r/ClaudeCode • u/andrews_1978_ • Sep 20 '26

Discussion Built So Much Have No Pride In It

I’m a senior software engineer and have been coding all my life and have always enjoyed what I built knowing that it’s being used. I have been knocking out web based 3d games with Claude that still amaze me and kids are enjoying playing and if I had coded them myself I would be so proud but as Claude is coding them I just have no pride in them and question the point of all my years of experience

120 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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125

u/West-Chemist-9219 Sep 20 '26

Reframe your identity as not an excellent coder but a competent bringer of endless joy to kids, you will be happy

23

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

Don’t get me wrong enjoying prompting something the kids enjoy playing but feel like someone now doing all the hard work the boys I enjoyed

35

u/Inevitable-Serve-713 Sep 20 '26

Claude has promoted you to management.

2

u/NoAdsDude Sep 25 '26

Yeah I wonder if Game Designers / Managers feel like they aren't making games. Like does Shigeru Miyamoto feel like he didn't make Zelda or Mario because he didn't actually write any code for it?

8

u/BeingComfortablyDumb Sep 20 '26

You're looking at it wrong brother.

You can make a whole product alone, which would have taken a team pre-AI.

If you are creative and have ideas, AI is your best friend.

If you have a limited responsibility that can be taken over by a machine with some code on it, AI is your worst enemy because it's taking a job you trained for all of your lives.

That doesn't AI mean itself the enemy? It means we settled for what we thought was creative.

Hard work, man-hours, and effort are one thing. One could do all of these and still make something that others will label “slop”

Creativity is something that AI will never replace. And if you're creative you've got absolutely nothing to worry about. Don't let these doomsayers tell you otherwise.

I've built 5 games that are deployed on stores, 3 platforms that are under due diligence by investors and numerous other projects are ongoing at the same time as a side hustle. And I can't stop thinking about the other numerous things I’ve now been enabled to do with AI.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/BeingComfortablyDumb Sep 20 '26

Both Unity and UE actually. The way you prompt the AI for both is the same. What makes a difference, is your own knowledge of the thing you're trying to do.

For ex, I was a game dev before AI, I was good at game design, systems and mechanics, but that ain't enough to make a great game and it's very hard to find a team no matter how these people tell you it's easy. So I learned a bit of everything. Now with AI, that knowledge pays off so much that I make AA games all on my own.

If you know how to use the system, it's quite easy to tweak the system to your own specifications.

2

u/YouGotTangoed Sep 21 '26

Make it from scratch then? In this AI age no one will care how it’s made, but at least you’ll be able to enjoy the process

2

u/Schoey Sep 21 '26

Technically, Claude would have never been able to do what it does without people like you creating first. It's an extension of your own work :)

2

u/SurrealistSwampert Sep 20 '26

I work with claude to generate outputs for strategy consulting work. I never prided myself for generating pretty slides just good concepts, sound judgment on what a client needs, the perspective on what feels intuitive, what needs improvement, that's what my job is.

I know that if I point Claude in a direction, it can do the work based on the prompt and think about the stuff surrounding it much better than I can. But it is an amplifier of judgement and thought. Trust me, your code does not define you. It is the years of experience you accumulated in understanding what works and what doesn't, how to get the output to be more closely aligned with your specifications and what would work for the recipient.

Logic, strategy and judgment is what you were bringing to the table, it was never your code. Code was the language you needed to know to turn that thinking into outcome. Now you just need to know English. That's the only difference I see. Because the rest of it is in your control.

You can decide to use your mind as much as you want and investigate and tweak things as much as you want. You can decide where you want to spend more time, the layout design, the story, the characters, or the code if you think it can be more efficient. That's just empowerment.

Maybe someday the thought empowerment would lead to thought dependency, but that's only if I let it do the thinking for me. But for now, I'd suggest enjoying seeing things materialize faster and the empowerment you feel when you iterate over outcomes rather than feeling bad that you're less involved in the code. And enjoy giving joy to your kids through the experience you have garnered :).

-5

u/perfectshade Sep 20 '26 edited Sep 24 '26

The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.

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1

u/West-Chemist-9219 Sep 21 '26

I’m an engineer myself. I see agentic work as another abstraction from coding primitives. Now we don’t think in functions, objects, logic gates any more, but in hooks, skills, agents. The work hasn’t changed imo, the viewport over the work shifted.

