Writing code by hand is over, forever
An engineer says Claude Opus 4.5 in Claude Code ended his 18-year habit of writing code by hand.
Elio Capella writes that after 18 years of daily hand-coding, Claude Opus 4.5 inside Claude Code made prompting faster than typing. At Filestage, monthly merged pull requests rose from about 200 to 300 without more bug reports, using a roughly $20-per-developer AI subscription and tools including Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor. He argues models are now good enough that merging without an AI code review is irresponsible, while CI guardrails such as linting, type checks, full coverage, and end-to-end tests catch agent mistakes. He rejects defaulting agents to assembly, preferring high-level code passed to a deterministic compiler, and speculates about diagram-based interfaces replacing text files.
- Filestage merged PRs rose from about 200 to 300 monthly without more bugs.
- Developers pick Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor for roughly $20 a month.
- He now considers merging without an AI code review irresponsible.
- Higher throughput hit Cloudflare tunnel limits and overloaded the shared dev database.
- He prefers high-level code plus deterministic compilers over agent-written assembly.
- Organizations
- Filestage
- AI models
- Claude Opus 4.5
From the original article
4 min read at eliocapella.com
I wrote code by hand every day for 18 years. Then, almost from one day to the Last year, AI gradually worked its way into my routine. Paste some code into a web chat for a second opinion.
By aray07 · eliocapella.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.