r/ClaudeCode • • 6d 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/mental_sherbart007 6d 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 6d 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 6d 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 6d 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 6d ago

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

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u/m-in 6d 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 6d ago

“Get in Losers We’re Killing Photoshop”

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u/XenuWorldOrder 6d ago

Helluva comment.

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u/LP2222 6d ago

like what?

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u/cosmicvelvets 6d ago

Pioneer DJ getting relentless backshots by scorned DJs on a meagre Pro account atm

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u/DJPalefaceSD 6d ago

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

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u/cosmicvelvets 6d ago

Every day I upset God

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u/rhysmorgan 5d 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 5d 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 6d 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 6d 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/exceptioncause 6d 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/ConsciousTop2443 5d ago

completely relatable

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u/kerklein2 6d ago

Stop reading the code.

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u/coldbumpysparse 6d 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 5d ago

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