Developers are worried about AI. The creator of Claude Code has a response.
On Thursday, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny posted an email a developer wrote to him on X. The email was titled: “What to do about slop?” Cherny wrote that he receives emails like this every day and that he tries to respond to as many as possible.
It’s no surprise that developers are reaching out to Cherny with their worries. AI has radically changed coding, shifting job descriptions and turning engineers into reviewers. Some engineers love the ease; others call it lonely and tedious.
In the email, the unnamed developer wrote that the shift to AI coding was causing “friction.” He broke it down into two views and asked Cherny to broker the dispute.
The first view was a more restrained use of AI tools:
The second view was more permissive. This was the vibe coding position:
The developer wrote that many people were incapable of doing option 1 — the more restrained approach — but worried about getting laid off. “A lot of people are just forcing it,” they wrote.
Cherny posted his response in full. As for the two options the developer provided, Cherny said there was room for both.
On the “don’t worry” approach:
And, on cautious reviewing:
The developer’s job is to “hold the bar on code quality,” Cherny wrote. AI leaders use different terms for this role, such as “mini CEO.” It’s the developer’s job to act like a manager, stopping bad code in its tracks.
If all else fails, Cherny said the developer could be more hands-on with Claude or ask it to rewrite the codebase.
“Or, wait for the next model,” he wrote.
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