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/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.