# The Pulse #160: Why it’s so dramatic that “writing code by hand is dead”
### Also: New trend of staff+ engineers and managers using AI a lot, replacing a $120/year micro-SaaS with LLM-generated code, and more


_The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Hit reply and share it with me._

Today, we cover:

1.  **Why the claim “writing code by hand is almost dead” feels so dramatic.** It used to take years for major technological shifts in computing, like going from Assembly to high-level languages, to play out. In stark contrast, LLM tooling has gone from “meh” to “good-enough-to-write-most-code” in mere months.
    
2.  **New trend: staff+ engineers and VPs making heavy usage of AI tools at tech giant.** Microsoft’s internal dashboard for AI usage reveals interesting details, including that senior folks who barely used to code are now the biggest users of AI agents – some of it for coding use cases, others for planning and exploring.
    
3.  **Replacing a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with an LLM.** I used to pay $120/year for a SaaS that hasn’t added new features in four years, and didn’t fix its broken billing system for three years. Using an LLM, I managed to rewrite all the functionality I used to pay for in 20 minutes. Is this bad news for “write once, don’t update later” SaaS?
    
4.  **Industry Pulse.** Claude Code looks more like an IDE with its new diff view, ChatGPT to host ads while Gemini stays ad-free, how Anthropic does takehome exercises during interviews, Cloudflare acquires Astro, and more.
    

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1\. Why the claim “writing code by hand is almost dead” feels so dramatic
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