When cameras were first introduced, French painter Paul Delaroche reportedly opined “From today, painting is dead.” That was nearly two hundred years ago, and painting is doing just fine. But the nature of painting changed. Photography took over the work of faithful reproduction, and painting became something else: more expressive, more conceptual, more human. I think something similar is happening with code. LLMs change Software Engineering But Do Not Replace It I’ve been using coding agents like Claude Code to do most of my development these days, with overall great success. This is a stark contrast to even a year ago, when LLM output was still prone to hallucinations around formatting and typos that broke the code it generated. But I can’t remember the last time Claude Code output didn’t at least run. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about coding with LLMs is I have greater control over how I want the code to work and be designed.…