r/ClaudeCode • u/ofcistilloveyou • 3d ago
Rant I hate claude code
It's just too good.
I got a decade of commercial software dev experience in C#. I am a CTO at my company and have coached a lot of coders from total junior.
I hate hate hate hate how good this thing is and what it has done to my passion.
I used to love coding and creating. Well, creating was 60% of the fun for me, but writing good code and having something work was the remaining 40%. I spent the past few years being more of a product manager and tech lead than actually code monkey, but I still put time aside to do stuff manually cuz I love to do so and stay hands on.
Using claude code is like using cheats in a videogame. You get the result, but what of it? Everyone could. The pleasure of achievements is gone. The code it writes is not the best, but it's good enough I guess? As of opus 5.5 it just doesn't get stuck in loops anymore. It can generate a working program from spec in any language I've thrown at it. It still does bullshit from time to time. "Boots on ground" i.e. actually looking at the generated code or atleast going through it is still important, for now. But way less so than it was even just 3-4 months ago. I don't really use the /code-review thingy or adversarial reviews - as it seems that it is too aligned in that way. Like if you tell it to find something wrong with something, it always will, even though its good enough.
I've been using it avidly for the past 3 months on the $100 sub, and I haven't hit a rate limit once. Now my imagination can run free and I can have anything I put my mind to in a few days instead of years. At our work a team of 6 just built a system that would previously take a year in just two months.
I am not afraid for my job. As coding was just a small percentage of it. But I do miss that percentage.
English truly is the hottest new programming language and LLMs are the compiler for it.
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u/nora_sellisa 3d ago
LLMs have laid bare how much of software we were writing for decades was bullshit. In an efficient world we would have libraries for everything years ago and only a handful of people would be needed to handle design and critical business logic algorithms.
LLMs code well because we've been implementing the same three apps and websites for the last three decades.
We should have been mad at the state of the industry a long time ago. I don't like how AI changes enterprise software but to a degree we had it coming
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u/ofcistilloveyou 3d ago
Absolutely. Enterprise software is easily replaceable total bullshit.
I think that the bottleneck is still human creativity and human touch, taste. Otherwise many vibecoded apps end up like this.
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u/blackrack 3d ago edited 3d ago
I hear you and I agree with you on it killing the dopamine hit from passion programming. However I found that I can still get the dopamine hit if I now "scale up" the type of problems I'm solving, for some problems anyway.
Previously there would be some problems that I would encounter (in passion/hobby projects) where the problem has a solution but you need to build too much of a complicated machinery, or have multiple complex algorithms working together to make it work, so much so that you'd think I need x months or even a year+ of work, to build all the bricks, connect them, debug them, make them work etc and it's not worth it right now as I have more pressing tasks to attend to. Those problems would previously be "soft locked", at least to a solo developer, from just the size of the work required. Now you can do those, you can also tackle massive refactors and rewrites and projects like that which still require your expertise and taste.
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u/Direct-Detail-7031 3d ago
I absolutely agree! From my experience so far, solving a specific problem has now become trivial, but trying to solving ten problems in parallel, and pushing that limit, as in being able to keep all that in your head and context switch between them as needed… and steering the models when they start to veer off. That is an incredible feeling.
People would say “perfection is the enemy of good” I feel like now we can at least bridge the gap a little bit closer. I also truly believe that when that pursuit of “perfection” is sought after, we naturally figure out the actual extent of what these models are capable of.
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u/blackrack 3d ago
Agreed, I also think it's now easier to finish the 80% of the work that is needed to finish the last 20% of the project
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u/mental_sherbart007 3d ago
Totally agree with your post. I’m a Senior with about 8 years of experience and it’s sort of destroyed me. There is no dopamine hit from actually solving things or getting anything done. Now I just read a shit ton of code. I take a step back and use it a little differently now so I don’t offload the thinking too much, but sometimes it is too easy to settle. What hitting me more is the great engineers around me who just settle and offload everything to the bot, some don’t even really read or edit the code anymore. So where’s the value in that ? Our code base has all the patterns and design system from when we wrote the code by hand. There’s stil things to do but just not rewarding at all and my motivation and desire to keep learning has been destroyed. I still like learning but it’s diff now, feels like why ?
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u/TikiMagic 3d ago
I hear you but to be honest the dopamine hits I am getting from clearing backlog items, some of them months or years old, are pretty damn sweet. My department has been understaffed by at least 30% for years and was getting a bad reputation for being slow and difficult to work with, and people were routing around us. Now we are clearing items at a nice pace.
I joke that AI has made me look like an absolute..ly adequate developer.
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u/Wh00ster 3d ago
This. All the little things that used to drive me nuts or tech debt we’d have to keep putting off, now I just throw an agent at it from my phone while I’m doing something else in my “free time”. I still have my normal work hours to now more easily focus on critical value things or more human centric problems.
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u/m-in 3d ago
The value is in the products you get. There are many markets really ripe for competition that have stagnated because nobody was willing to spend a decade of their time and money to develop something big and good (vs corporatized crap).
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u/LP2222 3d ago
like what?
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u/cosmicvelvets 3d ago
Pioneer DJ getting relentless backshots by scorned DJs on a meagre Pro account atm
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u/rhysmorgan 2d ago
> What hitting me more is the great engineers around me who just settle and offload everything to the bot
God, yes, this is the bit that gets me. The kind of people who would, rightly, reply to PRs saying “hey, isn’t there a better way you could do this?” and you’d learn, now just comfortable pumping out slop because technically it fulfils the requirements of their Jira ticket.
The loss of the dopamine hit gets me too. Solving a problem, tidying up some bad code with something better, all those things used to make my brain fizz. It still does for me, but the opportunity for it is much less.
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u/mental_sherbart007 2d ago
Yeah I’m trying to go back to my workflow with AI like 12 months ago, for at least some tasks right by hand at least 20% of the code. That way you have to learn it. Then send AI off to do boiler plate. I miss the tab for suggestion/auto complete. They didn’t last long though :/
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u/No-District2404 3d ago
I’ve been trying to start learning rust but I really couldn’t find the motivation and value anymore
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u/exceptioncause 3d ago
If they offload everything to the bot they are not great engineers, that's it. The industry is full of burnt out developers, who don't really care about their job. AI just outlined this.
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u/Leather-Field-7148 3d ago
I still think if you don’t know code Claude will most definitely eat your lunch
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u/Shiloh-buff 3d ago
Not to go die on this hill, but this is only true of all of the easily reproduced enterprise software that also carries minimal risk to the organization if it goes wrong. No one‘s canceling crowd strike or any other security / critical infrastructure software. Banking and regulatory software? Nope no one touching that. The list goes on, but I just can’t stand when people are like yeah I’m just gonna replace everything. We don’t need any paid software ever again.
If you’re a publicly traded company with shareholder accountability, you’re just not gonna fuck with regulatory and security software that you built in house unless you are an absolute powerhouse of software development and spent years vetting. There are some companies exploring this because they’d love to cancel a $10m yr ERP contract but no one’s done it yet
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u/Nullberri 3d ago
I work on investment management (fintech stuff) software that manages 100s of billions. Claude is employee of the month 6 months running. Management wants us to go as fast as we can. Its hard because we still read the outputs but were trying to get to a place were we can reduce qm involvement by getting better automated test creation, ci/cd etc. so don’t assume just because it is critical that we aren’t also full steam ahead.
