> everyone seems to have a radically different experience

What people have is radically different expectations.

I noticed engineers will review Claude's output and go "holy crap that's junior-level code". Coders will just commit because looking at the code is a waste of time. Move fast, break things, disrupt, drown yourself into tech debt: the investors won't care anyways.

And no, telling the agent to "be less shit" doesn't work. I have to painstakingly point every single shit architectural decision so Claude can even see and fix it. "Git gud" didn't work for people and doesn't work for LLMs.

It's not that the code isn't DRY, it's just DRY at the wrong points of abstraction, which is even worse than not being DRY. I manage to find better patterns in each and every single task I tell Claude or Copilot to autonomously work on, dropping tons of code in the process (DRY or not). You can't prompt Claude out of making these wrong decisions (at best from very basic mistakes) since they are too granular to even extract a rule.

This is what separates a senior from a junior.

If you think Claude writes good code either you're very lucky, I'm very bad at prompting, or your standards are too low.

Don't get me wrong. I love Claude Code, but it's just a tool in my belt, not an autonomous engineer. Seeing all these "Claude wrote 97% of my code" makes me shudder at the amount of crap I will have to maintain 5 years down the line.