I think the point remains, if someone armed with Claude Code could whip out a feature complete clone of Microsoft Office over the weekend (and by all accounts, even a novice programmer could do this, because of the magnificent greatness of Claude), then why don't they just go ahead and do it? Maybe do a bunch of them: release one under GPL, one under MIT, one under BSD, and a few more sold as proprietary software. Wow, I mean, this should be trivial.
It makes development faster, but not infinitely fast. Faithfully reproducing complex 42-year-old software in one weekend is a stretch no matter how you slice it. Also, AI is cheap, but not free.
I could see it being doable by forking LibreOffice or Calligra Suite as a starting point, although even with AI assistance I'd imagine that it might take anyone not intimately familiar with both LibreOffice (or Calligra) and MS Office longer than a weekend to determine the full scope of the delta between them, much less implement that delta.
But you'd still need someone with sufficient skill (not a novice), maybe several hundred or thousand dollars to burn, and nothing better to do for some amount of time that's probably longer than a weekend. And then that person would need some sort of motivation or incentive to go through with the project. It's plausible, but not a given that this will happen just because useful agentic coding tools exist.
Pick a smaller but impactful project and have 2-3 people working full-time on it for 1 year. Either this tech is truly revolutionary and these 2-3 people are getting at least 50% more done, or it's marginal and what are we even talking about?
There could be many such cases, or maybe only a few. I'm easily a multiple more productive as a result of integrating AI into my workflows; but whether that's broadly the case across the industry, or will become the case as we collectively adapt in coming years, is essentially unfalsifiable.