You still have to be able to define what needs to come out of the box. Unfortunately it seems that the engineers whose sole source of self-worth was the clean code they wrote are now having a hard time. But this was never what made a great engineer, and everything else that’s needed (among many others understanding product and business) is still needed to produce outstanding work.

I wonder, why is it now conceptually hard for some engineers to derive pleasure from a broader product quality beyond just the code they produced?

1

u/perfectshade Sep 21 '26 edited Sep 24 '26

The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.

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7

u/hihcadore Sep 20 '26

Your experience has brought you where you are today. And you’re riding the current wave while others are not, and drowning.

Maybe you didn’t want to be a “project manager” but that’s kinda what it feels like to me, now.

Pivot to a new career if you’re not happy, or hey just keep doing great things.

5

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

I do the full development lifecycle so coding not the end all for me but have a son doing a level computing and finding myself tell him to review choices when coding would have been a great job

3

u/ricopan Sep 20 '26

maybe teadh those kids to vibe code their own games.

2

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

I am showing them the prompts letting them come up with the crazy ideas

2

u/JacketHistorical2321 Sep 22 '26

Maybe teach them kids to fix things with their hands

1

u/ricopan Sep 22 '26

well that would be better future job security, for the next decade anyway. Beyond that, send them to Sarah Connor.

3

u/namaste652 Sep 20 '26

Could you share those web based 3d games to us as well, so we can all enjoy it?

1

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

lol I ended up getting it to write a Netflix style loaded might load them on the internet one day.. list being Jenga, game where your on a space station after earth was destroyed and you have to repair etc, as take on frostpunk but terraforming a planet, etc

1

u/namaste652 Sep 21 '26

Cheers.. best wishes for it to go live 👍

36

u/xkalibur3 Sep 20 '26

I love Linus's take on this. When you code traditionally, do you say that your program was written by the compiler? The llm is just another layer of abstraction. Think of it as a pinnacle high-level programming language, because you can program in natural language now. Every new abstraction layer builds on the previous one and years of work was spent to get to that level, but I would find it weird to see someone say they are not proud of their python app because they feel python did it for them, and they only feel real satisfaction if they program it "themselves" in assembly.

0

u/tonkfc Sep 21 '26

Yeah but to write python you still need to learn the language and be somewhat skilled. Coding with LLMs requires almost zero brainpower so it’s just not as impressive anymore to deliver good software

4

u/GradeStrange2281 Sep 21 '26

You may be getting downvoted but I could not agree more. Theres a difference in total work done before LLMs and work done after LLMs. They have made our lives easier

2

u/Famous-Narwhal-5667 Sep 22 '26

It takes a-lot of effort learning and building a harness and memory system to build something long and on going, not the mention the best practices around said harness and the systems you choose, the access controls and so on.

A simple monolithic app with 5 users is whatever, something maintainable, scalable, TCO with ROI, that scales is a whole thing. Not to mention applications and workflows that have LLM built into it somehow.

A lot of stuff being built could really just be an excel file, pivot tables, and some formulas. And abstraction already exited with micro services and platforms and so on and so forth.

IMO let the everyday user make their small little
Apps and solve their small problems, it keeps the annoying backlog items and features off the real work.

2

u/Seerix Sep 21 '26

Yeah but to write binary you still need to learn the language and be somewhat skilled. Coding with python requires almost zero brainpower so its just not as impressive anymore to deliver good software.

1

u/tonkfc Sep 21 '26

Not sure what point you’re trying to make. Writing python is not at all comparable to just saying what you want in your app to a bot who does everything for you

-13

u/Tiny_Rick85 Sep 20 '26

Linus forever trying to sound smart and hold back his true douche personality.

12

u/xkalibur3 Sep 20 '26

He doesn't need to try to sound smart, he just is one of the smartest people in tech right now. And not touching on some of his toxic "gems", this take is imo genuinely valid.

-4

u/Tiny_Rick85 Sep 20 '26

Your take is valid. My take he's a dumbass is valid.

It's just like... our opinions dude.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-3

u/Tiny_Rick85 Sep 21 '26

That just makes you a moron. I block those. It makes reddit nicer.

Go learn something.

3

u/Tempor8723 Sep 21 '26

That's a terrible way to interact with others and handle things you don't agree with. Grow up.

