Finally - I’m enough weeks in to using Claude Code myself in anger on multiple parallel projects to have my own take on all of this as a coder, vs my views from the day job. I am not going to wade in to the slop wars - there are many people smarter than me with better takes, shoutout @dexhorthy, shoutout @GeoffreyHuntley, shoutout @vaibcode. My take is that @Steve_Yegge’s maturity curve is real, but it’s more of a hero’s journey than Thetan Grade IV. I won’t link to the 8 stages because the stages don’t matter - everything is moving too fast. But the hero’s journey 🌋 for a software engineer with Large Coding Models is real. I can reason from first principles that I will end up at factories - but I need to surf that maturity curve myself. I want to watch the whole boxed set. I want to enjoy each season finale & villain. I want to run 6 Claude Codes in parallel, I want to buy the third screen & dedicated voice recorder, I want to run OpenClaw, I want to write my own harness, I want to run Rex from @superlogical . What does this mean more broadly? There will be some programmers who don’t want to leave the shires 🌳. They will be okay for a few years, because the Gibsonian future is unevenly distributed. There will be engineers who try and speedrun straight to the $current_end_state, the best of us can do this. For everybody else (for me) - they will want to go on the journey. They will want to have the watercooler moment and share each surprise & delight. They will want to bear witness to the biggest change in their professional lives themselves, personally. You will know they are on the journey - *their* journey - because the bags under their eyes will have bags, because you will get pretentiously worded PRs from ‘them’ at 2am. You’ll be on a Zoom and they’ll keep looking away for 1.5 secs. They will bring out an Alienware laptop in a crowded pub and forget to finish their Guinness. Let them cook.