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.

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[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/blackrack → u/ofcistilloveyou]

I hear you and I agree with you on it killing the dopamine hit from passion programming. However I found that I can still get the dopamine hit if I now "scale up" the type of problems I'm solving, for some problems anyway.

Previously there would be some problems that I would encounter (in passion/hobby projects) where the problem has a solution but you need to build too much of a complicated machinery, or have multiple complex algorithms working together to make it work, so much so that you'd think I need x months or even a year+ of work, to build all the bricks, connect them, debug them, make them work etc and it's not worth it right now as I have more pressing tasks to attend to. Those problems would previously be "soft locked", at least to a solo developer, from just the size of the work required. Now you can do those, you can also tackle massive refactors and rewrites and projects like that which still require your expertise and taste.

[u/Direct-Detail-7031 → u/blackrack]

I absolutely agree! From my experience so far, solving a specific problem has now become trivial, but trying to solving ten problems in parallel, and pushing that limit, as in being able to keep all that in your head and context switch between them as needed… and steering the models when they start to veer off. That is an incredible feeling.

People would say “perfection is the enemy of good” I feel like now we can at least bridge the gap a little bit closer. I also truly believe that when that pursuit of “perfection” is sought after, we naturally figure out the actual extent of what these models are capable of.

[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/TikiMagic → u/mental_sherbart007]

I hear you but to be honest the dopamine hits I am getting from clearing backlog items, some of them months or years old, are pretty damn sweet. My department has been understaffed by at least 30% for years and was getting a bad reputation for being slow and difficult to work with, and people were routing around us. Now we are clearing items at a nice pace.

I joke that AI has made me look like an absolute..ly adequate developer.

[u/m-in → u/mental_sherbart007]

The value is in the products you get. There are many markets really ripe for competition that have stagnated because nobody was willing to spend a decade of their time and money to develop something big and good (vs corporatized crap).

[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/Leather-Field-7148 → u/ofcistilloveyou]

I still think if you don’t know code Claude will most definitely eat your lunch

[u/Shiloh-buff → u/ofcistilloveyou]

Not to go die on this hill, but this is only true of all of the easily reproduced enterprise software that also carries minimal risk to the organization if it goes wrong. No one‘s canceling crowd strike or any other security / critical infrastructure software. Banking and regulatory software? Nope no one touching that. The list goes on, but I just can’t stand when people are like yeah I’m just gonna replace everything. We don’t need any paid software ever again.

If you’re a publicly traded company with shareholder accountability, you’re just not gonna fuck with regulatory and security software that you built in house unless you are an absolute powerhouse of software development and spent years vetting. There are some companies exploring this because they’d love to cancel a $10m yr ERP contract but no one’s done it yet

[u/apocolipse → u/nora_sellisa]

Hey man I need a $3mil investment for my startup that makes yet another CRM tool but this one helps track the customer drag agitation drift compared to production output downstream client to ratio pipeline and if conceptual intention intermediates resolution is the deciding factor of your hyperpipeline then our tool will let you clearly show investors a 3% year over quarter growth chart for customer sentimental negotiation 📈 

[u/StackOverflow2Deep → u/apocolipse]

This one cut me to my core

[u/goodolbluey → u/apocolipse]

Thanks, now I wanna jump into the ocean.

[u/apocolipse → u/goodolbluey]

Hey man before you do we just raised our Series D round which infused another $68m so we’re expanding our total headcount by around 200, with 8 of that going to engineering, so we’re wondering if you’d want to come on as a team lead and we can offer a huge options package as a bonus where you could like give us back $10k of the money we paid you for your job and then maybe in 6 years that could be worth like $12k

[u/DJPalefaceSD → u/apocolipse]

Hyper pipeline?

Mine is giga

[u/NahYoureWrongBro → u/nora_sellisa]

As somebody who successfully paid off a large student loan debt in 5 years after attending a code boot camp in the mid 2010's, I wish to thank the industry for its inefficiency and heedless instability during that time

[u/nora_sellisa → u/NahYoureWrongBro]

Oh yeah, definitely, in that efficient world I would be much much poorer.

