Working with Claude: A Senior Developer's Honest Take

I've been using Claude Code as part of my daily development workflow for several months now. This isn't a breathless endorsement or a dismissive rejection. It's an honest assessment from someone who's been writing software professionally for over two decades. It's a Tool. Treat It Like One. Claude is a tool. A genuinely impressive one, but still a tool. It sits in the same category as my text editor, my terminal, and my version control system. I find this framing helpful - not to diminish what it can do, but to approach it practically. Some of the hype around AI assistants oversells what they are. Junior developers aren't obsolete. Senior developers aren't being replaced. What's actually happening is more interesting: certain categories of work have become dramatically faster, and that changes what's practical to attempt. AI assistants are particularly good at boilerplate, repetitive transformations, exploring unfamiliar codebases, and acting as a thinking partner. They still need huma