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Software authorship

Lex Friedman: Claude writes code; I author the apps

My initial prompt when I started on The Universe, Controlled was about 1,000 words — more than half the length of this article to this point. And it was explicitly only for a very limited subset of the game’s functionality. I’ve since prompted Claude with tens of thousands of words of additional prompts on the project.

Lex puts it very well in this post. It remains simultaneously amazing how incredible today's agentic tools are for creating software, all while their ability to do this without significant human involvement is close to zero.

I should also bring up that exactly one year ago today, we were in a whole other era of agentic coding. It was getting better, but it hadn't crossed the line to being good in the ways we think about it being good (if not great) today. With that in mind, I do have to wonder how much of of our experience will change by this time next year.

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