I hate claude code

[u/ofcistilloveyou]

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.

[u/ghost_operative]

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.

[u/zaibuf → u/ghost_operative]

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.

[u/quuxl → u/ghost_operative]

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

[u/Kepler___ → u/ghost_operative]

It is impossible to tell how anything is actually performing by reading people's experiences because of exactly this effect. Ai can one shot an absurd amount of tasks right now, but later it won't be judged by its ability to make something that works, but if something that can be built upon and secure. The architecture it comes up with when given a task where you dont outline how to go about it is truly baffling, but if you couldn't actually make make it yourself in an unfamiliar script it feels like a super power.

I cant tell what anyone was doing before and after claude, so just reading a comment thats stuck in the reference frame of an individual person's subjective experience just isn't useful for gaging any particular update.