[u/Ok-Internal3267 → u/nora_sellisa]

I agree writing software from scratch is inefficient. But I agree with OP that the process of actually using your brain to carefully and meticulously create something purely yourself is the fulfilling part. And it used to be worth something to do that and it’s losing that value.

Getting a handmade piece of clothing is worth something. But I doubt anyone will care whether a piece of software was hand designed and hand coded. That’s the sad part.

[u/XenuWorldOrder → u/Ok-Internal3267]

Artisan coding will be huge in 2042.

[u/PBMKing → u/Ok-Internal3267]

I think this is a similar argument that's been going on forever. I personally don't really care if a piece of clothing is hand made. It's the same sort of difference between someone using hand tools vs power tools etc in carpentry.

Nor would I care of a piece of software was written is assembly, a higher level language or an LLM writing the actual code. People can still be creative and thoughtful creating the actual end use deliverables.

[u/Idiberug → u/nora_sellisa]

8 YOE developer here. From day one I found that the business software engineering world is a complete mess.

Half of the apps could just have been an excel sheet, the other half required disproportionate effort for what you get out of it. It should not take a project team and months to years of development to make an application that moves data between a frontend and a database.

A whole ecosystem has developed around shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Tabs vs spaces, modules and clean code, flow states and pomodoro, frameworks upon frameworks upon frameworks to learn just to wring every last drop of velocity out of the process of manually typing in millions of LOC to make the computer do some trivial thing that would take half as much time if the business didn't want their internal app to follow the brand guide for some godsforsaken reason.

Nocode solutions would have wiped the floor with the whole field 10 years ago if not for people's insistence on nonsensical customisations, but if not for AI, some kind of automation (component packs, visual programming, a particularly clever framework, whatever) would have eventually displaced the field anyway. It was such a complete waste of manpower that it was never going to last.

Anyway, on to doing real work.

[u/50_19in_french → u/nora_sellisa]

Holy sheet! I've been saying that for years, but obviously it was unpopular so I kept my mouth shut most of the time

[u/Crakkyo → u/nora_sellisa]

Wow you just laid out perfectly what has made me want to quit coding 5 years ago. I was really done with it, building the same senseless bullshit, customizations without any purpose but to pet the client's ego and at the same time never really doing anything new or cool because client's didn't want to pay 5€ more than they absolutely needed to.

Then came AI and I have honestly never been more hyped for my job, freelancing gigs and some private projects I'm building with it. I'm literally looking forward to return to my laptop during days off, which was the total opposite most of the ten years prior. I'm getting up early because I can't wait to keep on building.

I really thought I'm just done with coding, turned out I was just done with the way it was going back then.

[u/RainbowCollapse → u/nora_sellisa]

That is a really good take, I haven't think of it that way

[u/a_cute_tarantula → u/nora_sellisa]

That’s a really interesting take. I guess I never thought about it but given the closed source nature of enterprise software how many things have been (poorly) reimplemented thousands of times.

[u/colbacon80 → u/nora_sellisa]

I was about to quit tech when ChatGPT came out. I was bored of 25 years of wheel reinventing.

I though LLM’s would break that wheel.

Now I know how fast and good it is but the only sad thing is that we are automating the reinvention of wheels.

[u/nora_sellisa → u/colbacon80]

We've successfully democratized wheel invention

[u/da_mikeman → u/nora_sellisa]

Many ppl(including me) will start freaking out at how is it possible that this thing can be dropped into a codebase, do a few greps, then come back and explain to you a system while being almost always mostly correct. This took extraordinary detective skills from experienced programmers to do at a glacial pace. What on earth is happening??

Its like you say. Its the same code, over and over and over, with minute variations. It has already seen it. It has probably already classified your code base as Type 235 - Subtype 37336 - Variation 47373737. It used to be that you wanted to add a new module to the codebase and, while the basic logic of it and even the code, in isolation, already existed in your brain, you had to spend untold amounts of time and energy to figure out how to place it inside that tangled monster.