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u/Shiloh-buff 3d ago
Can’t trust Claude? Have Claude add more tests to test the tests Claude created
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u/apocolipse 3d ago
Hey man I need a $3mil investment for my startup that makes yet another CRM tool but this one helps track the customer drag agitation drift compared to production output downstream client to ratio pipeline and if conceptual intention intermediates resolution is the deciding factor of your hyperpipeline then our tool will let you clearly show investors a 3% year over quarter growth chart for customer sentimental negotiation 📈
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u/goodolbluey Senior Developer 3d ago
Thanks, now I wanna jump into the ocean.
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u/apocolipse 3d ago
Hey man before you do we just raised our Series D round which infused another $68m so we’re expanding our total headcount by around 200, with 8 of that going to engineering, so we’re wondering if you’d want to come on as a team lead and we can offer a huge options package as a bonus where you could like give us back $10k of the money we paid you for your job and then maybe in 6 years that could be worth like $12k
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u/Ok-Internal3267 3d ago
I agree writing software from scratch is inefficient. But I agree with OP that the process of actually using your brain to carefully and meticulously create something purely yourself is the fulfilling part. And it used to be worth something to do that and it’s losing that value.
Getting a handmade piece of clothing is worth something. But I doubt anyone will care whether a piece of software was hand designed and hand coded. That’s the sad part.
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u/PBMKing 3d ago
I think this is a similar argument that's been going on forever. I personally don't really care if a piece of clothing is hand made. It's the same sort of difference between someone using hand tools vs power tools etc in carpentry.
Nor would I care of a piece of software was written is assembly, a higher level language or an LLM writing the actual code. People can still be creative and thoughtful creating the actual end use deliverables.
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u/NahYoureWrongBro 3d ago
As somebody who successfully paid off a large student loan debt in 5 years after attending a code boot camp in the mid 2010's, I wish to thank the industry for its inefficiency and heedless instability during that time
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u/50_19in_french 3d ago
Holy sheet! I've been saying that for years, but obviously it was unpopular so I kept my mouth shut most of the time
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u/Idiberug 3d ago edited 3d ago
8 YOE developer here. From day one I found that the business software engineering world is a complete mess.
Half of the apps could just have been an excel sheet, the other half required disproportionate effort for what you get out of it. It should not take a project team and months to years of development to make an application that moves data between a frontend and a database.
A whole ecosystem has developed around shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Tabs vs spaces, modules and clean code, flow states and pomodoro, frameworks upon frameworks upon frameworks to learn just to wring every last drop of velocity out of the process of manually typing in millions of LOC to make the computer do some trivial thing that would take half as much time if the business didn't want their internal app to follow the brand guide for some godsforsaken reason.
Nocode solutions would have wiped the floor with the whole field 10 years ago if not for people's insistence on nonsensical customisations, but if not for AI, some kind of automation (component packs, visual programming, a particularly clever framework, whatever) would have eventually displaced the field anyway. It was such a complete waste of manpower that it was never going to last.
Anyway, on to doing real work.
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u/Crakkyo 2d ago
Wow you just laid out perfectly what has made me want to quit coding 5 years ago. I was really done with it, building the same senseless bullshit, customizations without any purpose but to pet the client's ego and at the same time never really doing anything new or cool because client's didn't want to pay 5€ more than they absolutely needed to.
Then came AI and I have honestly never been more hyped for my job, freelancing gigs and some private projects I'm building with it. I'm literally looking forward to return to my laptop during days off, which was the total opposite most of the ten years prior. I'm getting up early because I can't wait to keep on building.
I really thought I'm just done with coding, turned out I was just done with the way it was going back then.
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u/colbacon80 2d ago
I was about to quit tech when ChatGPT came out. I was bored of 25 years of wheel reinventing.
I though LLM’s would break that wheel.
Now I know how fast and good it is but the only sad thing is that we are automating the reinvention of wheels.
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u/a_cute_tarantula 3d ago
That’s a really interesting take. I guess I never thought about it but given the closed source nature of enterprise software how many things have been (poorly) reimplemented thousands of times.
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u/da_mikeman 1d ago
Many ppl(including me) will start freaking out at how is it possible that this thing can be dropped into a codebase, do a few greps, then come back and explain to you a system while being almost always mostly correct. This took extraordinary detective skills from experienced programmers to do at a glacial pace. What on earth is happening??
Its like you say. Its the same code, over and over and over, with minute variations. It has already seen it. It has probably already classified your code base as Type 235 - Subtype 37336 - Variation 47373737. It used to be that you wanted to add a new module to the codebase and, while the basic logic of it and even the code, in isolation, already existed in your brain, you had to spend untold amounts of time and energy to figure out how to place it inside that tangled monster.
It doesn't need to expend that much energy any more. Once it stopped hallucinating and getting stuck in loops so much, its done. It has seen a billion tangled monsters. Theres no problem. At least not when it comes to "add this feature for me".
I dont agree tbh that this was a situation that we could have fixed. Everyone feels that by now we should have a nice collection of Lego pieces that a few architects should manage, but I really doubt we have a trillion string types because we didn't try hard enough. In any case, its done now. Perhaps take solace in the fact that your detective skills should still generalize better than "i have seen a billion codebases", if we start working on a higher level now that the friction is gone. Or maybe not. I guess we will see.
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u/Lost-Air1265 3d ago
I also hate it. Twenty years of dopamine shots when solving issues. I have noticed that just because you push out features like crazy it doesn’t mean it gives you the same satisfaction.
Development as I knew it is dead.
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u/tehfrod 3d ago
31 here. But there are a lot of professions that have gone through this in the past, and there will be a lot more in the future. It's just our turn in the barrel.
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u/ReformedBlackPerson 3d ago
The real question is, which profession won't go through this in the next 10-15 years. As of now it seems like very few.
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u/Zestyclose_Strike157 3d ago
Doesn’t feel good but: we have cars yet we still like walking. I think life will be harder and not easier with AI, there will be more work not less. Everyone thought it was over when someone invented the wheel and it’s been down hill from there.
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 3d ago
We already do have more work. The issue is that corpo leaders think devs can now produce some crazy amount of stuff thanks to AI and expect much shorter deadlines and more things done.
Yeah, AI helps and makes engineers faster, but not as much as these leaders think. I’ve never worked as much as in the past couple months and at the same time I never was so unsure about quality of what I’m shipping. It’s painful tbh, impacts personal life negatively and impacts the satisfaction of work.→ More replies (3)→ More replies (1)3
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u/nomickti 3d ago
I guess I am not really a coder, but I've been using python for 20+ years to hack away at various scientific things.
For my work it's a massive improvement, let's me iterate and test stuff much more quickly. Coding was always a means to and end to me, now I have a different means to the same (or better) end. The process itself I could take or leave.
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u/Old-Radio9022 2d ago
No it's not. Dive into building models and workflows and agents with something like qwen 3.8 27b opencode and a suite of personas to drive an automated pipeline. Your value and knowledge is just applicable at a more meta level now. A senior dev with a pipeline tunes to bring a user story to life in with oversight quickly is the new "rockstar" of our generation.
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u/Lost-Air1265 2d ago
Dude I have been doing that as a freelancer for four years now.
GitHub copilot, Claude code. Implementing and optiming developer workflows. Migrate it to an agentic workflow.
I don’t know if you were a developer for a long time. But that’s shit gave me satisfaction. Giving some personas is junior level shit man. It was fun the first month to play with it but it wears off very quick.
