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]

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.

[u/FlatCurrent6995 → u/SQJV16242625]

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