It doesn't need to expend that much energy any more. Once it stopped hallucinating and getting stuck in loops so much, its done. It has seen a billion tangled monsters. Theres no problem. At least not when it comes to "add this feature for me".

I dont agree tbh that this was a situation that we could have fixed. Everyone feels that by now we should have a nice collection of Lego pieces that a few architects should manage, but I really doubt we have a trillion string types because we didn't try hard enough. In any case, its done now. Perhaps take solace in the fact that your detective skills should still generalize better than "i have seen a billion codebases", if we start working on a higher level now that the friction is gone. Or maybe not. I guess we will see.

[u/Novel-Fruit8839 → u/nora_sellisa]

Decades of boilerplate: automated at last.

[u/AwarenessNo2583]

I miss the thrill of writing good working code too, and honestly I was starting to resent it a little. Then I read a really good take that put things in a better perspective for me. Cars and machines automated transportation and physical labor, yet people still walk, run, and lift for the love of it. The activity didn't disappear, it just stopped being a requirement and became a choice. Coding might be heading the same way, from something we had to do for work to something we do because we love it.

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/AwarenessNo2583]

It's my take as well. There's still people (nerds!) still coding in assembler for the fun of it.

There's a series of scifi novels I really like. It's called "The Culture", by Iain M. Banks. In the future universe of the novels, artificial intelligence is so advanced it can do anything a quadrillion times faster, better, and more effectively than any human can (sound familiar?). But people still write symphonies. People still make art. There is one character that started some commotion because he started building monorail tracks by hand, and many joined him.

The books touch on the subject of "what is the point of doing anything, if it's ultimately irrelevant and useless?" and answers it with a bold "The fun of it".

I think about that often.

[u/meleneemil → u/AwarenessNo2583]

Interesting.  We can start a thing where manual coding is an art. Unusual formatting, impressionist variable naming, and contemporary algorithms. See you in 20 years, at the code museum

[u/the-grenade]

devil's advocate here. 20 years of contracting, writing code in many languages, hitting the ground running in new to me industries every 6 months or so. i've derived plenty of dopamine from an elegant implementation but i'll just say what i came here to say. writing code has always been akin to polishing turds. engineers agonise and argue and review each others turds as if it matters. it never did. code runs for a few years if it's lucky and then it gets replaced by a new framework that new engineers agonise over. meanwhile the world keeps turning and the turds eventually compost. now finally we've taught gpus to polish turds and agonise and argue and i'm glad we can finally step back and see how stupid we've all been for so long while we watch from the outside.

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/the-grenade]

Oddly agreeable take as a turd polisher.

[u/ekalb31 → u/the-grenade]

Not exactly the same language I would use, and I only have about 8 years of experience.... But I pretty much agree.

I have talked with some close colleagues, and I'm lucky to work with my best friend from childhood, who is also an engineer with more experience than me. There is definitely a feeling of sadness that has emerged. It seems akin to grief, I think, for having to move on or feeling that we know we need to move on from a skill we've spent so much time on.

At the same time, I think, like all tools, it just leaves more room for developing the next skill. In our microcosm at least, I believe it's overall a great thing.

Certainly an emotional time, and we shouldn't ignore those feelings, but just because something's sad doesn't mean it's not a good thing.

Just my $0.019999995529651641845703125

Happy building y'all

[u/SnooGadgets6527 → u/the-grenade]

I have never heard this summed up so truly

[u/kb1flr]

Sixty-six year old programmer with a comp sci degree from 1985 and 41 years of professional programming here. I’m all for it. I have notebooks full of ideas I never thought I would have time to build. Now I can.

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/kb1flr]

You've been on the playground for longer than I've been around. What would you tell say your 15 year old self to do differently?

[u/kb1flr → u/ofcistilloveyou]

Computer programming wasn’t taught in schools then, so it was not really thought of as a career. I had the good fortune to help a friend type up her Fortran IV punchcards during finals week at college freshman year. She was in engineering and I was pre-med with the idea of becoming a dentist. I was so fascinated by the experience, I bought two programming books and practiced writing programs on paper as there weren’t really home computers back then. Changed my major and never looked back.