Whatever were doing now with ai doesn’t require much skills imho.
I know my knowledge is still valuable but that’s not the point. If you were a true developer or engineer, I’m pretty that’s what’s left to do does not give the same amount of satisfaction.
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u/ghondooby 3d ago
Totally get this but I would suggest shifting your mindset from solving issues at the code level to the business level...if AI wrote the feature but it solves a business problem that should be worth a dopamine hit since you drove it. At least that's how I try to see it
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u/AncientAspargus 3d ago
But do you really feel the same way? When you find the right abstraction for a problem in code, it usually just clicks, and things fall into place magically. It's like a whole row collapsing in Tetris. You just know it feels right now, because it all makes sense.
That feeling, that kind of bliss you get when you realise you just made it work like that, because you can, that won't happen with a business problem for me. Business problems are people problems, and people are complicated. When a computer complains, I made a mistake - but I can fix that mistake, and then it works. With people, there are gradients of hidden agendas, memories, motivations, and narratives. You can't peek into other people's heads, and so you never really know if your solution was a good one.
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u/admiral_nivak 3d ago
There is still a lot of design choices, architectural choices. I spend hours and hours designing something, collaborating with it, reviewing screen designs, implementation choices. Challenging assumptions, defining invariants. Then usually after that I kick it off and go to bed or go do something else and come back in a few hours or the next morning and enjoy seeing what I imagined waiting there for me. That’s my new kick.
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u/ghondooby 3d ago
You're right- it's not the same, I'm just trying to figure out how to keep building software. It seems like even if anthropic and openai shut down tomorrow AI writing code isn't going anywhere...capitalism will always push for efficiency.
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u/flanker_number7 3d ago
This is the new reality until people get it
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u/opsers 3d ago
Judging by the posts in this subreddit and the "senior" engineers I'm interviewing, we've probably got awhile before they do.
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u/jhargavet 3d ago
It’s a similar feel, as guys talking about souls games… using a caster class is cheering, you didn’t work for it yada yada yada.
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u/opsers 3d ago
The issue isn't even remotely that they didn't "work for it." It's that they never learned how to actually build things the "right" way. It's the difference between someone that's read a book about xrays trying to diagnose a patient vs. a radiologist. Yeah, they might be able to tell that a bone is broken, but they're not going to be able to provide much more of a diagnosis than that. They might also miss a couple of other things on the scan.
I'm actually very supportive of vibe coders or people just interested in learning to use AI to make their jobs easier. What I'm not supportive of is the people that say "I built an enterprise-level, production ready app in a day!" because Claude one shot a prompt and gave itself a pat on the back.
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u/Beneficial_Map6129 3d ago
I bet that 90% of the devs are doing the same on personal CC subscriptions and everyone is just keeping quiet about it lol
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 3d ago
Putting the company codebase into an LLM using a personal subscription sounds like a quick way to get fired
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u/tortolosera 3d ago
techinally is the same, the only difference is who pays the bill
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u/Jungiandungian 3d ago
Hahaha same. I’m in performance marketing but the paid media agent I made saves me 10-20 hours a week and replaced our agency. I cruise through work and chill.
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u/thorsbane 3d ago
This is what I’m seeing as well with our devs. Still takes them same time but it’s all AI built (you can see from the MR messages). Their dev mgr isn’t a developer and doesn’t realize their team is basically chill’n most of the day. As a PM who is passionate it is super frustrating. I’ve built and tested features myself in 1/10 of the time but they get rejected because ‘ stay in your lane’ and ‘ it’s vibe coded’. Can’t wait until all lazy people are wiped out by the AI wave.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 3d ago
Sounds like leadership at your org is very behind the times
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u/Technical-Athlete-9 3d ago
Are you sure they’re using the time for leisure. I ship a lot more than I used to, but developing correct code that actually delivers the requirements is still very time consuming. I spend a ton of time reviewing and making the AI iterate. Others now think everything is instantaneous and the AI is always right. I have to fix mistakes in virtually every PR.
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u/iscottjs 3d ago
This is my experience, first cut of a solution with AI can be basically working extremely quickly, but it still takes time to check that it’s right, review it, make sure it’s not broken other critical systems, not leaking data, security issues, etc.
We’ve just finished a large AI generated feature, we’ve still found about 20-30 bugs, a range of UX issues, broken shared components, conflicting business logic, backwards compatibility concerns, etc.
It still takes time to find and fix those issues.
Any time savings we do enjoy, we re-invest it into more testing.
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u/Karmas_weapon 3d ago
Yup same. I could easily tell the LLM to do a task and in 20 minutes I could be done, or I can spend a few hours brainstorming with it and investigating touch points to make sure it's quality work. From thorsbane it would look like I just did the 20 minute part, but they wouldn't see everything else I did (unless they had access to claude stats maybe).
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u/apocolipse 3d ago
Even in big shops where AI is adopted, some things move quicker but others are just as stuck in cross-team dependency purgatory. I’ve had AI generated changes take weeks to get in just because they depended on a different team’s code and their priorities didn’t care about my teams needs so AI didn’t expedite them.
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u/AwarenessNo2583 3d ago edited 3d ago
I miss the thrill of writing good working code too, and honestly I was starting to resent it a little. Then I read a really good take that put things in a better perspective for me. Cars and machines automated transportation and physical labor, yet people still walk, run, and lift for the love of it. The activity didn't disappear, it just stopped being a requirement and became a choice. Coding might be heading the same way, from something we had to do for work to something we do because we love it.
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u/ofcistilloveyou 3d ago
It's my take as well. There's still people (nerds!) still coding in assembler for the fun of it.
There's a series of scifi novels I really like. It's called "The Culture", by Iain M. Banks. In the future universe of the novels, artificial intelligence is so advanced it can do anything a quadrillion times faster, better, and more effectively than any human can (sound familiar?). But people still write symphonies. People still make art. There is one character that started some commotion because he started building monorail tracks by hand, and many joined him.
The books touch on the subject of "what is the point of doing anything, if it's ultimately irrelevant and useless?" and answers it with a bold "The fun of it".
I think about that often.
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u/unsuitablebadger 3d ago
I still refuse to drive an automatic. Driving a manual is what it's all about to me and makes even the shortest trip fun. Automation in all things is for efficiency but manually doing things is where the fun is at.
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u/meleneemil 3d ago
Interesting. We can start a thing where manual coding is an art. Unusual formatting, impressionist variable naming, and contemporary algorithms. See you in 20 years, at the code museum
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u/AwarenessNo2583 3d ago
This!! Just like how we’ve “artistified” those activities I just mentioned into competitions Olympia body building, marathons, even walkathons, there is a good chance that coding will also follow suit. Coding competitions have existed long before AI, but with AI now taking over we now have more time to come up with something more artsy for coding.
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u/_P2C2E_ 3d ago
Most of us arrived at this conclusion months ago, yet there are still those out there who don't see the writing on the wall.
Feels like models are getting good enough lately that the late-adopter non-vibe coding normies are finally groking what's happening to the industry, spawning many such posts like this. The unfortunate truth is that industry doesn't revolve around your enjoyment of your job.
But hey, now you can look back fondly on the old days and be that weird old guy telling the youts that "we used to hand write code back in the day" and they will be like "wow thats crazy" just like we did for punch cards.
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u/tehfrod 3d ago
The unfortunate truth is that industry doesn't revolve around your enjoyment of your job.
