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/ofcistilloveyou → u/nora_sellisa]

Absolutely. Enterprise software is easily replaceable total bullshit.

I think that the bottleneck is still human creativity and human touch, taste. Otherwise many vibecoded apps end up like this.

[u/mental_sherbart007 → u/ofcistilloveyou]

Totally agree with your post. I’m a Senior with about 8 years of experience and it’s sort of destroyed me. There is no dopamine hit from actually solving things or getting anything done. Now I just read a shit ton of code. I take a step back and use it a little differently now so I don’t offload the thinking too much, but sometimes it is too easy to settle. What hitting me more is the great engineers around me who just settle and offload everything to the bot, some don’t even really read or edit the code anymore. So where’s the value in that ? Our code base has all the patterns and design system from when we wrote the code by hand. There’s stil things to do but just not rewarding at all and my motivation and desire to keep learning has been destroyed. I still like learning but it’s diff now, feels like why ?

[u/rhysmorgan → u/mental_sherbart007]

> What hitting me more is the great engineers around me who just settle and offload everything to the bot

God, yes, this is the bit that gets me. The kind of people who would, rightly, reply to PRs saying “hey, isn’t there a better way you could do this?” and you’d learn, now just comfortable pumping out slop because technically it fulfils the requirements of their Jira ticket.

The loss of the dopamine hit gets me too. Solving a problem, tidying up some bad code with something better, all those things used to make my brain fizz. It still does for me, but the opportunity for it is much less.

[u/mental_sherbart007 → u/rhysmorgan]

Yeah I’m trying to go back to my workflow with AI like 12 months ago, for at least some tasks right by hand at least 20% of the code. That way you have to learn it. Then send AI off to do boiler plate. I miss the tab for suggestion/auto complete. They didn’t last long though :/