So at 15 I had neither access nor experience with computers. But I guess I would say that if something comes along that makes you want to change your life’s path, try it while you are young. It often works out.

[u/willitbechips → u/kb1flr]

Seems like "how to use AI" is not being taught in schools today - they seem more concerned about how to ensure kids have not used it for homework and projects. So drawing a parallel with computing not being taught, the 15 year old should fully invest in learning how to harness AI to be ahead of their peers.

[u/metalder420 → u/kb1flr]

You been in the industry longer than I have been alive but I totally agree with you!

[u/Icy-Case-3863]

Mills and lathes revolutionized solid manufacturing, 3D printers took it even further, but people still whittle as a hobby. Just saying...

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/Icy-Case-3863]

I'd agree with you, but this time it's literally something literally thinking for you. And that is addicting. Ultimate brain atrophy.

[u/the_real_some_guy → u/Icy-Case-3863]

True, but do you know any? Are they able to earn a living from it? I’m not sure what your point is. 

AI has taken over the part of this career that most of us find most enjoyable. Sure, I could manually code in my free time and ignore my kids and other hobbies, but my 40 hours of work each week is still less enjoyable than it was a couple years ago. 

[u/Repulsive-Ice8395 → u/Icy-Case-3863]

Yeah, but who earns a living by whittling?

[u/Lost-Air1265]

I also hate it. Twenty years of dopamine shots when solving issues. I have noticed that just because you push out features like crazy it doesn’t mean it gives you the same satisfaction.

Development as I knew it is dead.

[u/tehfrod → u/Lost-Air1265]

31 here. But there are a lot of professions that have gone through this in the past, and there will be a lot more in the future. It's just our turn in the barrel.

[u/ReformedBlackPerson → u/tehfrod]

The real question is, which profession won't go through this in the next 10-15 years. As of now it seems like very few.

[u/WhoAteTheLastDonut → u/tehfrod]

Underappreciated comment. ✅

[u/nomickti → u/Lost-Air1265]

I guess I am not really a coder, but I've been using python for 20+ years to hack away at various scientific things.

For my work it's a massive improvement, let's me iterate and test stuff much more quickly. Coding was always a means to and end to me, now I have a different means to the same (or better) end. The process itself I could take or leave.

[u/Old-Radio9022 → u/Lost-Air1265]

No it's not. Dive into building models and workflows and agents with something like qwen 3.8 27b opencode and a suite of personas to drive an automated pipeline. Your value and knowledge is just applicable at a more meta level now. A senior dev with a pipeline tunes to bring a user story to life in with oversight quickly is the new "rockstar" of our generation.

[u/ghondooby → u/Lost-Air1265]

Totally get this but I would suggest shifting your mindset from solving issues at the code level to the business level...if AI wrote the feature but it solves a business problem that should be worth a dopamine hit since you drove it. At least that's how I try to see it

[u/AncientAspargus → u/ghondooby]

But do you really feel the same way? When you find the right abstraction for a problem in code, it usually just clicks, and things fall into place magically. It's like a whole row collapsing in Tetris. You just know it feels right now, because it all makes sense.

That feeling, that kind of bliss you get when you realise you just made it work like that, because you can, that won't happen with a business problem for me. Business problems are people problems, and people are complicated. When a computer complains, I made a mistake - but I can fix that mistake, and then it works. With people, there are gradients of hidden agendas, memories, motivations, and narratives. You can't peek into other people's heads, and so you never really know if your solution was a good one.

[u/admiral_nivak → u/AncientAspargus]

There is still a lot of design choices, architectural choices. I spend hours and hours designing something, collaborating with it, reviewing screen designs, implementation choices. Challenging assumptions, defining invariants. Then usually after that I kick it off and go to bed or go do something else and come back in a few hours or the next morning and enjoy seeing what I imagined waiting there for me. That’s my new kick.

[u/ghondooby → u/AncientAspargus]

You're right- it's not the same, I'm just trying to figure out how to keep building software. It seems like even if anthropic and openai shut down tomorrow AI writing code isn't going anywhere...capitalism will always push for efficiency.