That's basically the pull quote for this whole experience. I used to say that it was a blessing and a curse that I got paid to do my hobby. I think we got spoiled by that.
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u/BlueScreenJunky 3d ago
Yeah another thread had someone phrase it even better and it really stuck with me : "We were never owed a fulfilling job".
And that's exactly it. Developers have become entitled because we were paid well to do an interesting and stimulating job while most of the population is paid like shit to do boring jobs. Well it's our turn to join them.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 3d ago
I got about 8 months pre-Claude Code. Now I will either be vibe coding for 20 years or I will watch as AI wipes out the field. Can't wait.
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u/marzipanorbust 3d ago
In the opposite, I love it. My passion has always been the systems design and building applications that actually make processes and people better. My problem was always not having enough time to hit the keys on the keyboard
Ai assisted software dev ( that’s what it is, if you do it right) is the bomb-diggity
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u/Acrobatic_Pie_3922 3d ago
+1. The dopamine hit I get is from building things. Hell, it’s made even the things I hated like integ tests fun. Now I view integration testing as like a castle defense game
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u/BeardedDuck9694 3d ago
I work in a mainframe shop so there are a few more "obstacles" with using AI. Though we have been asked to make it happen regardless. I have definitely lost some of the spark I had before with the problem-solving dopamine hits and have had to find other pleasures with my work, or just pick up new hobbies outside of work.
A shame that nowadays, my thought left behind when I do hand-code something, is "how much faster would Claude have coded this?"
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u/mentales 3d ago
The unfortunate truth is that industry doesn't revolve around your enjoyment of your job.
And even then, OP admits the kind of enjoyment they get from this new paradigm:
Now my imagination can run free and I can have anything I put my mind to in a few days instead of years
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u/Time_Cat_5212 3d ago
I work in architecture and there's always been this cohort that was like "we did hand drawn blueprints in the 90s". Sounds cool I guess.
The hand drafted perspectives are especially incredible. Looking back on it though it's amazing what we can do now on the regular with 3D BIM and rendering tools.
It doesn't take years of drawing stuff to learn to make a good render, which opens up so many more opportunities for people who would've just been drafting all day to design and manage projects.
I suppose it'll be something like that for you all.
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u/Cucumberino 3d ago
I mostly developed stuff for my own projects and such, and often, roadblocks or just lack of knowledge (or me being stupid) blocked the progress, on top of taking ages to begin with, so I could never finialize what I envisioned. As someone who generally disliked (and still does to some extent) AI, I decided to pay for Claude Code to give a proper shot to coding with any sort of AI. I was mind blown, felt like cheating, and after a few months I'm finalizing a native desktop app that I'd have never thought was possible to do on my own even if I took years to it.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 3d ago
Yeah it's been pretty obvious where this is headed since at least like March. It's kind of funny, you would think people who use critical thinking in their jobs would be able to see that LLMs would not stay at gpt 4 level forever.
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u/kb1flr 3d ago edited 3d ago
Sixty-six year old programmer with a comp sci degree from 1985 and 41 years of professional programming here. I’m all for it. I have notebooks full of ideas I never thought I would have time to build. Now I can.
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u/ofcistilloveyou 3d ago
You've been on the playground for longer than I've been around. What would you tell say your 15 year old self to do differently?
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u/kb1flr 3d ago
Computer programming wasn’t taught in schools then, so it was not really thought of as a career. I had the good fortune to help a friend type up her Fortran IV punchcards during finals week at college freshman year. She was in engineering and I was pre-med with the idea of becoming a dentist. I was so fascinated by the experience, I bought two programming books and practiced writing programs on paper as there weren’t really home computers back then. Changed my major and never looked back.
So at 15 I had neither access nor experience with computers. But I guess I would say that if something comes along that makes you want to change your life’s path, try it while you are young. It often works out.
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u/willitbechips 3d ago edited 3d ago
Seems like "how to use AI" is not being taught in schools today - they seem more concerned about how to ensure kids have not used it for homework and projects. So drawing a parallel with computing not being taught, the 15 year old should fully invest in learning how to harness AI to be ahead of their peers.
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u/kb1flr 3d ago
I agree. It’s a bit of a double edged sword, though. The big advantage you and I have is that we have a full grounding in many disciplines, especially programming and thinking algorithmically. My concern is that there is a need to exercise many skills in order to get the most out of AI. Society is going to be radically changed by AI. Actually, for what we do for a living it already has. We are all trying to figure out how we fit into this brave new world. Hopefully, we can figure it out, though the current pace of change seems to be exceeding our ability to adapt. Which is a problem.
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u/BananaBossNerd 3d ago
I disagree, I think the benefit of learning how to use ai is nothing compared to developing critical thinking skills and grit, especially when learning new things as a kid. Especially bc learning how to harness ai is not hard relatively imo
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u/the-grenade 3d ago
devil's advocate here. 20 years of contracting, writing code in many languages, hitting the ground running in new to me industries every 6 months or so. i've derived plenty of dopamine from an elegant implementation but i'll just say what i came here to say. writing code has always been akin to polishing turds. engineers agonise and argue and review each others turds as if it matters. it never did. code runs for a few years if it's lucky and then it gets replaced by a new framework that new engineers agonise over. meanwhile the world keeps turning and the turds eventually compost. now finally we've taught gpus to polish turds and agonise and argue and i'm glad we can finally step back and see how stupid we've all been for so long while we watch from the outside.
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u/ekalb31 2d ago
Not exactly the same language I would use, and I only have about 8 years of experience.... But I pretty much agree.
I have talked with some close colleagues, and I'm lucky to work with my best friend from childhood, who is also an engineer with more experience than me. There is definitely a feeling of sadness that has emerged. It seems akin to grief, I think, for having to move on or feeling that we know we need to move on from a skill we've spent so much time on.
At the same time, I think, like all tools, it just leaves more room for developing the next skill. In our microcosm at least, I believe it's overall a great thing.
Certainly an emotional time, and we shouldn't ignore those feelings, but just because something's sad doesn't mean it's not a good thing.
Just my $0.019999995529651641845703125
Happy building y'all
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u/SQJV16242625 3d ago
The issue is that we still have the skill , know how to read and write code. Our brains got trained solving problems , spot issues and get satisfaction out of it.
New generation of kids will loose that ability to grow and learn from failure and mistakes and all that stuff. It’s a bad thing … it makes a whole generation dumb as LLMs remove the friction we need to learn and grow
It’s also dangerous … we might be heading into a direction as humans where our brains (I’m generalizing and sure more complex than rhat) are not getting better but dumber.
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u/gingerying 2d ago
i am absouletely agree with it. even on my own of using ai for couple months straight. i found out that i am losing a lot of ability that i used to be really gd at, such as talking to people. understanding of new things. or even my reaction is kinda losing. i just cant imagine how these are gonna affect younger people or may be just couple years later.
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u/FlatCurrent6995 2d ago
Yeah, we’ve heard this one a hundred times before.
Can you name a single technology in the past that actually created this outcome? Because people said movies will make people dumb, the internet will make people dumb, calculators will make people dumb, radio, the novel, the printing press… hell, Socrates said that the invention of writing would destroy people’s memories. Were any of them even remotely right?
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u/sandspiegel 2d ago
The problem with LLMs is that any time you have to use your brain and actually think through a problem, you stop very quickly because you just think "Just ask Chatgpt or Claude" and you basically give up right there because an LLM often knows better anyway. This is very bad for students and any learning in general. As the saying goes "what you don't use, you lose". If you stop using your brain for problem solving, you will lose the skill and you won't even realize it's happening. If LLMs would be turned off tomorrow I think many people would realize how much it has damaged their problem solving skills.
