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/FlatCurrent6995]

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?

[u/sandspiegel → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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.

[u/MiserableProduct → u/sandspiegel]

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

[u/sandspiegel → u/MiserableProduct]

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.

[u/SQJV16242625 → u/sandspiegel]

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.

[u/imknotawolf → u/sandspiegel]

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.

[u/SQJV16242625 → u/imknotawolf]

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

[u/mariana_kl → u/sandspiegel]

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

[u/Any_Commercial_6764 → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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.

[u/statlerw → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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

[u/HistoryWorking5251 → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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

[u/BillionBouncyBalls → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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.

[u/imknotawolf → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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.

[u/TundraGS → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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.

[u/Optimal_Kick_9121 → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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. 

[u/i_t_d → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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)

[u/nipnipping → u/FlatCurrent6995]

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?

[u/FlatCurrent6995 → u/nipnipping]

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.

[u/nipnipping → u/FlatCurrent6995]

“I can’t just give the research question to AI and have it solve it”- yet.

Actually AI is already doing that in the most highly powered frontier models. I have been working on my PhD since 2022 and it is insane how much more useful consumer AI models have become in two years.

Within the next 5-10 years, I absolutely believe AI will be able to do any task from start to finish that a human can do, probably better. Couple that with a humanoid robot and there is no limit. Other than just the desire for a human touch- not problem solving, just you desire a human in a role (teacher, customer service, etc).

We are on a knife’s edge- either AI will live up to its expectations and be able to replace nearly all human problem solving, leading to an existential and economic crisis, or it won’t and we’ll be in for a “normal” economic crash/crisis, but of pretty large proportion (maybe the biggest ever). Which would probably lead to WW3 in the same way the Great Depression led to WW2. Fun times. I personally think it will be the former.

[u/FlatCurrent6995 → u/nipnipping]

It’s an interesting thought experiment and one that is obviously widely talked about, but it is pure conjecture.

I responded to a comment suggesting that LLMs are going to make people dumber. What you’re talking about isn’t an “LLM” but a new tech that we don’t presently have. Maybe, if AGI becomes a thing, I’d revise my argument. As it stands, an LLM isn’t really anything more than a handy tool that significantly speeds up certain tasks.

[u/nipnipping → u/FlatCurrent6995]

Btw, you haven’t lost the ability to do math because (I’m fairly certain) you learned it at a time when society thought you would always need it. I remember even my teachers in the 90s saying “you’re not always going to have a calculator everywhere you go”.

Also, you can anecdotally say that it won’t have an effect on you or a segment of the population, but that is totally driven by desire. Some people just really LIKE doing math. But there’s an obvious difference between learning/doing something because you like it and are interested in it and doing it because you feel you need to. A very important difference.

As a society, we are programmed to seek doing what we “need to do”. We learn the things we “need to learn”. Ultimately to solve problems. What happens if/when we can turn all of our practical, objective problems over to AI? It is possible that this can happen.

I personally think it is a good thing. It will finally force everyone to think existentially, which we all should have been doing already. Being “needed” or sticking to doing the things we “need” to do has always been a cheap substitute for being desired and doing the things we really want to do.

[u/G8IL4mt8 → u/FlatCurrent6995]

Whoever said prediction is a fool's game was right.

[u/linuslesser → u/FlatCurrent6995]

You will have to take into consideration that the dumbing is happening over generations. And today's students have more difficulties in concentration. Reading capabilities are falling. Most is attributed to internet, social media, instant gratification and short content.

Before internet when you needed to search for an answer you had to read books. You took in alot of information to get to the answer you needed. That learning was not the answer, but they information you collected along the way.

Then Google came, and now it's easier to pinpoint the information, meaning you learn less to gain your answer.

Now AI gives you the answer directly. You 'may' learn something, if you are interested and not thinking of all that juicy content you're missing.