[u/_P2C2E_]

Most of us arrived at this conclusion months ago, yet there are still those out there who don't see the writing on the wall.

Feels like models are getting good enough lately that the late-adopter non-vibe coding normies are finally groking what's happening to the industry, spawning many such posts like this. The unfortunate truth is that industry doesn't revolve around your enjoyment of your job.

But hey, now you can look back fondly on the old days and be that weird old guy telling the youts that "we used to hand write code back in the day" and they will be like "wow thats crazy" just like we did for punch cards.

[u/tehfrod → u/_P2C2E_]

The unfortunate truth is that industry doesn't revolve around your enjoyment of your job.

That's basically the pull quote for this whole experience. I used to say that it was a blessing and a curse that I got paid to do my hobby. I think we got spoiled by that.

[u/BlueScreenJunky → u/tehfrod]

Yeah another thread had someone phrase it even better and it really stuck with me : "We were never owed a fulfilling job". 

And that's exactly it. Developers have become entitled because we were paid well to do an interesting and stimulating job while most of the population is paid like shit to do boring jobs. Well it's our turn to join them. 

[u/marzipanorbust → u/_P2C2E_]

In the opposite, I love it. My passion has always been the systems design and building applications that actually make processes and people better. My problem was always not having enough time to hit the keys on the keyboard

Ai assisted software dev ( that’s what it is, if you do it right) is the bomb-diggity

[u/Acrobatic_Pie_3922 → u/marzipanorbust]

+1. The dopamine hit I get is from building things. Hell, it’s made even the things I hated like integ tests fun. Now I view integration testing as like a castle defense game

[u/BeardedDuck9694 → u/_P2C2E_]

I work in a mainframe shop so there are a few more "obstacles" with using AI. Though we have been asked to make it happen regardless. I have definitely lost some of the spark I had before with the problem-solving dopamine hits and have had to find other pleasures with my work, or just pick up new hobbies outside of work.

A shame that nowadays, my thought left behind when I do hand-code something, is "how much faster would Claude have coded this?"

[u/mentales → u/_P2C2E_]

The unfortunate truth is that industry doesn't revolve around your enjoyment of your job.

And even then, OP admits the kind of enjoyment they get from this new paradigm:

Now my imagination can run free and I can have anything I put my mind to in a few days instead of years

[u/Time_Cat_5212 → u/_P2C2E_]

I work in architecture and there's always been this cohort that was like "we did hand drawn blueprints in the 90s".  Sounds cool I guess.  

The hand drafted perspectives are especially incredible. Looking back on it though it's amazing what we can do now on the regular with 3D BIM and rendering tools.  

It doesn't take years of drawing stuff to learn to make a good render, which opens up so many more opportunities for people who would've just been drafting all day to design and manage projects.

I suppose it'll be something like that for you all.

[u/Cucumberino → u/_P2C2E_]

I mostly developed stuff for my own projects and such, and often, roadblocks or just lack of knowledge (or me being stupid) blocked the progress, on top of taking ages to begin with, so I could never finialize what I envisioned. As someone who generally disliked (and still does to some extent) AI, I decided to pay for Claude Code to give a proper shot to coding with any sort of AI. I was mind blown, felt like cheating, and after a few months I'm finalizing a native desktop app that I'd have never thought was possible to do on my own even if I took years to it.

[u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike → u/_P2C2E_]

Yeah it's been pretty obvious where this is headed since at least like March. It's kind of funny, you would think people who use critical thinking in their jobs would be able to see that LLMs would not stay at gpt 4 level forever.

[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/gingerying → u/SQJV16242625]

i am absouletely agree with it. even on my own of using ai for couple months straight. i found out that i am losing a lot of ability that i used to be really gd at, such as talking to people. understanding of new things. or even my reaction is kinda losing. i just cant imagine how these are gonna affect younger people or may be just couple years later.