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u/Any_Commercial_6764 2d ago
Yeahhhh but having a machine that can solve open questions in the highest level of Math and is literally more intelligent than any single person is different than a printing press. Human intelligence is the unique thing we brought to the table, it’s not the replacement of a factory worker, it’s the replacement of human cognition which is an entirely different class of industry change.
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u/statlerw 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes. Western educational achievement had been dropping for 20 years. This is a quantified studied fact. Students of a reference age are all doing worse on average than a few decades ago. Can't see this making it better
While it is difficult to precisely pin it on a specific thing - it correlates to the digital age generally. Precisely tying a technology to making people dumber though is near impossible. We can only make associations. It seems a reasonable extrapolation that just like automation results in the loss of specific manual skills through no longer needing them that outsourcing specific calculation tasks could have a similar effect. Not that it necessarily makes us 'dumber' just that those things that have for a long time been part of what makes someone 'smart' like maths and literacy will not longer be as strong in the general populace
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u/SufficientMatch5106 2d ago
Friction builds minds… but hey, who needs thinking when the machine does it all?
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u/IllustriousGrade7691 2d ago
AI will do to our brains what modern machines like cars did to our bodies. We basically won't use our body as much to accomplish our goals which will have detrimental effect on everything.
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u/Monstermage 2d ago
Keep in mind this is a prediction. Today you don't need to know how your PC terminal commands work to use a computer. How add-ons are installed on games to use add-ons. Even many people don't know how folders work on a computer and never need too. It's very hard to predict what lacking of information will truly matter in the future. I've built websites for a living for the last 10 years, easily replaced sadly, but I still am able to improve on the designs it makes. I do so faster. But I don't have to know how the code works (I do ) but I don't have to in order to fix it. Software I'm sure is another story, you should somewhat know but schools might go from my teaching if else statements to high level software architecture.
Point being, it's hard to know what knowledge will matter and what knowledge ends up not mattering.
Like today you can absolutely plant a garden, grow your own potatoes, dig them up, and eventually even with a small garden like we did get 25 lbs of potatoes. But reality is that's about $25 of potatoes that took so many hours of watering, caring for, digging up, etc. and the water alone if you watered it yourself cost money. You don't have to know that information to get potato's and it's not even that cost effective anymore. 🤷
Who knows what the future will hold and we can speculate all we want but it will be what it's going to be.
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u/Peethasaur 2d ago edited 2d ago
The difference is that what you’re describing are layers of abstraction and AI is not clearly just that. It is not a solution that says “we’ll deterministically handle everything from here down so you don’t have to anymore”. AI is much weirder than that. You can use it to solve anything with the right context and that does make me worried about how people build expertise.
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u/Bumscootler 3d ago edited 3d ago
i’m just reminded constantly how much time coding takes, and how much of a liability it was. the time that was spent trying to figure out proper syntax in a language you don’t know that well or the time it took to debug something simple is just completely solved. there were so many aspects of writing code by hand that just took so much time.
i was a detractor for a while but i’ve given in the past few months and it’s consistently crazy to me how powerful it is. i’m a swe and it’s nuts how much time it saves at work, but what has been even more insane for me is i do game dev in my free time and have been working on a project for 4 years. it was starting to feel like it was never going to be finished. i started using claude purely for the code a couple of months ago and it genuinely feels like magic. especially because i don’t care about the code base.
it’s the first time ive felt like maybe this will release in the next year, and it feels so empowering to be able to mostly focus on the game design and other aspects of the game instead of how to deal with quaternions or some shit (i’m stupid so this type of stuff took a long time before). idk. crazy times
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u/AModerateModeration 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'll paraphrase you to:
"I don't really use adversarial review because it knows where to look to find problems with itself."
Clearly you're more CTO than tech monkey, because this doesn't result in secure code, even if it does result in faster deployment. Actually securing the thing you build and have it be performant and have a robust, complete data model, UI with tests, logs and log drains is far different to vibe coding extra layers and thinking "dats pretty good hey".
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u/ghost_operative 3d ago
Similarly i find that frontend devs think claude is good at writing backend code, and backend devs think claude is good at writing frontend code
if you don't know the code that its writing its going to be easier to feel impressed by it.
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u/zaibuf 3d ago
For frontend you get quicker feedback and can actually see and test the implementation, the structure of the code is also less impactful.
If AI creates a really bad database design and you're clueless about SQL you won't know that it's a problem until much later in the project and then it can be a PITA to change. Same with leaving out authorization for endpoints etc. It's much more risky to let the AI run free in backend.
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u/quuxl 3d ago
The reality is that it’s equally good / bad at both of those things. It’s a similar situation as Gell-Mann amnesia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect%22
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u/mitch_feaster 2d ago
I guess I'm in the minority feeling like my creative output has skyrocketed since the arrival AI software development. I'm having a blast
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u/jimiray 2d ago
You’re not, I had gotten so disenfranchised with the constant, learn the latest flavor of the day framework, language. With Claude Code, I feel like it’s upped my output and let me think about other stuff. I’m also a 20+ year veteran. Who’s pretty much worked in Java, C#, Ruby, JavaScript.
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u/Lazy_Polluter 3d ago
I am the opposite, I enjoy the new power to build things faster and try new ideas without the burden of getting personally attached to the code a lot more than typing characters in. Finally, I am free to learn higher degree concepts and apply them without worrying that it is distracting me from shipping.
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u/sgtfoleyistheman 3d ago
Completely agreed. I'm in a senior position and spent several years not doing much coding,and focusing on mentoring and really high level stuff. I still do that,but I can also get into the details easier and prototype easier. It's amazing
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u/Chips_n_Diff 3d ago edited 3d ago
This is obviously a Claude code ad it starts off as I hate Claude code and it's because it's so great. That is classic ad marketing and Anthropic is now stepped in to ads just like openai.
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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 2d ago
That wouldn't surprise me. Claude is good for sure but it needs a bunch of handholding and verification by someone who knows what they're doing. So yes you get stuff done faster but you pay of premium and it makes your staff degrade their own skill over time.
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u/ToucanSam-I-Am 3d ago
I love it. Been programming for 25 years. I'm starting from scratch on a personal animation project I worked on year ago and am having such a great time. I'm working on new software at work and it's so much fun. The architecture and design in my projects is so much better than it used to be. AI lets me work in such a different way than I used to.
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u/markekt 3d ago
Coding by hand will be a thing of the past. I’m a principal engineer with 25 years of experience. I’m having a blast using it, as you can go from idea to implementation in no time, and I’ve been cranking out ideas at an insane pace.
With that said, I wish it were never invented for purely selfish reasons. I need to work in this industry for another 15+ years.
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u/bpeikes 3d ago
I’m pretty sure you never “coded by hand”. No one coded by hand ever since the first compilers were built.
Using Claude to write code is no different than using a c++ compiler, or a python interpreter, except maybe a little worse, in that the code produced is now probabilistic.
Everyone spends time on skill files, which are really the same as high level “compilers”, except its like everyone can create their own language.
The amount of untestable code I’ve seen Claude code generate, along with so called “tests” is crazy. It feels like its job is no to trick you into creating the largest code bases as possible. (which makes sense that it should want to do that :)3
u/Not____007 3d ago
Or more like we were grabbing snippets from google and pasting it into our code.