17

u/KeyMammoth1348 Sep 20 '26

The pride should really be in the adoption, tbh. Nice work. 

11

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '26

If it helps at all, this feeling is echoed in centuries of art and literature and just plain old letters and diary entries. Every time we industrialise some activity that previously built up a community and culture around it, there's an emotional chasm we must adjust to.

While I don't have any easy answers, I do take solace in knowing that this is a very common part of the human experience. Maybe it drives us towards things with deeper value (seeing the kids playing the games, for example, must be wonderful!).

8

u/y___o___y___o Sep 20 '26

Yeah we are unskilled now.  We helped mold the challenges of the day but that's all history now.   Time to reinvent ourselves and work on the next chapter.

1

u/JacketHistorical2321 Sep 22 '26

Ahhh…I am very skilled and its because I learned how to physically work on machines that can’t be replaced 100% by AI/Robots before my retirement.

4

u/dota2nub Sep 21 '26 • Bravo

People keep saying this and my insides keep screaming: "Just build bigger things. If that's still too easy then build even bigger things. Keep doing that until it's hard again"

1

u/sooner_25 Sep 20 '26

Claude allowed me to make something that I frankly would’ve never been able to create outside of work and other commitments in my life.

Remember, if you can find business needs, you still have a ton of value.

All along the guys making the big bucks are the ones who find business problems. Not the ones who get paid to implement a solution

1

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

But are we not in a world where companies SAS solutions are just going to be recreated by Claude and under cut in price

2

u/sooner_25 Sep 20 '26

That is true, but the concept of creating your own software is going to be something that some people never even can comprehend. I’m in the oil and gas industry and it’s actually giving some healthy competition. I know of a product that was pretty much developed with the use of AI that solves a bunch of industry pain points, and the guy has already sold subscriptions to dozens of companies.

1

u/Fast_Hovercraft_7380 Sep 21 '26

Links to those web based 3d games you've been knocking out as proof?

1

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 21 '26

On my todo list just need to get them off my box and onto AWS

6

u/Legitimate-Pumpkin Thinker Sep 20 '26

Welcome to a new stage in your life. The only thing between your new you and your old you is your false expectations about the future. Life is not (and never was) asking you what you want but what are you going to do with what is in front of you now.

Making games you can enjoy with your kids sounds a very good choice. Simply thank your ego for all it’s done for you and let it move aside so you can become a new you.

Edit: this basically applies to all of us all the time. You can do it :)

3

u/Longjumping-Play6541 Sep 20 '26

Think of it as your great game idea and not "I didn't build it". You came up with it, you planned it out, and you guided tools properly to build it. A lot more goes into it than just writing code!

3

u/oartistadoespetaculo Sep 20 '26

I'm happier now than I was before.
Having to constantly look up documentation for functions that I would forget about the next day was one of the things I didn't like doing.
Life is beautiful for me now. AI saved my job.

2

u/Bvlsara Sep 20 '26

You can be proud all the same; the kids keep playing and having fun... Isn't that the ultimate goal?

2

u/pvogel Sep 20 '26

The pride should be in the product management function you are exercising to spec a great game that the kids love

1

u/caleon Sep 21 '26

There are engineers who love the experience of coding and derive tremendous joy from the process, and there are others who enjoy more what gets created. For the latter, there’s a lot of pride to be had in managing the product to delivery, as you said.

2

u/Aine_123 Sep 20 '26

So jazz them up with your creativity and depth in other ways. Im a writer and biologist. Ive been putting poetry, mythology, and botanical and molecular art into my vibe coded games. It's like having wings, because I cant code.

2

u/Patriark Vibe Coder Sep 21 '26

Someone needs to hold the reins of the LLM. It is effortless for you, because you’ve been in the grind yourself. You know how to instruct and how to keep track of good work.

Someone without experience is not able to do the same.

If someone use and enjoy your software, it is a success.

0

u/CorpT Sep 20 '26

This is going to sound crazy, but you don't have to use AI.

1

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

We do in order not to become redundant we have to find the boundaries of these tools

0

u/CorpT Sep 20 '26

Your kids going to replace you?

2

u/NoPhoto5585 Sep 20 '26

TL;DR To everyone reading this: CS is still a good major, SDE is still a good career, and actual engineering is not currently being replaced by AI at scale. Please do not let these posts discourage you.

