Hugh Williams, a former VP of engineering at Google and eBay, recently spent two days deep-diving with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI-powered coding assistant. His verdict: "It's like being a carpenter who suddenly gets his hands on an incredibly cool tool." But it wasn't without its challenges.
Hugh Williams, a former VP of engineering at Google and eBay, recently spent two days deep-diving with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI-powered coding assistant. His verdict: "It's like being a carpenter who suddenly gets his hands on an incredibly cool tool." But it wasn't without its challenges.
In 48 hours, Williams built a fully functional system running on AWS. He says it would normally take at least three weeks. He didn't just write code, he also learned a new graph database (AWS Neptune) on the fly, producing a clean, modular, and scalable result, Business Insider writes .
However, Claude Code had its problems. Williams warned that every hour or so, the coding assistant would “compress” the context of the conversation, causing things to break. “I learned to end the ‘stage’ of work, update the README file, and then start the conversation from scratch to avoid losing context,” he said.
Williams also made the now-classic mistake of asking Claude to “clean up” the code directories, and watched as he destroyed important features, working code, and data in one fell swoop. “I learned the hard way to manually back up my code about every hour so I could revert to previous versions if something went wrong,” he explained.
Sometimes Claude Code would add random extra or duplicate features, so Williams had to check the entire code about every hour to make sure it was working as planned.
Still, Williams believes Claude Code is a real accelerator for those who already know how to code. But for younger developers or non-coders? Not yet.
He estimates that Claude Code can now take on 50% of the workload of an experienced engineer, and in the future this figure could reach 75%. Such productivity gains will have serious implications for the entire industry.
Conclusion: Claude Code is a powerful tool for experienced developers. Just don't forget to back up your work!