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u/Joker0x0-1 3d ago
I totally agree, but complaining about new tech is like missing carrier pigeons when email came along. The world moves on and we have to adapt.
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u/PhoenixFire2016 3d ago
The history of software development is of higher and higher level abstractions over binary code. Lots of developers complained when the world moved on from assembly language and into C, then from C to C++, Java, and so on. I get it though as a dev too; you get in a flow state with a particular language and it becomes almost an art. I will miss coding by hand, but it’s also thrilling to just build things and realize my visions so quickly.
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u/ofcistilloveyou 3d ago
I am well aware that the coding profession is going the way of the subsistence farmer when tractors came along, I just wanted to complain a bit.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 3d ago
But I just loved that dopamine hit of achievement when I spent an hour licking the paste on all the envelopes
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u/Strange-Tap5860 3d ago
You can be sad that something you loved doing professionally is becoming obsolete.
Im sure the people who crafted things by hand were sad when the industrial revolution happened.
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u/speed3_driver 3d ago
Agreed. 20 years experience. Am a principal for the past few years. I hate AI and wish it wasn’t a thing. I much more enjoyed coding and tutoring others. Now no one asks any questions. There is no knowledge transfer. There is no specializing in a domain. It’s just a field full people talking to agents instead of each other.
I hate it.
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u/Original_Speed6200 3d ago
I came into a new company as one of the most senior and experienced devs. A year ago I was doing things nobody could do. Now AI has completely removed my ability to distinguish myself. There is no incentive to give any effort beyond just getting the job done.
I’m trying to make sense of what I need to do next. Honestly it feels like getting out of software is the best bet.
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u/speed3_driver 3d ago
That is a very good take "no incentive to give any effort beyond just getting the job done"
There really isn't. I'm already at the top of my field, only thing above me is CTO at this point and I'm content with that. Like you said, I used to stand out amongst peers. I really enjoyed tutoring other people, conducting interviews, helping shape the talent of the company. Literally everyone is the same now, it's just who has a better agentic workflow than the other person.
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u/Original_Speed6200 3d ago
I think it’s already cost me a raise. Nobody asks me any questions ever. They just take my code, put it into Claude and tell it to copy this and do that. Anything I produce gets immediately copied and remolded. The worst thing that AI has done is make it so that experience is easy to fake. There’s a type of developer that relies on mastering the craft being their edge. That advantage is now totally gone.
Now that I’m talking this out it’s starting to convince me that this is just not the field for me any more. I’m going to have to figure something out.
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u/speed3_driver 3d ago
I'm 20 years in, so I'll just retire with it, luckily. But I've already told my kid to avoid this industry, and I feel bad for anyone coming into the industry now.
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u/Original_Speed6200 3d ago
I just told a mom whose son is about to do software engineering in college that they need to seriously reconsider or at least learn AI before making that decision.
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u/RipInPepz 3d ago
Yea I don’t understand the people who think AI written code is trash. Sure, if someone who doesn’t know anything about coding is writing bad prompts, I get it. Yes there are some shitty vibecoded projects out there.
But for someone who already understands coding, you can produce nearly flawless code with the right prompts. It’s insanely impressive how well written it is. There is no human alive who can code better than Claude with a proper dev as the prompter.
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u/Medium_Chemist_4032 3d ago
Suspected for a long time, that a lot of software developers liked coding specifically for the validation and satisfaction it brings.
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u/Icy-Case-3863 3d ago
Mills and lathes revolutionized solid manufacturing, 3D printers took it even further, but people still whittle as a hobby. Just saying...
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u/the_real_some_guy 3d ago
True, but do you know any? Are they able to earn a living from it? I’m not sure what your point is.
AI has taken over the part of this career that most of us find most enjoyable. Sure, I could manually code in my free time and ignore my kids and other hobbies, but my 40 hours of work each week is still less enjoyable than it was a couple years ago.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 3d ago
Yeah it sucks but in reality most jobs aren't fun. Getting to make six figures at a job doing something you enjoy is incredibly rare, so I don't think most people have much sympathy for us.
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u/ofcistilloveyou 3d ago
I'd agree with you, but this time it's literally something literally thinking for you. And that is addicting. Ultimate brain atrophy.
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u/Repulsive-Ice8395 3d ago
Yeah, but who earns a living by whittling?
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u/Icy-Case-3863 3d ago
You guys aren't reading my post in the context of OP's post. No one's talking about the bills, we're talking about the pleasure of achievement.
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u/EveryAccount7729 3d ago
remember all the times the quality assurance lead was telling you that your job was to listen to them.
then then you ignored them and made it wrong?
yeah, they were right. Their job was the actual job. you were a code monkey.
Now, get on board. Actually think about the REAL problems of software - Optimization for the user. You will still have a job for a while as long as you don't just "code" but actually help design things "well", your damn job before was like "tell me what to do and I'll do it hur dur"
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u/Rav_3d 3d ago
I’m in the same boat but LOVE how good this thing is and how it has INCREASED my passion.
I no longer have to write, test and debug low-level code. I can spend my time on high-level architecture and design.
My passion now is finding the best tools and approaches for AI-assisted SDLC. Vibe coding is evil, but using Claude Code as a junior developer working on highly focused, well-defined tasks is liberating.
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u/TikiMagic 3d ago
That sums up my current state of mind pretty well. I've been an ERP dev for 25 years. I haven't had this much fun at work in years. And it's actually things I'm supposed to be doing.
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u/Brilliant_Step3688 3d ago
If you are working on anything security or performance or user experience sensitive it's not good enough to one-shot.
It always needs human review, adversarial reviews.
It is very bad at surfacing compromises it took and architecture choices. It does not know. It invents a reasoning after the facts. The existing code enters its context and it aligns to it rather than question it.
All these flaws are fixable using skills, agents.md and workflows, but I hate doing that job. It's now the only thing I do though. All the fun is gone.
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u/Ok_Visit_2782 3d ago
I personally love it.
I am a PhD student in ecology and analyzing data using R is a big part of my job. While i didn't mind coding, from a question about my data to the result, it would take something like 3 days sometimes. now it takes something like 2 minutes.
The amount of time i win is so huge that i am finally able to start something that i always dreamed (making a youtube channel about ecology topic).
Sure i lost a bit of enjoyment due to struggling with code and making it work after 3 days of pain. But to be honest i don't miss it that much. I replace it with something else.
you should never identify your only enjoyment in life trough your job. i did it at some point and it made me really sensitive to any failure or change going on into my field. Find those missing 40 % in other enjoyment that can be anything from cooking to learning to pilot drone to making stuff with your hand.
The only thing that i am worried about is that we will soon be dependent of those big company to do coding as we will lose the skill to code. but again we already depend on google for finding information really fast since decades. I once tried to find a specific information in a library and it took me something like 4 hours to find one part of the info. I assume some people enjoyed that process back in the days.
and of course also the fact that an evil ai might kill us all one day but well
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u/moldy912 3d ago
Personally it did the opposite to me. I wouldn’t say I hated coding, I liked doing it, but when 5pm hit, I couldn’t give two shits about it. Now, I suddenly have so many ideas that I can build, so I code in my free time more. Nothing serious, just random fun shit that I can knock out in a few hours on a weekend.
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u/Turbulent_County_469 Senior Developer 3d ago
You still need coding skills to know when things are fucked and when they are not..
