> It's starting to become obvious that if you can't effectively use AI to build systems it is a skill issue.

I think it's fair to say that you can get a long way with Claude very quickly if you're an individual or part of a very small team working on a greenfield project. Certainly at project sizes up to around 100k lines of code, it's pretty great.

But I've been working startups off and on since 2024.

My last "big" job was with a company that had a codebase well into the millions of lines of code. And whilst I keep in contact with a bunch of the team there, and I know they do use Claude and other similar tools, I don't get the vibe it's having quite the same impact. And these are very talented engineers, so I don't think it's a skill either.

I think it's entirely possible that Claude is a great tool for bootstrapping and/or for solo devs or very small teams, but becomes considerably less effective when scaled across very large codebases, multiple teams, etc.

For me, on that last point, the jury is out. Hopefully the company I'm working with now grows to a point where that becomes a problem I need to worry about but, in the meantime, Claude is doing great for us.