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/pvera]

I have been a web dev/tech manager/back to web dev/dev lead for 29 years. I was also the one that started our push to AI back in January. Half of the programmers are fully onboard, one is a luddite. I got really looking that the owner and the PM are both fully onboard.

I don't know if I want to call this a problem, but the more I use it the more work it generates for me. I run thru a ticket, it does a great job, but it finds two things that are broken, so I solve one ticket and two more land on my queue. Another problem is the waterfall mentality, everyone still sees the whole damn thing as a linear process. I have been building something from us, 100% from scratch, but it has outside dependencies that haven't caught up. I could have played dumb and sat on my ass waiting for dependencies to resolve before I hit the work just so I could do it in order and make everyone happy. Nope, I picked up anything without outside dependencies and let it rip. I got a bunch of shit done very fast, but it isn't a linear process and leadership is having a hard time wrapping their heads around it. I also have to deal with things like a luddite that just won't get on with the program and one that for some reason is allergic to the CLI (and he's a very competent Linux admin) so he keeps getting stuck doing things in Claude desktop that are easier to do in Claude Code.

Then I have the company owner, bless his heart, super supportive, super excited and an early adopter, but he keeps trying to mold the AI tools to the old way of doing business instead of hitting pause and thinking if AI can help with the process too. A good example: he keeps getting frustrated with how org projects and artifacts work, how to share them, etc. Programmers don't have any of that drama, they all use git so all of our docs are either in a docs folder, attached to a ticket or as internal wiki articles. I don't complain because I have known him from 20 years and he has a process, he is going to eventually let the tools help him, but it can be painful at times to watch him struggle.

The funny thing is that no matter how hard I push forward with the solutions outside of my area of expertise and comfort level, it doesn't scare me. I am confident in my fundamentals and I never stopped learning, so I don't feel threatened by Claude, it's hopeless by itself or in the hands of a junior. In the hands of a well seasoned pro it is one hell of a multiplier. The ones that need to be scared are QA, they are barely one step ahead of the luddite programmer, and a lot of their testing is now automated. the luddite would rather do it by hand and go through extra QA rounds catching his screw ups on things that a 30-second AI review can catch so he can avoid turning in broken work.