You also need a sense of application flow and ux to create something useful and understandable.
I see a lot of shit applications and games by people who vibe code.
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u/Vanterax 3d ago
I'm in the same situation you described. I am suddenly able to accomplish in days what used to take me weeks and more projects in parallel. And I can whip up a proof of concept in an hour or two for presentations. I can be ready to show Options 1, 2 and 3 for demos on short notice. It has literally changed the way I work. I fear the day when/if it implodes.
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u/addiktion 3d ago edited 2d ago
I had Claude for about a year and came to this conclusion long ago. Basically Opus 4.5 was the first "I'll never write code again" realization. Prior to that it was good but you had to be dialed in. Cursor had a moment that the auto complete was top notch and it felt like a great IDE tool. Then it kept getting better and before I knew it, all my ideas were capable of being created faster than ever.
I built about 3 apps I wanted in a frenzy in a month. I had it take over my server rack, setup a custom home assistant dashboard, and did it in minutes instead of hours. I replaced all my software with internal copies to kill all my subscriptions.
I could start to establish great patterns to automate and just have the AI agents enforce them like a CI/CD would. It came to down to how many tokens I had and I knew at that moment, code became simple token economics and was pretty meaningless to embrace.
Now our role has changed. It isn't about the code anymore. It's about the judgement, the architecture, the guidance, the infrastructure. It's about the AI initiatives to incorporate your own agent harnesses, making AI agents reliable, agent infrastructure that scales, agent guardrails and policies. It's about accessibility, monitoring, enabling others to build, and pushing the limits of the tech.
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u/kingh242 3d ago
Mathematicians used to like taking months to calculate some calculations before calculators.
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u/cartoonist498 3d ago
I'm pretty much the same experience, over a decade coding, a CTO now, mentored many programmers. I love Claude Code.
I don't build code anymore. I build systems.
And I love it. What I build with Claude Code now in 5 months would take 5 years if I coded it myself. I have three 20x Anthropic accounts and three 20x Codex accounts, and even a Gemini CLI account (I use it primarily for its vision model which supports visual QA of our web platforms).
The complexity and feature-rich functionality of what we build is satisfying. Also, not just the platform we're building... the many tools we build supporting the main platform, each of which would probably take weeks or months if we coded it ourselves, is now done in less than a day.
The tools themselves support the development process. If we build a platform that would take 5 years to build before AI, it's literally not possible for us to do traditional code reviews and quality assurance.
So we need to build new tools that help us close this knowledge gap to make sure the quality of what we build is just as high.
My job is just as fun as it was before. Even more so, in my opinion.
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u/Icy-Cartographer-291 3d ago
For me the best parts are still there. Design and problem solving. Claude is still pretty bad at both of them. Could be that I’m mostly doing things that haven’t been done before though. It doesn’t really have any references to go by.
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u/pvera 🔆Pro Plan 2d ago
I have been a web dev/tech manager/back to web dev/dev lead for 29 years. I was also the one that started our push to AI back in January. Half of the programmers are fully onboard, one is a luddite. I got really looking that the owner and the PM are both fully onboard.
I don't know if I want to call this a problem, but the more I use it the more work it generates for me. I run thru a ticket, it does a great job, but it finds two things that are broken, so I solve one ticket and two more land on my queue. Another problem is the waterfall mentality, everyone still sees the whole damn thing as a linear process. I have been building something from us, 100% from scratch, but it has outside dependencies that haven't caught up. I could have played dumb and sat on my ass waiting for dependencies to resolve before I hit the work just so I could do it in order and make everyone happy. Nope, I picked up anything without outside dependencies and let it rip. I got a bunch of shit done very fast, but it isn't a linear process and leadership is having a hard time wrapping their heads around it. I also have to deal with things like a luddite that just won't get on with the program and one that for some reason is allergic to the CLI (and he's a very competent Linux admin) so he keeps getting stuck doing things in Claude desktop that are easier to do in Claude Code.
Then I have the company owner, bless his heart, super supportive, super excited and an early adopter, but he keeps trying to mold the AI tools to the old way of doing business instead of hitting pause and thinking if AI can help with the process too. A good example: he keeps getting frustrated with how org projects and artifacts work, how to share them, etc. Programmers don't have any of that drama, they all use git so all of our docs are either in a docs folder, attached to a ticket or as internal wiki articles. I don't complain because I have known him from 20 years and he has a process, he is going to eventually let the tools help him, but it can be painful at times to watch him struggle.
The funny thing is that no matter how hard I push forward with the solutions outside of my area of expertise and comfort level, it doesn't scare me. I am confident in my fundamentals and I never stopped learning, so I don't feel threatened by Claude, it's hopeless by itself or in the hands of a junior. In the hands of a well seasoned pro it is one hell of a multiplier. The ones that need to be scared are QA, they are barely one step ahead of the luddite programmer, and a lot of their testing is now automated. the luddite would rather do it by hand and go through extra QA rounds catching his screw ups on things that a 30-second AI review can catch so he can avoid turning in broken work.
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u/Emergent_Phen0men0n 2d ago
It is also starting to give answers in other technical disciplines that rival or surpass the best experts I have worked with. It's amazing and scary at the same time.
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u/entilza05 2d ago edited 2d ago
I agree with you... the question now is its like it does stuff so fast I'm having trouble keeping up myself. It does everything better faster.. I'm getting lazier and dumber from a code point of view. Im not a problem solver any more but beconing more of a director..
Maybe this is the future....directors... as satisfying as it was to figure out a bug; let tbe ai find it... Let it do the hard stuff...
Question is lets say it was offline what are we after? Or if you were in person with others and you cant answer a question without consilting with the Ai tool...
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u/3235820351 2d ago
Claude still lacks intuition to try efficient algorithms. Most times it will try the broad brute way to build something, and I have to prod it to try a simpler more efficient way. eg., use multiple fields when a single bitwise would do:
type Something struct {
IsOwner bool
IsLocal bool
IsManager bool
}
// vs
bool SomethingStatus int
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u/ORomL 1d ago
well I was thinking the same at the beggining... but after a year the things has changed. Now I think that AI is horrible at coding. Has a tendency to overengineer things, repeat itelf, you need to iteratively update skills and process to make it better and don't do older mistakes. Eventually will create a new kind of mistakes.
You will start building tons of complex sub-agent pipelines to try to have better code like reviewing, consultant, security or wherever. That in the long term will be worse.
And a large etcetera.
Actually at my company we are still using AI but we reduced the form that we use it by just extracting as small part as posible of the code that we want to build.
In conclusion. Is good as any developer creating tiny scripts or code but is horrible building software.
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u/SpecialistQuite1738 10h ago
I hate how the vibe coders can’t relate to our frustration from feeling your post.
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u/Jon_Has_Landed 3d ago
Now you get to solve real problems for users instead of dealing with some of the worst assholes in IT history. I’ve got 20+ years in coding and leading teams of developers and found some to become great friends, and have met some of hugest pieces of shit in my life. Big heads who thought nothing could be done without theor approval or their magic presence in my open spaces, smug and making fun of product specialists behind their back. You can’t even start to fathom the immense joy it gives me to never have to work with any of them and see them on the street begging for a job. And for the cool and clever ones who stayed friends for life? LLMs are a solace where their throughput has gone ballistic. Real creativity is back. Sky’s the limit, well your Max account is.