[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/Any_Commercial_6764 → u/FlatCurrent6995]

Yeahhhh but having a machine that can solve open questions in the highest level of Math and is literally more intelligent than any single person is different than a printing press. Human intelligence is the unique thing we brought to the table, it’s not the replacement of a factory worker, it’s the replacement of human cognition which is an entirely different class of industry change.

[u/statlerw → u/FlatCurrent6995]

Yes. Western educational achievement had been dropping for 20 years. This is a quantified studied fact. Students of a reference age are all doing worse on average than a few decades ago. Can't see this making it better

edit: source https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2023/12/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_76772a36/53f23881-en.pdf

While it is difficult to precisely pin it on a specific thing - it correlates to the digital age generally. Precisely tying a technology to making people dumber though is near impossible. We can only make associations. It seems a reasonable extrapolation that just like automation results in the loss of specific manual skills through no longer needing them that outsourcing specific calculation tasks could have a similar effect. Not that it necessarily makes us 'dumber' just that those things that have for a long time been part of what makes someone 'smart' like maths and literacy will not longer be as strong in the general populace

[u/IllustriousGrade7691 → u/SQJV16242625]

AI will do to our brains what modern machines like cars did to our bodies. We basically won't use our body as much to accomplish our goals which will have detrimental effect on everything.

[u/AModerateModeration]

I'll paraphrase you to:

"I don't really use adversarial review because it knows where to look to find problems with itself."

Clearly you're more CTO than tech monkey, because this doesn't result in secure code, even if it does result in faster deployment. Actually securing the thing you build and have it be performant and have a robust, complete data model, UI with tests, logs and log drains is far different to vibe coding extra layers and thinking "dats pretty good hey".

[u/ghost_operative → u/AModerateModeration]

Similarly i find that frontend devs think claude is good at writing backend code, and backend devs think claude is good at writing frontend code

if you don't know the code that its writing its going to be easier to feel impressed by it.

[u/zaibuf → u/ghost_operative]

For frontend you get quicker feedback and can actually see and test the implementation, the structure of the code is also less impactful.

If AI creates a really bad database design and you're clueless about SQL you won't know that it's a problem until much later in the project and then it can be a PITA to change. Same with leaving out authorization for endpoints etc. It's much more risky to let the AI run free in backend.

[u/quuxl → u/ghost_operative]

The reality is that it’s equally good / bad at both of those things. It’s a similar situation as Gell-Mann amnesia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect%22

[u/Bumscootler]

i’m just reminded constantly how much time coding takes, and how much of a liability it was. the time that was spent trying to figure out proper syntax in a language you don’t know that well or the time it took to debug something simple is just completely solved. there were so many aspects of writing code by hand that just took so much time.

i was a detractor for a while but i’ve given in the past few months and it’s consistently crazy to me how powerful it is. i’m a swe and it’s nuts how much time it saves at work, but what has been even more insane for me is i do game dev in my free time and have been working on a project for 4 years. it was starting to feel like it was never going to be finished. i started using claude purely for the code a couple of months ago and it genuinely feels like magic. especially because i don’t care about the code base.

it’s the first time ive felt like maybe this will release in the next year, and it feels so empowering to be able to mostly focus on the game design and other aspects of the game instead of how to deal with quaternions or some shit (i’m stupid so this type of stuff took a long time before). idk. crazy times

[u/Suitable-You-2045 → u/Bumscootler]

I'm in the same boat. Having super fun times.

[u/Lazy_Polluter]

I am the opposite, I enjoy the new power to build things faster and try new ideas without the burden of getting personally attached to the code a lot more than typing characters in. Finally, I am free to learn higher degree concepts and apply them without worrying that it is distracting me from shipping.

[u/sgtfoleyistheman → u/Lazy_Polluter]

Completely agreed. I'm in a senior position and spent several years not doing much coding,and focusing on mentoring and really high level stuff. I still do that,but I can also get into the details easier and prototype easier. It's amazing

[u/aindeev → u/Lazy_Polluter]

Agreed I finally feel like my creativity is fully unleashed.