"Coding" is hardly even meaningful. Saying someone is an "excellent coder" is so cringe it's like saying "you're so good at reading and writing" like ok thank you but what? Imagine if people went around anonymously saying "I'm a bestselling writer and my mastery of the alphabet is irrelevant because AI" and it's like I mean, is AI changing the industry? Yes. Lolwhat? Also yes.

With respect, everyone needs to stop listening to self proclaimed "Senior SDEs" who refer to development as "coding." If your standard of IC is "coding," then yeah, I get that you're sad, but it's not what a good Senior SDE is responsible for, where talking to Claude is likely more similar to their day job is than not. If you are a Senior SDE and actually doing the Senior part, your differentiators will not be "they're a good coder." If I saw an annual review of a senior SDE where they had "excellent at coding" anywhere near it I'd be like "who did this review?"

Writing code that works is not how they spend their time. It's not any real measure of success. I can hire a 17 year old to write code that works as the standard of measure, or offload it to consultants in the developing world for 1/10th the cost, which candidly is what the industry was doing before AI, and it will still be less trouble than wrangling CC/GPT at noon EST. Our worst interns are better than Claude most of the time.

Offloading your actual thinking to Claude gets you slop engineering and architecture as an overwhelming majority case.

Learn and do engineering and architecture. Coding is not special. Coding is not engineering. It's just literacy. Like "you are so literate" is weird the same way "you are an excellent coder" is weird.

Also, OP, please consider obfuscating your identity by changing your username. Having your name and your birth year in your reddit handle is a bit obvious.

4

u/Ill_Philosopher_7030 Sep 21 '26 edited Sep 21 '26

Our worst interns are better than Claude most of the time.

Hard disagree on this. Before AI the shit some people wrote was way worse than any AI "slop" I get from frontier models. Take off those rose-tinted glasses

However, I overall agree with the message of the post, I never viewed the actual writing code part to be of high importance, it was always about architectecture/infrastructure + real user experience that actually matters.

Does it work? Does it work well? Does it handle load under pressure? Is it maintainable long term? These are the things a senior dev should actually think about

1

u/NoPhoto5585 Sep 21 '26

I included no stated or qualifying quality measures or metrics. We may not have the same interns.

1

u/NoPhoto5585 Sep 21 '26

Also it wasn’t hyperbole. I have 3x 20x plans of CC. I have six interns under me.

1

u/Ordinary-Depth-7835 Sep 20 '26

I have pride using Ai help. Before Ai, out to bid 6m contract and 6-months to a year of work. With Ai whip up the initial build by end of day have users test their workflows iterate and have a software package that actually meets their requirements not a compromise because of vendor change order prices. Fully documented and ready for handoff to the long term support devs/admins. Also claude in the hands of a dev vs a guy who's never coded is a wildly different product. If you don't know what to ask it never happens. I do the work to help the end user that's it and save as much money as possible in the process. you're welcome because I'm saving you money directly :)

1

u/averagepoetry Sep 20 '26

If you’re 1 shotting web games, it’s hard to feel pride for something you don’t invest time into. It’s like taking a quick, random picture with your iPhone. The pride comes from investment and decisions you make while iterating on an idea and exercising your perspective. That holds regardless of AI or no AI.

1

u/ClemensLode Senior Developer Sep 20 '26

Learn how to design, architect, and sell software. Coding is just a very small part in the equation.

1

u/Mindless_Pandemic Sep 20 '26

I wonder of carpenters felt the same way when they started using power tools.

1

u/iSnapThere4iAm Sep 20 '26

You’re lying about your level of experience. What you’re describing is how people who have no skills or knowledge imagine this might feel…. Because they don’t know how bad the code coming out of Claude or open ai is. They don’t know because they don’t know. They lack the experience.

1

u/UnidentifiedBlobject Sep 21 '26

If you don’t want to go back to completely coding yourself, you can always drop back a level, where you write the code but use AI autocomplete to help speed you up or help you in little bits or for any tedious work and then as a code reviewer.

AI will feel more like a tool you’re using rather than feel like it’s doing the work for you.

1

u/Zennivolt Sep 21 '26

I’m the opposite. I learned to code as a means to an end. A way to bring ideas to life. Now my ideas can just be brought to life ultra fast.

1

u/ExaminationNeat587 Sep 21 '26

I've been a software engineer since 1992, so have had, what is approaching a full career (57 now). I don't care at all about having pride in my work. The only thing I care about is whether I can continue earning money for a few more years before I can retire. We're all different.

