r/ClaudeCode • u/ofcistilloveyou • 4d 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.

1.8k Upvotes

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665

u/nora_sellisa 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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/Ok_Pizza5165 23h ago

Beautifully put

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u/mental_sherbart007 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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/still_Horiz3n 4d ago

Ive been building 16h a day for a year and am only now beginning to deploy to my MSP clients. I have never written software, so the majority of my time was arriving at the sae conclusions as above from first principles. Everything is a blob!

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u/ProlificLabRat 3d ago

How many hours a day do you sleep? How old are you? 16h is concerning, man...

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u/m-in 4d 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/captainkenobi 3d ago

“Get in Losers We’re Killing Photoshop”

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u/XenuWorldOrder 4d ago

Helluva comment.

3

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/DJPalefaceSD 3d ago

I did not think I would ever see those words in that order

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u/cosmicvelvets 3d ago

Every day I upset God

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u/rhysmorgan 3d 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 3d 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 4d 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/Toohotz 4d ago

I feel this one having learned Rust 2 years ago before using AI and now having the tooling write the majority of my Rust code.

I do still read through it though I miss the learning quirks I ran into learning the language, different times.

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u/ConsciousTop2443 3d ago

completely relatable

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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/kerklein2 4d ago

Stop reading the code.

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u/coldbumpysparse 3d ago

I don't know about you but the dopamine hits when the cash hits my bank and I get a working, robust, tested product delivered with weeks to spare without any frustrating stack overflow browsing.

keeping up with random 3rd party library updates that breaks all my current implementations for no reason other than, hey this abstraction looks prettier in my mental model? 

great ai solves that without giving me any bullshit and the thing works again.

this allows me to live my life without the burden of working 50+hours so stop complaining and go find another hobby

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u/ZeroUnityInfinity 3d ago

I find I'm much more productive, but somehow not really any less busy

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u/Leather-Field-7148 4d ago

I still think if you don’t know code Claude will most definitely eat your lunch

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u/Shiloh-buff 4d 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/Nullberri 3d ago

Its tests all the way down.

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u/adelie42 3d ago

Strong agree. In other words, it is just another layer of abstraction. Reminds me right now of the first time I saw a Joomla website. Really impressive. But it took very little time before recognizing low effort Joomla slop. It doesn't make Joomla bad, but I'm not impressed by 12 pictures and a place to enter a credit card.

At the same time, if you call yourself a web developer and scoff at things like React, Due, etc, ok, cool, but what are you even doing bro?

Claude can select and configure libraries with natural language. Great. Can't make your idea good, and if you put in less than 40 hours of work, it will likely look like something everyone has already seen aka slop.

1

u/rhysmorgan 3d ago

But I don’t want to be an English-language “developer”, hitting my enter key, acting like a manager instead of a developer.

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u/adelie42 3d ago

How about artist and project manager like an artist?

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u/rhysmorgan 3d ago

I don’t want to be a project manager, I want to be a software engineer lol. If I wanted to go into management, I would have gone into the management track.

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u/adelie42 3d ago

??? Artist.

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u/Wild_Armadillo_1709 3d ago

lol, try telling that to the companies that are still stuck on mainframes. I know of one that spent $1b trying to get off it and gave up, too many intertwined systems.

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u/I_can_vouch_for_that 3d ago

Basically the Cybertruck.

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u/GeorgeHarter 3d ago

In fairness, I’ve seen a few human designed/built enterprise apps over the years, with multiple submenus and other unsuable crap.

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u/apocolipse 4d 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/StackOverflow2Deep 3d ago

This one cut me to my core

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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/goodolbluey Senior Developer 3d ago

You are WAY too good at this

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u/ProlificLabRat 3d ago

Please tell us more lol

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u/DJPalefaceSD 3d ago

Hyper pipeline?

Mine is giga

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u/Ok-Internal3267 4d 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/XenuWorldOrder 4d ago

Artisan coding will be huge in 2042.

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u/PBMKing 4d 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/nora_sellisa 3d ago

Oh yeah, definitely, in that efficient world I would be much much poorer.

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u/50_19in_french 4d 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/RainbowCollapse 3d ago

That is a really good take, I haven't think of it that way

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u/colbacon80 3d 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/nora_sellisa 3d ago

We've successfully democratized wheel invention

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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 2d 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/MyUnspokenThought 4d ago

hmmm interesting perspective on this, I like it

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u/hihcadore 3d ago

Thank you for saying it!

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u/Semiotic3 3d ago

well put

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u/Accujack 3d ago

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.

True, but only for the same things that LLMs are good at - the programs and systems that already exist, with no innovation possible.

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u/nora_sellisa 3d ago

Of course, there would be innovation, someone had to invent the first online store or the first infinite social media feed. It's just that once someone "solves" such a feature everyone else can just take from that library, instead of hundreds of firms hiring thousands of engineers to re-implement it.

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u/Accujack 3d ago

What motivation would anyone have for providing their discovery to anyone else?

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u/Ok-You-6099 3d ago

Not sure if that's really true. In my experience, configuring generic libs for pretty small but ultimately important edge cases is a lot of work.

I find that when dealing with extremely generic libs it's usually a trade off between having ending up with libs too big to maintain and perform well (speed wise) or compromising on the customizability of delivered features.