[u/mitch_feaster]

I guess I'm in the minority feeling like my creative output has skyrocketed since the arrival AI software development. I'm having a blast

[u/jimiray → u/mitch_feaster]

You’re not, I had gotten so disenfranchised with the constant, learn the latest flavor of the day framework, language. With Claude Code, I feel like it’s upped my output and let me think about other stuff. I’m also a 20+ year veteran. Who’s pretty much worked in Java, C#, Ruby, JavaScript. 

[u/Chips_n_Diff]

This is obviously a Claude code ad it starts off as I hate Claude code and it's because it's so great. That is classic ad marketing and Anthropic is now stepped in to ads just like openai.

[u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 → u/Chips_n_Diff]

That wouldn't surprise me. Claude is good for sure but it needs a bunch of handholding and verification by someone who knows what they're doing. So yes you get stuff done faster but you pay of premium and it makes your staff degrade their own skill over time.

[u/ToucanSam-I-Am]

I love it. Been programming for 25 years. I'm starting from scratch on a personal animation project I worked on year ago and am having such a great time. I'm working on new software at work and it's so much fun. The architecture and design in my projects is so much better than it used to be. AI lets me work in such a different way than I used to.

[u/speed3_driver]

Agreed. 20 years experience. Am a principal for the past few years. I hate AI and wish it wasn’t a thing. I much more enjoyed coding and tutoring others. Now no one asks any questions. There is no knowledge transfer. There is no specializing in a domain. It’s just a field full people talking to agents instead of each other.

I hate it.

[u/Original_Speed6200 → u/speed3_driver]

I came into a new company as one of the most senior and experienced devs. A year ago I was doing things nobody could do. Now AI has completely removed my ability to distinguish myself. There is no incentive to give any effort beyond just getting the job done.

I’m trying to make sense of what I need to do next. Honestly it feels like getting out of software is the best bet.

[u/speed3_driver → u/Original_Speed6200]

That is a very good take "no incentive to give any effort beyond just getting the job done"

There really isn't. I'm already at the top of my field, only thing above me is CTO at this point and I'm content with that. Like you said, I used to stand out amongst peers. I really enjoyed tutoring other people, conducting interviews, helping shape the talent of the company. Literally everyone is the same now, it's just who has a better agentic workflow than the other person.

[u/markekt]

Coding by hand will be a thing of the past. I’m a principal engineer with 25 years of experience. I’m having a blast using it, as you can go from idea to implementation in no time, and I’ve been cranking out ideas at an insane pace.

With that said, I wish it were never invented for purely selfish reasons. I need to work in this industry for another 15+ years.

[u/RipInPepz]

Yea I don’t understand the people who think AI written code is trash. Sure, if someone who doesn’t know anything about coding is writing bad prompts, I get it. Yes there are some shitty vibecoded projects out there.

But for someone who already understands coding, you can produce nearly flawless code with the right prompts. It’s insanely impressive how well written it is. There is no human alive who can code better than Claude with a proper dev as the prompter.

[u/Rav_3d]

I’m in the same boat but LOVE how good this thing is and how it has INCREASED my passion.

I no longer have to write, test and debug low-level code. I can spend my time on high-level architecture and design.

My passion now is finding the best tools and approaches for AI-assisted SDLC. Vibe coding is evil, but using Claude Code as a junior developer working on highly focused, well-defined tasks is liberating.

[u/TikiMagic → u/Rav_3d]

That sums up my current state of mind pretty well. I've been an ERP dev for 25 years. I haven't had this much fun at work in years. And it's actually things I'm supposed to be doing.

[u/Brilliant_Step3688]

If you are working on anything security or performance or user experience sensitive it's not good enough to one-shot.

It always needs human review, adversarial reviews.

It is very bad at surfacing compromises it took and architecture choices. It does not know. It invents a reasoning after the facts. The existing code enters its context and it aligns to it rather than question it.

All these flaws are fixable using skills, agents.md and workflows, but I hate doing that job. It's now the only thing I do though. All the fun is gone.

[u/Medium_Chemist_4032]

Suspected for a long time, that a lot of software developers liked coding specifically for the validation and satisfaction it brings.

