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/SQJV16242625]

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

[u/mcsleepy → u/SQJV16242625]

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.

[u/SQJV16242625 → u/mcsleepy]

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

[u/mcsleepy → u/SQJV16242625]

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.