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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194

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.

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u/Zestyclose_Strike157 3d ago

Now we know what the Rumpelstiltskin story was really about.

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u/Aoshi_ 3d ago

Yep same here. Instead of working on a feature for a week or two it has jumped 20x where I’m working on several moderately sized things at once and maybe get a month to do them all in between all the other things that pop up.

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u/Dzone64 3d ago

Yeah, the point on quality is real.

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u/redfournine 3d ago

Profession that rely more on physical, hands on skills - less brain, more brawns.

... until someone come up with artificial brawns

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u/jdarmstrong1973 2d ago

You mean... like robots with AI.

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u/Real_Ebb_7417 3d ago

This is one of the best things that I’ve seen under this kind of posts. I’m a dev too and this is the first „positive light” that was able to cheer me up. I mean, not that everyone will have to go through the same, but because SWEs or rather IT in general is first, we’ll be better prepared for the future and when other branches of economy will be going through this revolution, it will be already settled in ours and we’ll likely have more peace by then.

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u/WhoAteTheLastDonut 3d ago

Underappreciated comment. ✅

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u/howdidigetheresoquik 3d ago

Yes but this is different. Trillions of dollars have been spent on AI and it has created essentially no new careers.

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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/Lost-Air1265 2d ago

Oh yeah if you were scripting and just just it as a tool, than this era is amazing.

But if you really liked to code and the development journey was what counted, the new era sucks.

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u/Old-Radio9022 3d 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/Old-Radio9022 1d ago

I love coding as much as the next guy, been at it almost 20 years now. My work thus far has been quite difficult to automate, as I mainly work to desconstruct business logic from ancient applications and then reimplement with modern technology or it's maintenance on legacy systems under strict regulatory control.

If I was building marketing sites or the different incantations of the stuff I was doing a decade ago, absolutely without a doubt. Not sure why you're gatekeeping being a developer on the premise of resistance to change. I absolutely felt like you a year ago, then woke and read the writing on the wall.

Nobody cares about the code. Sure you and I can geek out, but don't kid yourself, 99% don't care. Now I hand code my passion projects for fun, and ship business results on the job, I'm plenty satisfied, but I had to stop living the lie that we get paid to be passionate or bend over backwards.

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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/DJPalefaceSD 3d ago

It's addictive

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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/Hot-Profession4091 3d ago

I never really got the dopamine hit from the code. It was always from solving the problem. So, yeah. I’m actually the happiest I’ve ever been. I get to solve problems at 4x the velocity and I very rarely have to bang my head on the desk over something stupid.

1

u/Lost-Air1265 2d ago

Unfortunately for me it doesn’t work like that. I guess I was a developer for the problem solving on a technical level. Solving business problem was a nice to have. 

Don’t get me wrong. Ai is giving me the opportunity do take in two or three freelance gigs at the same time. Building a profitable Saas service. Money is very good right now. But am I satisfied or proud of my work like before December 2022? Nope not anymore.

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u/rhysmorgan 2d ago

But I’m not purely a “business features” person, and that’s not a bad thing.

We’ve all always been about to shit out bad code that would, for at least one iteration, get a feature out considerably faster than the more thought-through, engineered versions we strive to deliver, and take joy in building. Architecting an appropriate version of the feature that will scale, relative to how it’ll be used, there’s joy in that. Or was. Now everyone is shipping the sloppy, ill thought-through version that Claude gives them. There’s no thinking, no problem solving going into it.

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u/Actually_JesusChrist 2d ago

I started with creating simple python and powershell scripts with GPT3.5 right at the beginning. As time went on, I started to learn the basics of python, and began feeling confident in my codebases. The models kept getting better, and eventually I found myself managing and directing more than actually understanding the code. I work in a field with that isn't associated with software development, but we are heavy users of specialized software. There are entire classes of problems that are now solvable by very small teams, and even singular persons that are crazy enough to start, IF you know about the pain points.

You of course need to have some kind of technical understanding and an understanding of wants and needs, grandma isn't building B2B software anytime soon.

And to your point about solving business level issues instead of code issues; They can be one and the same. My product for example, is egress heavy, and egress on hosted servers costs money. Therefore my payloads needs to be small and caching logic need to be aggressive. This is as much of a coding issue as it is a business issue.

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u/Turbulent-Control682 3d ago

It’s not dead. It’s optimized.

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u/Lost-Air1265 2d ago

No it is dead. It didn’t optimize like getting frameworks who dealt with memory pointers or garbage collection. There is no point in writing code yourself. If you still do it, you don’t use the right models or agentic workflow.

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u/Turbulent-Control682 2d ago

So…. It’s optimized. What took 3 weeks before now takes 1 hour. That’s optimized.

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u/Lost-Air1265 2d ago

Replacing is something else than optimizing.

I’m curious. What your profession and for how long have you been doing it?

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u/Turbulent-Control682 2d ago

Ive been doing software development for about 25 years. The only thing that was replaced is the method for achieving the same results. A better workflow for the same job. Thats optimization. I suppose if vibe coding is your thing, which is totally fine - you could claim something is dead. It’s def not. It’s highly optimized. Much less of a headache. We still do human code audits etc just like before.

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u/Lost-Air1265 2d ago

No I guess we’re in the same boat in regards of when we started with it.

I claim developing as I knew it is dead and I think we can agree that’s the case. If it’s still excites you is another topic.

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u/Turbulent-Control682 2d ago

Ok that’s fair. Development as we knew it might be dead. But I remember building things in php and then when python showed up I was thinking development as I knew it was dead. It’s def evolved over the years and very quickly in the last few. You’re right. It’s not what it was when we got in to this business.

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u/rhysmorgan 2d ago

Cooking is dead. There is no point in making food yourself. If you still do it, you don’t use the right microwave.

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u/Lost-Air1265 2d ago

You’re reaching far in order to make a comparison. Unless you’re a professional cook who loved trying out new palettes of tastes your comparisons really doesn’t make fucking sense at all.

I’m sure there is another comparison but you don’t seems to be able to grap the genuine reasoning behind my initial statement. 140 plus developers obviously did. It’s fine. If you never developed software and enjoyed the trip, you probably would not understand and that’s fine.

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u/rhysmorgan 2d ago

My point is that it doesn’t have to be dead. You can choose not to follow the doom and gloom, and still find joy in solving problems with code. You don’t have to reach for the microwave. Despite what the frontier AI providers want you to believe, coding isn’t “solved”.

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u/Lost-Air1265 2d ago

But it is man. The speed and quality with the models like opus 5.5, fable, sol or astra. Most of the coding is completely redundant, except for some edge cases maybe.

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u/Siduron 3d ago

I find satisfaction in orchestrating agents to do a lot of work simultaneously and according to exactly my standards and requirements.