A Google engineer described how Anthropic’s Claude Code managed to recreate a complex internal developer tool in about an hour, something their own team had spent nearly a year building, highlighting how quickly AI coding systems are closing the gap with traditional software development. The tool, which helps automate and coordinate coding tasks, was reproduced by Claude Code with minimal guidance, raising concerns about how much human effort is still needed for similar projects. The engineer said the result was both impressive and unsettling, suggesting that AI systems are becoming capable of compressing long development cycles into extremely short timeframes. The experience underscores how fast AI-assisted programming is advancing and why companies may need to rethink engineering workflows, team structures, and the value of long, manual development efforts as these tools rapidly improve.
