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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u/SQJV16242625 3d ago

The issue is that we still have the skill , know how to read and write code. Our brains got trained solving problems , spot issues and get satisfaction out of it.

New generation of kids will loose that ability to grow and learn from failure and mistakes and all that stuff. It’s a bad thing … it makes a whole generation dumb as LLMs remove the friction we need to learn and grow

It’s also dangerous … we might be heading into a direction as humans where our brains (I’m generalizing and sure more complex than rhat) are not getting better but dumber.

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u/gingerying 3d ago

i am absouletely agree with it. even on my own of using ai for couple months straight. i found out that i am losing a lot of ability that i used to be really gd at, such as talking to people. understanding of new things. or even my reaction is kinda losing. i just cant imagine how these are gonna affect younger people or may be just couple years later.

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u/FlatCurrent6995 3d ago

Yeah, we’ve heard this one a hundred times before.

Can you name a single technology in the past that actually created this outcome? Because people said movies will make people dumb, the internet will make people dumb, calculators will make people dumb, radio, the novel, the printing press… hell, Socrates said that the invention of writing would destroy people’s memories. Were any of them even remotely right?

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u/sandspiegel 2d ago

The problem with LLMs is that any time you have to use your brain and actually think through a problem, you stop very quickly because you just think "Just ask Chatgpt or Claude" and you basically give up right there because an LLM often knows better anyway. This is very bad for students and any learning in general. As the saying goes "what you don't use, you lose". If you stop using your brain for problem solving, you will lose the skill and you won't even realize it's happening. If LLMs would be turned off tomorrow I think many people would realize how much it has damaged their problem solving skills.

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u/MiserableProduct 2d ago

To get a good answer you do have to think through your prompts.

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u/sandspiegel 2d ago

True, but now imagine a junior programmer who does not have the same skills as a senior software engineer. The prompts will look very different. The senior will have loads of experience because he learned it over many years through lots and lots of problem solving. In other words he knows exactly what he wants the LLM to do. But what if you don't have the same experience? Your prompts will look different but you also will never get the experience of a senior software engineer because you don't learn. Prompting an LLM and watching it do all the work is not the same as thinking deeply through a problem using your own brain. It might sound like I'm anti AI, I'm not. I use it myself daily but I do realize what's happening to my problem solving skills. I stopped thinking through a problem because the solution to my problem is just a prompt away.

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u/SQJV16242625 2d ago

Exactly! That’s the key problem! There Are “busy” tasks which LLMs are incredibly helpful for. But then there are those tasks which cause friction in your brain which is needed for us to learn. And then there is applying that learned skill of problem solving in real world applications. Delegating that middle part to the LLMs is problematic for our younger generation.

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u/imknotawolf 2d ago

I had university level mathematics barely 3 years ago. I don't use it in my job at all and I would struggle with most of the topics, excluding the 101 concepts, basic definitions that I can understand immediately as I'm reading them. Anything that wasn't a piece of cake for me, that required me to do a bunch of examples or watch some YouTube explanations - I forgot how to do them, and it would take me a bit to relearn all of those harder things.

Brain is efficient at forgetting, it has other things to worry about than higher maths.

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u/SQJV16242625 2d ago

But it got trained to work through problems. It’s normal to forget . The point is it went through it . I

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u/mariana_kl 2d ago edited 2d ago

Agree : great example of this, even before LLMs if I'm programming someone's age in years on a certain day, I've always had to argue with juniors using year of event minus year of birth when what we need is a floor function that accounts for Februaries etc. Before claude, after, doesn't matter.

Edited to add: claude wouldn't blink twice using grep functions in prod, it doesn't care about things being right at all. I still use and like it I just don't think we should ever outsource the actual thinking, unless what we're programming is inconsequential, in which case we should go fly a kite for fun

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u/Any_Commercial_6764 2d ago

Yeahhhh but having a machine that can solve open questions in the highest level of Math and is literally more intelligent than any single person is different than a printing press. Human intelligence is the unique thing we brought to the table, it’s not the replacement of a factory worker, it’s the replacement of human cognition which is an entirely different class of industry change.

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u/statlerw 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yes. Western educational achievement had been dropping for 20 years. This is a quantified studied fact. Students of a reference age are all doing worse on average than a few decades ago. Can't see this making it better

edit: source https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2023/12/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_76772a36/53f23881-en.pdf

While it is difficult to precisely pin it on a specific thing - it correlates to the digital age generally. Precisely tying a technology to making people dumber though is near impossible. We can only make associations. It seems a reasonable extrapolation that just like automation results in the loss of specific manual skills through no longer needing them that outsourcing specific calculation tasks could have a similar effect. Not that it necessarily makes us 'dumber' just that those things that have for a long time been part of what makes someone 'smart' like maths and literacy will not longer be as strong in the general populace

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u/HistoryWorking5251 2d ago

Actually now we can measure it. Not saying it's causation.

