alt Hacker NewsOh I'd say its real. Years ago I worked as that senior who divvied up the work to a team of 4 mid-level engineers in that exact fashion (they were mostly Latin American contractors with limited english). We actually shipped some good stuff too!
Unfortunately, looking back, I could easily see Claude replacing 3 out of 4 of those developers. Myself + one other dev + AI would probably would've shipped a bit more a little faster. With that said tokens aren't free so the net cost savings would've been 2 dev salaries maximum.
I'm there now. I have a team of low level engineers in Hyderabad and Bengaluru which can be useful but I have to spend a lot of time writing very detailed specifications and instructions to walk them through what has to be done. There are plenty of instances I can point to where it would have been faster for me to implement the solution myself, by hand, no Claude. Now bring Claude into the mix and I do not really have any use for these engineers at all aside from providing operational support during IST.
We're not too much an AI-friendly company yet, so we don't officially have Claude access, but I can tell with certainty that several of my Indian teammates are using Claude anyway. I'm pretty familiar with the style of code it creates. And the comments are decidedly better English, which is a big giveaway itself.