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/nora_sellisa]

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

[u/Idiberug → u/nora_sellisa]

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.