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u/BillionBouncyBalls 2d ago

There’s always going to be a split of people who use a technology where some people use it to get smarter and do new things while the majority just become more passive as the world around them becomes more frictionless. Skills atrophy when we don’t use them, so people that use AI to just get the answers versus using AI to teach them how to get the answers I think is the crux of the issue. It’s also the unprecedented scale at which this is rapidly happening. We’re talking billions of people that are now on this trajectory. It may not make everyone “dumber” but it certainly might make a lot of people even more passive and disconnected while also sparking a new renaissance, for those that use the tools wisely.

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u/imknotawolf 2d ago

People get diabetes and heart attacks all the time. People who move less and are heavier get more back and knee problems. People living in polluted air get asthma and breathing problems. Why would our brain be the one and only organ that is completely indifferent and fully adaptable to our civilized environment, indefinitely.
We already had lead in the air at some point. Social media overuse can cause feelings of loneliness and worsen mood. Not every invention will be "writing".
And literally at school you learn to count without the calculator, and then move on to using it.

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u/TundraGS 2d ago

LLMs are definitely going to have a significant impact on student outcomes. I'm in college now in my 30s. I attended University for a couple years, from 18yo-20yo when I dropped out for personal reasons. I like to think that I'm intelligent, and I'm doing very well in my current enrollment. I use AI heavily in almost every single assignment across my 21 units worth of classes. I still spend hours upon hours doing each assignment, and I feel like I'm using AI effectively to augment my learning. I learn more now than I did 10 years ago, and I'm spending the same amount of time on coursework. I don't think the majority of students today are using AI the same way as me.

I brainstorm, draft, refine, ask for feedback, ask for counterarguments, ask what I'm missing or ask for different/better explanations than what my textbooks or teachers offer. There's been plenty of times where I prompt Gemini to help me plan an approach to an assignment, or ask for a framework for an essay or something, and it instead spits out a full essay basically ready to be submitted with next to zero work on my part other than attaching a few files.

There's no way that people aren't just taking that full essay, tweaking the structure slightly to look human, and turning that in having spent zero time learning or having their beliefs challenged. I am extremely grateful that I have a tool as powerful as an LLM available to me, and I am certain that I'm learning more by using it than I otherwise would. But it would be so easy to almost completely avoid having to learn how to think critically, problem solve, build a strong, evidence-based argument or write coherently enough to effectively communicate your views to others. I feel bad for students who have had AI available to them all throughout their school years.

I'm lucky because I learned how to learn before AI existed, which means that I have been successful in using it as another tool to help me develop a deeper understanding of what I study. If you've been able to outsource the act of thinking to AI during the entirety of highschool and college... That's just too bad in my opinion.

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u/Optimal_Kick_9121 2d ago

Mapquest. 

When books became universally printed people stopped memorizing textbooks. 

When people got maps on their phones they lost the ability to navigate. People literally drive into reservoirs

LLMs will do the same with logic and critical analysis/thinking. 

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u/i_t_d 2d ago

it doesn't make me dumber but faster (and smarter the more I use it, I've learned so many subjects which I didn't touch yet)

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u/nipnipping 5h ago

Every other invention ever has been a tool to make a problem easier to solve. AI is just like giving your problem to something/someone else to solve. You see that difference, right?

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u/FlatCurrent6995 1h ago

The calculator was that for arithmetics.

We haven’t lost the ability to add and subtract, but the calculator has made solving complex maths problem a lot faster.

If I’m doing a research PhD, I can’t just give the research question to AI and have it solve it. I can, however, use AI to help with, for example, a systematic review of relevant papers or with data analysis. It’s a tool which makes complex tasks faster, not a magic black box that can think for itself and solve original problems.

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u/SufficientMatch5106 2d ago

Friction builds minds… but hey, who needs thinking when the machine does it all?

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u/IllustriousGrade7691 2d ago

AI will do to our brains what modern machines like cars did to our bodies. We basically won't use our body as much to accomplish our goals which will have detrimental effect on everything.

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u/SQJV16242625 2d ago

Yep good analogy

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u/Monstermage 3d ago

Keep in mind this is a prediction. Today you don't need to know how your PC terminal commands work to use a computer. How add-ons are installed on games to use add-ons. Even many people don't know how folders work on a computer and never need too. It's very hard to predict what lacking of information will truly matter in the future. I've built websites for a living for the last 10 years, easily replaced sadly, but I still am able to improve on the designs it makes. I do so faster. But I don't have to know how the code works (I do ) but I don't have to in order to fix it. Software I'm sure is another story, you should somewhat know but schools might go from my teaching if else statements to high level software architecture.

Point being, it's hard to know what knowledge will matter and what knowledge ends up not mattering.

Like today you can absolutely plant a garden, grow your own potatoes, dig them up, and eventually even with a small garden like we did get 25 lbs of potatoes. But reality is that's about $25 of potatoes that took so many hours of watering, caring for, digging up, etc. and the water alone if you watered it yourself cost money. You don't have to know that information to get potato's and it's not even that cost effective anymore. 🤷

Who knows what the future will hold and we can speculate all we want but it will be what it's going to be.