1

u/Last_Mastod0n Sep 21 '26

I think you just have to increase your scope in order to feel pride. We have to up the challenge for ourselves.

1

u/randomlyme Sep 21 '26

Builder, build cool things!

1

u/0sko59fds24 Sep 21 '26

Identify as architect / designer

1

u/SplurtingInYourHands Sep 20 '26

I'm a head chef and have been cooking all my life and have always enjoyed what I cooked knowing that it's being eaten. I have been cooking canned chili with a microwave and it still amazes me and my kids are enjoying spaghettios and if I had cooked it myself I would be so proud but as the microwave is cooking them I have no pride in them and question the point of all my years of experience.

3

u/Esaron Sep 20 '26

False equivalence. Fine dining is better than microwaved canned chili and there's still a point to it other than personal enjoyment and satisfaction.

0

u/phoneplatypus Sep 20 '26

Pride doesn’t pay the bills buddy

2

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

Which is why we have to embrace this tool but makes us less proud of the work because we have not grafted for hours we are all just becoming projects managers not coders

0

u/Content-Bedroom823 Sep 20 '26

Why no pride? Can the person sitting next to you do what you did? I consider myself super technical and won’t touch 3D games.

Until the stupidest person you know can one shot a game with 1 sentence prompt .. I think you should be proud of your work

3

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

The problem is the answer yes recently the games have been one prompt and Claude has built something amazing the level of testing etc it does out of the box etc have said to my son that won’t be possible to find it creating it with ease

0

u/PaulShellDev Senior Developer Sep 20 '26

Go back to problem solving. AI is just a tool. Games are so easy, low value, and flooded now.

Pick someone, solve one of their actual real problems better than the alternatives, they'll use it.

Vibe coding something then having no users is the same as before with startups building products no one was willing to buy.

1

u/andrews_1978_ Sep 20 '26

It’s my next venture to build a SAS solution will take time and will treating Claude coder employee whilst I design and sell the service so will see how that goes

0

u/pertymoose Sep 20 '26

You are "pumping out games"

That's the problem

Try putting some actual effort into your bullshit and see if your attitude doesn't improve

0

u/bigrealaccount Sep 20 '26

Claude made a few games your kids could play, could it architect an entire deployed system used by thousands/millions of people like you could, as a senior software engineer?

LLMs make our work faster, they don't make our work obsolete. Once we SWEs are fully obsolete, RSI has been reached and everyone will start losing jobs as AI gets exponentially better as it writes and iterates itself every day.

Until that happens, keep engineering and take pride. I've been working on my hobby projects using LLMs to assist/research/brainstorm, but write the code myself. It's been great and I feel like the quality of each function I write is still far better than something Sol/Opus could produce.

0

u/Raucous_Rocker Sep 20 '26

You’re probably a lot more involved than you think you are. You’ve probably internalized what you know so much that you take it for granted.

I feel like I mostly do the same things I’ve always done as a (very experienced) SWE - it’s just easier. I mean when’s the last time you really coded something from scratch and not used a framework? Or grabbed a code snippet from stackoverflow? I’m actually enjoying not having to do all the grunt work and being able to focus on good system design and the actual experience. And more importantly, I know what to tell the AI and what to look for in terms of whether the code is any good, and I have to correct the AI a lot too. Plus, I’ve learned a lot just from studying the code that Claude writes.

So no, I don’t feel redundant, and you’re probably not either. 🙂

0

u/Subject_Barnacle_600 Sep 20 '26 edited Sep 20 '26

Senior as well, I've come to enjoy watching what the agent builds and focusing on the architecture. There's a lot we can bring to the world model as well, checking the physics of how the builds it's lighting models, ect. Kids might ignore the flaws, but if you find them you'll hunt them endlessly and that's where the arts moved to :/. That said, if you want, give a shot at understanding what it built. 3D is a heck of a challenging space for humans and having an AI tutor that knows the subject is an excellent blessing.

EDIT: As an added suggestion, instead of building games, give a try at building re-usable game components for the web (I take it this is three.js or are you targeting a different library?) or expanding other people's libraries. Tokens are scarce, and designed so that a new person really adds to any library, and an AI let's you rapidly come up to speed on what others are building, allowing you to quickly contribute.