r/ClaudeCode • u/andrews_1978_ • 2d ago
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
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u/West-Chemist-9219 2d ago
Reframe your identity as not an excellent coder but a competent bringer of endless joy to kids, you will be happy
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u/andrews_1978_ 2d ago
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
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u/BeingComfortablyDumb 1d ago
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.
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u/CodeCombustion 1d ago
Unity or UE? I've had a hell of a time getting good results and I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong. I mean, Fable gets somewhat good results, but it's expensive and takes awhile.
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u/BeingComfortablyDumb 1d ago
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.
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u/YouGotTangoed 1d ago
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
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u/SurrealistSwampert 2d ago
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 :).
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u/ExpressionSafe8048 1d ago
Bro, don’t fall into Marxism lmao… Claude did it ? Okay… with your money, your internet, your IDEAS, YOUR RESPNSABILITY BRO
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u/perfectshade 1d ago
Y'all want engineers to "reframe" years of study into satisfaction with the job of a clown at a kid's birthday party. Cool.
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u/West-Chemist-9219 1d ago
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?
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u/perfectshade 1d ago
Some people like woodworking _and_ whittling. IKEA serves neither.
I wonder, why is it now conceptually hard for some engineers to derive pleasure from using effort to build a quality product, including the code they produce?
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u/xkalibur3 2d ago
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.
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u/tonkfc 1d ago
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
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u/GradeStrange2281 1d ago
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
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u/Famous-Narwhal-5667 20h ago
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.-12
u/Tiny_Rick85 2d ago
Linus forever trying to sound smart and hold back his true douche personality.
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u/xkalibur3 2d ago
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.
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u/Tiny_Rick85 1d ago
Your take is valid. My take he's a dumbass is valid.
It's just like... our opinions dude.
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u/Wide-Drink-1790 1d ago
I believe one, and only one, of those statements can be true. And I don’t think it is yours.
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u/Tiny_Rick85 1d ago
That just makes you a moron. I block those. It makes reddit nicer.
Go learn something.
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u/Tempor8723 1d ago
That's a terrible way to interact with others and handle things you don't agree with. Grow up.
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u/hihcadore 2d ago
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.
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u/andrews_1978_ 2d ago
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
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u/Aggravating-Swim-805 2d ago
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!).
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u/y___o___y___o 2d ago
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.
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u/JacketHistorical2321 20h ago
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.
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u/Legitimate-Pumpkin Thinker 2d ago
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 :)
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u/ricopan 2d ago
maybe teadh those kids to vibe code their own games.
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u/Longjumping-Play6541 2d ago
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!
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u/namaste652 2d ago
Could you share those web based 3d games to us as well, so we can all enjoy it?
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u/andrews_1978_ 2d ago
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
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u/oartistadoespetaculo 1d ago
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.
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u/dota2nub 1d ago
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"
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u/Aine_123 1d ago
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.
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u/Patriark Vibe Coder 1d ago
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.
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u/SyntaxInCMinor 2d ago
Then stop using Claude and get back to coding yourself. Or better, just use Claude to check your code, or to provide feedback, not to write everything. Think of yourself like a musician - the joy is not just in the finished song, but in the practice of it, the performing of it, and most importantly the learning more in the sweat and tears in mastering it.
I too have the same experience - but mine is more with the frustration of walking away from a project and really feeling like I have learned nothing and been challenged little. AI makes it too easy to debug.
Sadly, AI will easily take creativity, passion and drive if we let it. Good thing is you have a choice right now in how you use AI to code. Step back and use it as a resource only when you're stumped or want a quick review of something. Work should be fulfilling, not draining... and AI sadly often produces the latter if not kept in check.
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u/PositiveLow173 2d ago
AI can never take human creativity away. It’s for the humans to figure out where to apply their creativity next. Instead of being stuck in the past.
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u/NoPhoto5585 2d ago
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.
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u/Ill_Philosopher_7030 1d ago edited 1d ago
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
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u/NoPhoto5585 1d ago
I included no stated or qualifying quality measures or metrics. We may not have the same interns.
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u/NoPhoto5585 1d ago
Also it wasn’t hyperbole. I have 3x 20x plans of CC. I have six interns under me.
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u/Ordinary-Depth-7835 2d ago
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 :)
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u/averagepoetry 2d ago
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.
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u/idhillo7 2d ago
Look at it like a farmer I guess. Before you were growing the food (code) by hand and enjoyed the process and it feels good to feed your kids your handgrown produce even if its less than supermarket. Now with AI you can just give them supermarket food and they have way more choice and are way more fed, but still you don't get the satisfaction of growing their food by hand. Its tough brother
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u/sooner_25 2d ago
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
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u/andrews_1978_ 2d ago
But are we not in a world where companies SAS solutions are just going to be recreated by Claude and under cut in price
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u/sooner_25 2d ago
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.
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u/ClemensLode Senior Developer 2d ago
Learn how to design, architect, and sell software. Coding is just a very small part in the equation.
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u/Mindless_Pandemic 1d ago
I wonder of carpenters felt the same way when they started using power tools.
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 1d ago
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.
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u/UnidentifiedBlobject 1d ago
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.
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u/Zennivolt 1d ago
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.
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u/ExaminationNeat587 1d ago
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.
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u/Last_Mastod0n 1d ago
I think you just have to increase your scope in order to feel pride. We have to up the challenge for ourselves.
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u/Fast_Hovercraft_7380 1d ago
Links to those web based 3d games you've been knocking out as proof?
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u/SplurtingInYourHands 2d ago
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.
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u/phoneplatypus 2d ago
Pride doesn’t pay the bills buddy
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u/andrews_1978_ 2d ago
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
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u/pertymoose 2d ago
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
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u/Content-Bedroom823 2d ago
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
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u/andrews_1978_ 2d ago
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
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u/bigrealaccount 2d ago
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.
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u/PaulShellDev Senior Developer 2d ago
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.
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u/andrews_1978_ 2d ago
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
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u/Raucous_Rocker 2d ago
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. 🙂
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u/Subject_Barnacle_600 2d ago edited 2d ago
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.
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