It doesn't replace MBA-brained bad roadmapping. Good engineering is determined more by the processes you have in place for catching something that breaks bad. The system produces good code - singular 'good' developers are great but if they're not socializing what makes them good then it's just competency. Great engineers teach and mentor and advocate for capacity dedicated to testing and health-checks.

Given the speed at which Anthropic regularly pushes updates (eg their ridiculous app versioning that's in the thousands for v4 now) I doubt they're doing anything that looks like quality processes, even AI-integrated ones other than basic code review skills.

I imagine it's as much of a mess internally as it is with any other company whose execs are concerned more with bottom-line valuation rather than maintainability, extensibility, and sustainability. Just lots of spaghetti-at-the-wall hoping that something sticks long enough to drive up the IPO.

I find Claude to be exceptionally well-designed software that almost never has notable issues.

On the flip side, software I used that was majority built by 'real human engineers' coding by hand is utter garbage.

As a recent example, Facebook Ad Manager is extremely slow, plagued with UX issues, blatant state management problems (double scrollbars, iframes, random rerendering).

Other examples of 'real engineers' building software include SAP, Oracle ERPs, most banking software, most government websites. They're trash.

Human engineering is the reason your personal information gets leaked every other week. Human engineering is the reason there's a critical vulnerability in core software every day at this point.

The average software engineer cannot build good and secure software. Just like the average car driver is a safety disaster on the roads.