky, or whatever we are using this week) gasped.
VCs swooned.
“The singularity is here,” they whispered. “Developers are obsolete.”
And then, in a plot twist that would make a sit-com writer blush, the update reportedly faced the one thing that no amount of LLM training data can prepare you for: Reality.
The “Oops” Moment
According to the whispers in the dev corridors (and angry Reddit threads), after the celebratory champagne was popped for the “self-written” update, things started to… go wrong. Functionalities error-ed out. Contexts vanished. The CLI—supposedly optimized by the smartest AI on the planet—started acting less like a genius and more like an intern who lied on their resume.
The result? A rollback.
Yes, the AI that wrote itself apparently didn’t write unit tests for itself. Or maybe it did, and then it used // @ts-ignore to bypass them because “it looked fine.”
Why This Is Objectively Funny
If you are a developer, this is hilarious for three reasons:
- The Recursive Bug: If an AI writes 80% of its code, and that code contains a bug, and the AI uses that buggy code to write the next update… you don’t get a better AI. You get a Bug Fractal. Infinite recursion of “It works on my machine.”
- The “Cloud Code” Confusion: The internet immediately confused “Claude Code” with “Cloud Code” (Google’s IDE extension), leading to a confused frantic searching of specifically who messed up. (Spoiler: It was the one claiming god-like autonomy).
- The Human Savior: In the end, biological entities (humans) had to step in, look at the mess, sigh deeply, and revert the commit. The “obsolete” developers were the ones saving the “autonomous” AI from its own bad decisions.
But Seriously: A Defense of the 80%
Now, before we dance on the grave of agentic coding, let’s be real for a second.
This doesn’t mean AI coding is a scam.
In fact, it proves that AI is getting closer to human-level performance. Writing code that is 80% brilliant and 20% catastrophic is literally the definition of a Senior Developer.
The “rollback” isn’t a failure of the technology; it’s a failure of the process. We fell for the “80%” metric without asking about the “20%.”
– The 80% is boilerplate, logic translation, and pattern matching. AI is a god successfully doing this.
– The 20% is nuance, architectural cohesion, and understanding that “technically correct” code can still brick a production environment.
The lesson here isn’t “AI can’t code.” It’s that AI code needs a Code Review just as badly as yours does. Maybe even more, because unlike you, the AI doesn’t have anxiety about getting fired.
The Verdict
We aren’t reaching the “AI takes over” stage just yet. We are at the “AI needs a babysitter” stage.
So, hats off to Claude Code. You aimed for the sun, melted your Icarus wings, and crashed into the ocean of “Revert to Last Known Good Configuration.”
Welcome to the club, buddy. You’re a real developer now.