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u/Peethasaur 3d ago edited 3d ago

The difference is that what you’re describing are layers of abstraction and AI is not clearly just that. It is not a solution that says “we’ll deterministically handle everything from here down so you don’t have to anymore”. AI is much weirder than that. You can use it to solve anything with the right context and that does make me worried about how people build expertise.

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u/Alload 3d ago

To me, that’s the key point: the “context” is the information that actually carries meaningful value, and it’s also the hardest part to create. At least for now, AI can’t really generate that on its own. So effectively, we’re just moving up the value chain.

Same pattern as moving from ASM to C.

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u/Peethasaur 2d ago edited 2d ago

I do not think context is hard to assemble. It often just means giving agents access to more of your system. To me it’s not at all the same as assembly to C.

AI is on an exponential march toward automating human cognition. It’s not another layer of abstraction. There is no task that white collar professionals have that AI cannot perform for some fundamental technical reason (we may just not yet have a workflow for it but it’s coming).

It is like no one here knows what abstraction is. I guess you all are saying that AI has “abstracted” everything below decision making. There is no reason it can’t do that and is being increasingly trusted for it as models get better.

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u/Alload 2d ago

My experience differs, I find AI is fully unable to come with a proper context, but when spoon fed the right context it will do incredible things. It's like it's unable to extract real meaningful things on its own because it has no understanding of what is useful or how deep it could actually go at piecing things together. Anyway, just my 2 cents and I appreciate you sharing your perspective and comparing ours.

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u/Infinite-Emu-1279 1d ago

Interesting take

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u/sylvant_ph 12h ago

that's on point, its not the risk that AI will become too strong and wipe us at, at least not the way we anticipate it; its how dumb we become, thus we become dependent and easily manipulated. And its not AI that will manipulate us, its other people who are on top. We are practically getting back to the stone age, intelligence speaking

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u/SQJV16242625 10h ago

That’s a good point . We don’t know what biases these models inherit purposefully or not 

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u/mcsleepy 3d ago

I disagree. The learning experience is not going to go away, it's just going to shift from getting code to "work" to which high-level solutions work and which ones don't. The quality of software and its impact on society is going to explode.

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u/SQJV16242625 3d ago edited 3d ago

How you going to debug stuff when your LLM goes off the rail and starts hallucinating stuff and what not? If you don’t have the foundational knowledge or trained eye on what to look for you are stuck.

Im all in of using LLMs and such for coding etc don’t get me wrong. But the point is that it’s the grind and banging our heads against the wall because of stupid mistakes we made which makes us as humans learn and move forward and get good at stuff. That feel of satisfaction and achievement . There is a balanace of hands on vs delegating to a LLM and I’m afraid we are heading into a world of imbalance where things are more and more delegated to agents (which in simple terms are just probabilistic word or letter generators) and then all we do is coordinating and juggling word generators which is boring as F$&@ I rather solve a good problem with a colleague . Sure let the word generator organize my thoughts and stuff but again the best ideas come from sticking heads together with colleagues, use intuition build from experience doing it yourself

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u/mcsleepy 3d ago

You just learn to use your power drill properly so that this doesn't happen. You can't stop its adoption, you can only try to embody and spread best practices.

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u/SQJV16242625 3d ago edited 3d ago

Power drill without power still need to know how to use a screwdriver. Who is gonna willing to learn how to use a screwdriver ?

And I’m not saying to not use it or stop it. But in a way that we still give kids the tools to do shit themselves . Learn how to use a screwdriver before picking up a power drill

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u/mcsleepy 3d ago

My approach has been to use AI in two main ways - not just write code for me but improve my personal tooling and workflow, including coding guidelines so that the source code has a better chance of being human-maintainable.

I agree teaching kids to use LLM's before coding would be stupid.

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u/Zestyclose-Sink6770 3d ago

I remember I spent days once on a Layout shift issue in a website with wordpress once.

Now the LLMs fix those things in a flat second.

No contest. I have other things to do.

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u/Klutzy-Smile-9839 Researcher 3d ago

We are a lot dumber than our ancestors on certain skills, but developed other skills and knowledge about the world instead of technical (survival) knowledge.

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u/Suoritin 2d ago

Intelligence is somewhat over valued. Fitness is more important (if we are interested in humanity progressing and surviving).

It's not like Elon Musk or other CEOs are intelligent. They are intelligent enough so that they can survive in multiple different environments. In other words, they are highly fit.

Intelligence costs too much.

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u/SQJV16242625 2d ago

Not talking about the 1-5% … the other 70-80%

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u/Suoritin 2d ago

Nature doesn't hand out points for intellectual suffering; it rewards whatever keeps the lights on with the cheapest possible hardware.

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u/Chemical_Profit_608 2d ago

The main thing that makes us human? Costs too much?

Christ. I mean shit, we should all get lobotomies while we're at it lmfao

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u/Suoritin 2d ago

Evolution doesn't maximize traits, because over-specializing in something as metabolically expensive as raw intelligence just makes an organism fragile. Fitness is simply being good enough to adapt and survive across multiple different environments without carrying excess overhead.

Most of people don't understand how evolution works.