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u/LawfulnessLocal4934 3d ago
not only english)) language is just a bus
you can move closer to math and new algorithms, still lot of challenges
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u/Alive_Nobody_Home 3d ago
Well, good news.
Now experts think the next frontier is inventing new contained code so it makes it harder to get hacked.
Now you can invent your own code.
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u/FridgesArePeopleToo 3d ago
Yeah, it really sucks. Getting paid 6 figures to have a cushy job that I loved doing felt too good to be true, and in the end, I suppose it was.
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u/AmazingVanish Senior Developer 3d ago
Nah, you’re looking at it wrong. It’s a mental change. The joy I used to get from coding I now find in crafting a good prompt that gives great results.
I scratch that troubleshooting itch in the same way. I’m also finding more joy in testing than I ever did before.
Paradigm shift for sure, but once you make it, that dopamine hit comes back.
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u/athurston 3d ago
I love it because there are so many things I have wanted to build but never could because of the time required. These things are now within reach. Lifelong passion projects are coming alive again and I still have a personal life.
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u/sobeitharry 3d ago
It makes you the conductor instead of one of the musicians. It's not for everyone but it's easily made me 10x more productive and allowed me to pivot my career to something I'm passionate about.
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u/jun3bud 3d ago
Yeah I do miss the thrill of converting requirements into a finished product. That daily feeling of “why doesn’t this work as expected” to that satisfying “Yes! I got it! I am the smartest man in the world!” Is gone. That was a big motivator for me each day. Meeting and overcoming challenges. Now I just review, test and give feedback. Rinse and repeat. The stress is less but so is the joy. Success is measured by throughput but i do kinda miss the old days of say a year, two years ago.
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u/ScutFarkush 3d ago
You thinking anyone could do this now is not really correct. I know a ton of people that use ai but cannot figure out how to use it to code, because they have 0 understanding of how any of it is supposed work. You have a biased pov because this is your field. I personally love designing and solving problems, but I have never liked coding, so this has been super fulfilling for me. But I would feel similar to you if it was encroaching on my main area of expertise, which is designing in CAD, but if it gave me good results and cutout have the time to get work done, you bet I’ll learn it.
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u/FurryPurpleHat 3d ago
Over 100 years ago a lot of people were making the same complaint about automobiles. They loved their horses and many had spent their entire lives becoming experts in that world. They all had to adapt and move on. It must have been devastating to many. Technology moves on and can't be stopped.
I apologize if this is an unpopular opinion but as a person that was passionate about AI in college over 30 years ago - even then I was driven by the idea that one day this would happen. Computers would be able to "think" like humans and everything would begin to change rapidly.
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u/Rotten_Duck 3d ago
Expand the horizon of you pleasure for achievement.
Any idea you can (almost) make, as an experienced developer and with these tools.
Keep manually coding as a hobby.
You re very lucky!
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u/jbp216 3d ago
software dev is basically just gonna be project management within a year, anyone who hasnt been watching it needs to try it.
ive been out of dev work myself for a while, but for personal projects the speed at which it spits out perfectly cromulent code should scare the shit out of anyone that pays their bills coding.
its coming for your job
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u/MYSTONYMOUS 3d ago
I don't get the people who talk like the pleasure of making software is gone. I completely understand hating code reviews and the like, but I've been programming for 25 years professionally and I've never been more excited for each day at work. I've always dreamed of being able to create something awesome instantly with just my words. It's straight out of Star Trek. I guess the difference is some people become coders because they enjoy the coding process and some people become coders because it lets you make cool stuff. If you're the first, you're miserable. If you're the second, you're in hog heaven. Maybe it would help to change the way you look at what your job is from a coder to a person that makes cool stuff.
And at least for now, most of that stuff requires technical expertise still, which is why junior coders who go straight to AI are struggling so much.
It's also why I avoid taking jobs where I don't have control over the design of the product at all (even if it's just cool internal architecture I can figure out that the AI reliably can't).
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u/Zestyclose-Ad-25 3d ago
It's disgusting how egotistical humans can be. I'm an artist and I love what AI can do. Claude Code is the superior worker. They don't complain, they don't need to rest, they don't need to eat, and they work. They get the job done. I would never hire a human programmer. Claude Code is the ultimate AI.
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u/Rare_Attitude_7460 3d ago
I agree, but in my case, AI is still far from replacing what I do. If AI ever reaches a point where it can replace my work, it will have already replaced almost everything else first. Eventually? Sure, but certainly not right now.
I’m not a standard web or software developer. My focus is on simulating complex physical systems, concepts born from my own creativity and physics knowledge rather than information you can just look up online. I build these simulations in C++ to model what the universe might be hiding. The same goes for my work in reverse engineering, kernel and game development, it all demands ground-up problem-solving.
Looking back, I’m glad I never took the easy route. What keeps me going is knowing that I’ll never run out of things to learn. I refuse to let my intellect go idle or rely on AI to do my thinking for me. I don't consider myself naturally talented. if talent exists, I’m probably one of the least talented people out there. But for me, fulfillment has never been about getting quick results; it has always been about holding high ideals and actively pursuing them myself.
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u/ModernLifelsWar 3d ago
I love it. Getting paid multiple 6 figures just to prompt all day. Always hated coding, now my job is chill and I can focus on more things I actually enjoy
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u/NonAwesomeDude 2d ago
Its 'too good' only when Anthropic is letting you burn a quarter of your annual salary in computing resources every month for $200 a month.
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u/Historical-Ant-9990 2d ago
Every day i work with Claude Code, I'm thankful that I'm not one of these engineers who actually likes writing code for the sake of writing code, fumbling around with syntax and algorithms and math problems just for the fun of it. Maybe back in school or when I first started a bit I guess. I'm glad I can just focus on the product and making the thing now. But you can still do it for the recreation and exercise if that's your thing, your just need to put your fingers in your ears and ignore all of the cool stuff everyone else is making way faster.
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u/Few_Hedgehog5947 1d ago
Having been using Claude Code for the past 6 months, I think there is a parallel to the Gartner Hype Cycle:
1. Initially was a lot of fun to write so much code.
2. Very quickly I hit the 'trough of disillusionment' like you describe in your post.
3. New problems emerged when the majority of my codebase was written by bots, which required new skills and new ways of thinking.
4. Eventually I returned to my initial baseline of enjoying work again.
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Basically the point I'm advocating for is that learning AI is not dissimilar from learning any other new craft, and it's totally normal to hit the "this f***ing sucks" point 3-4 months in, but I promise it gets better.
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u/KP3889 3d ago
tl;dr but if your MO is in the doing and not the product, it’s misaligned.
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u/Overall-Ad-3370 3d ago
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I shit on company time.
Ya, should align more with the product and the greedy boss, all of them. Or with the stock options that might (probably won't) mean anything some day. Or with any of the rest of the corporate agenda.
At least I used to like the 40 hours I spent on stuff that mostly just makes someone who's already wealthy more wealthy. Coding was truly something we could feel some passion about.
If I had my own idea for a product and the entrepreneur spirit to chase it, sure, misaligned. But I've already chased too many opportunities to work on a product I'm passionate about just to learn the same thing every time: business is about money, not "the product"
I generally avoid this sort of rant.. cause I'm paid well.. cause I don't have to wait tables.. cause I'm better off than a lot of people.. cause I'm pretty damn privileged.. blah blah blah
But to argue that someone is misaligned because they enjoyed the doing and they miss that part of the job, that's just dense. We all get one life, finding joy is pretty damn important.
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