Tom Witherington

I work from a cottage on the eastern edge of Jersey. Twenty-five years writing software. The last couple I've spent typing rather less and saying "not quite" rather more often.

Most days I'm in a loop with Claude Code. It reads everything I give it, and a great deal I didn't, with the confidence of a new graduate and the recall of a librarian. About three useful things and one quietly wrong thing every fifteen minutes. The work is spotting which is which fast enough to matter.

Nobody was ever paying engineers for the typing. They paid for the judgement: what good looked like, where the edges were, when to stop. The typing used to hide most of that. Now it doesn't.

Both sides of the table are anxious about the wrong thing. Developers worry they'll be made redundant. Clients worry they'll get something half-baked. The actual shift is that the typing was subsidising weaker engineering for years, and the subsidy is running out. Judgement is what was always being paid for. Now it's just itemised.

I prefer this version. It looks more like editing than typing, and more like architecture than either. A few careful people with the right tools can do more than people are assuming. I'd like to find out how much more.