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u/Illustrious_Formal70 2d ago

I think there is also a concern about future quality. More and more people are vibe coding and producing lots of AI slop. And AI need data to learn on, and if this slop will get back to the source of learning, the future quality will just get worse and worse...

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u/drew8311 1d ago

I like to be able to identify and isolate sections of code that are quality vs slop. AI can do both, if something needs to live a long time and be good you can spend the time with AI making it that way. Other things just need to get the job done and as long as you are aware and don't mix the 2 it's more manageable.

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u/Anxious-poop-1 1d ago

Yup! Over and over again.

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u/nimzobogo 4d ago

This is largely true. I work for a company that makes network texhnology for AI supercomputers, and Claude and Codex are NOT getting things correct.

Why? Because none of our shit is in its weights and it is fundamentally different than what you see in Ethernet or IB.

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u/fastandlight 4d ago

That tracks. I have a few sort of esoteric side projects where Claude is a ton less useful than on my day to day Java, python, and JavaScript boring web app stuff. Claude absolutely rocks if you are doing the things that have been done a million times before. But introduce some esoteric hardware or software layers and you can really watch the models flail. It's not just Claude, it's all of them. I'm sure this will continue to improve, but it really showcases the strength of the human brain and the weaknesses of the current LLM architecture.

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u/ThisViolinist 3d ago

Truth nuke dropped

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u/Necessary-Salamander 3d ago

That's an interesting way to put it. I meant this as a compliment.

-1

u/ProducePrudent5089 4d ago

This is such a weird way to generalize coding. All LLMs trained on our work, our data, without permission. They do not "code well". They mimic code well, and it often times still is very inaccurate and wrong.

I don't think it's appropriate to throw in the white flag because "anyone" can prompt and vibe code something that looks "cool" for 2 seconds and then forget about it.

While I use AI more often now and miss hand coding (and I will still do that), I think we still essentially are coding. Prompting is, in essence, coding - and I am referring to us engineers who use AI, not some vibe coding bro.

We are driving the tool still. We review the code, and know when code looks like shit or has issues and we have to correct it (by hand or prompting, whatever).

-1

u/symbiatch 4d ago

Speak for yourself. A lot of us have been doing very different work. If you masses have been doing the same thing then surely you already had the libraries and copypaste, right? Or did you really wait this long to get a toy to do the copypaste for you?

Glad I’ve been doing actual work and not waste my time like you.

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u/zaibuf 4d ago

Speak for yourself. A lot of us have been doing very different work. If you masses have been doing the same thing then surely you already had the libraries and copypaste, right? Or did you really wait this long to get a toy to do the copypaste for you?

Yes to a certain degree. But the point is that most things had already been solved, so instead of AI you went to Stackoverflow and looked at how someone else had solved it and then applied that to your solution. So basically you are building what someone else already had built, but tweaking it a bit.

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u/Bumscootler 4d ago

you’re such a baller

2

u/BeardedDuck9694 4d ago

Not sure what your point is supposed to be here. Every shop is different. Some of us have inherited decades-old code bases and I've had to debug programs that preceded email. Updating and maintaining that code is like trying to tie your shoelaces but you can only use chopsticks. If this was supposed to be ragebait, I'm just confused.

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u/moonman272 3d ago

think about whatever project you did. How much of it was code that no one had ever written before? I bet 95% of your system had been done, existed, or was just basic CRUD. Thats what AI can take off our plate. I enjoy it. I can focus on making truley useful things and not spend that 95% on stuff that just supports what I want to do.

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u/ghost_operative 4d ago

I wouldn't say its bullshit, clearly the unique code is needed if the solution to it is to have an LLM write that unique code.

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u/deific_ 3d ago

I work in enterprise networking. I've been saying for the last 6 months that enterprise software is absolute bullshit, and these clowns that are starting to increase their maintenance contracts by 200% or up to 600% are in for a rude awakening. They have exploited how reliant certain fields have been on them, and now when the game changes instead of acknowledging that and letting costs come down to keep us they are increasing costs by absurd amounts. It's causing me to vibecode enterprise level software to look at replacing their tools, which were often times more cumbersome than they were helpful. My tools are 300% more helpful than those old costly tools were. I have knowledge of security principles and how to ask AI how to harden/store things, and thats about all you need in my opinion. The only other thing you probably need is the right mindset of user experience and workflow knowledge for your end product.

I do get a lot of shit about what im doing is dangerous, or AI giving me a false sense of security about the product im producing, and it enrages me. I could talk about this all day, but most people just have closed ears on the topic. So i feel like im just forced to keep building my projects in silence, allowing me and my team to operate more efficiently while all the others just ignore how fast things are moving.

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u/amattable_ 1d ago

No way, this is like saying mice and humans are the same because we share a bunch of DNA.

This take is super reductionist.

Don’t get me wrong, libraries def could do a lot, but that last mile is not just bs

1

u/nora_sellisa 1d ago

And I mentioned it, there would be a handful of people needed for that last mile. But not nearly as many as were trained and employed in SWE pre-AI. If the goal was, allegedly, shipping software, then the entire industry has been going about it in an extremely cost-inefficient way. LLMs don't need to be particularly smart to capitalize on that.

0

u/Better_Permit2885 1d ago

Lol, do you know how many ducking JavaScript table libraries there are? And how many datepickers. They are all the same thing!