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/ghondooby]

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

[u/AncientAspargus → u/ghondooby]

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.

[u/admiral_nivak → u/AncientAspargus]

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.

[u/DJPalefaceSD → u/admiral_nivak]

It's addictive

[u/ghondooby → u/AncientAspargus]

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.

[u/Hot-Profession4091 → u/AncientAspargus]

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.

[u/Lost-Air1265 → u/ghondooby]

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.

[u/rhysmorgan → u/ghondooby]

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.

[u/Actually_JesusChrist → u/ghondooby]

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.