Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I’m just sharing this because I found it insightful.
The author describes himself as a “fractional CTO”(no clue what that means, don’t ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):
I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.
I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.
Same thing would happen if they were a non-coder project manager or designer for a team of actual human progress.
Stuff done, shipped and working.
“But I can’t understand the code 😭”, yes. You were the project manager why should you?
I think the point is that someone should understand the code. In this case, no one does.
Big corporations have been pushing for outsourcing software development for decades, how is this any different? Can you always recall your outsourced development team for another round of maintenance? A LLM may actually be more reliable and accessible in the future.
If you outsource you could at least sure them when things go wrong. Good luck doing that with AI.
Plus you can own the code if a person does it.
Most outsourcing consultants I have worked with aren’t worth the legal fees to attempt to sue.
I’m not aware of any ownership issues with code I have developed using Claude, or any other agents. It’s still mine, all the more so because I paid Claude to write it for me, at my direction.
AI doesn’t get IP protections.
Nobody is asking it to (except freaks trying to get news coverage.)
It’s like compiler output - no, I didn’t write that assembly code, gcc did, but it did it based on my instructions. My instructions are copyright by me, the gcc interpretation of them is a derivative work covered by my rights in the source code.
When a painter paints a canvas, they don’t record the “source code” but the final work is also still theirs, not the brush maker or the canvas maker or paint maker (though some pigments get a little squirrely about that…)
So…like dealing with Oracle.