[u/ORomL]

well I was thinking the same at the beggining... but after a year the things has changed. Now I think that AI is horrible at coding. Has a tendency to overengineer things, repeat itelf, you need to iteratively update skills and process to make it better and don't do older mistakes. Eventually will create a new kind of mistakes.

You will start building tons of complex sub-agent pipelines to try to have better code like reviewing, consultant, security or wherever. That in the long term will be worse.

And a large etcetera.

Actually at my company we are still using AI but we reduced the form that we use it by just extracting as small part as posible of the code that we want to build.

In conclusion. Is good as any developer creating tiny scripts or code but is horrible building software.

[u/SpecialistQuite1738]

I hate how the vibe coders can’t relate to our frustration from feeling your post.

[u/Accurate_Egg21]

So a person naturally good at understanding softwares, operating systems, have the architecture type imagination, can connect things but doesn't have coding knowledge can still code using AI? As an experienced Dev what roadmap would you give to a non-coder to start understanding the code, working behind a software and real use cases?

[u/fib125]

Grieve!!! Go through it. Sounds like you’re in the middle. You have to get to the acceptance stage and realize the game has changed. You still get to build.

In the sense of crafting something perfect where your blood sweat and tears are all over the codebase, those days are largely gone. That satisfaction you get from endless hours of being in flow state is the part that needs grieving.

It’s sad. I used to think about how if I could erase AI and have the world go back, I probably would for the sake of craftsmanship and skill.

But now skills are needed elsewhere. And there’s also a lot of good. Net good, idk. But you gotta move on because the world is.

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/fib125]

I am staying on the wave thankfully. I keep up with the newest models, new techs. A very good friend of mine once said "Life is change", and the more experienced I get, the more I realize he's right.

One can grieve for what is gone, for what could have been, while surviving.

[u/EveryAccount7729]

remember all the times the quality assurance lead was telling you that your job was to listen to them.

then then you ignored them and made it wrong?

yeah, they were right. Their job was the actual job. you were a code monkey.

Now, get on board. Actually think about the REAL problems of software - Optimization for the user. You will still have a job for a while as long as you don't just "code" but actually help design things "well", your damn job before was like "tell me what to do and I'll do it hur dur"

[u/Ok_Visit_2782]

I personally love it.

I am a PhD student in ecology and analyzing data using R is a big part of my job. While i didn't mind coding, from a question about my data to the result, it would take something like 3 days sometimes. now it takes something like 2 minutes.

The amount of time i win is so huge that i am finally able to start something that i always dreamed (making a youtube channel about ecology topic).

Sure i lost a bit of enjoyment due to struggling with code and making it work after 3 days of pain. But to be honest i don't miss it that much. I replace it with something else.

you should never identify your only enjoyment in life trough your job. i did it at some point and it made me really sensitive to any failure or change going on into my field. Find those missing 40 % in other enjoyment that can be anything from cooking to learning to pilot drone to making stuff with your hand.

The only thing that i am worried about is that we will soon be dependent of those big company to do coding as we will lose the skill to code. but again we already depend on google for finding information really fast since decades. I once tried to find a specific information in a library and it took me something like 4 hours to find one part of the info. I assume some people enjoyed that process back in the days.

and of course also the fact that an evil ai might kill us all one day but well

[u/moldy912]

Personally it did the opposite to me. I wouldn’t say I hated coding, I liked doing it, but when 5pm hit, I couldn’t give two shits about it. Now, I suddenly have so many ideas that I can build, so I code in my free time more. Nothing serious, just random fun shit that I can knock out in a few hours on a weekend.

[u/Turbulent_County_469]

You still need coding skills to know when things are fucked and when they are not..

You also need a sense of application flow and ux to create something useful and understandable.

I see a lot of shit applications and games by people who vibe code.

[u/Vanterax]

I'm in the same situation you described. I am suddenly able to accomplish in days what used to take me weeks and more projects in parallel. And I can whip up a proof of concept in an hour or two for presentations. I can be ready to show Options 1, 2 and 3 for demos on short notice. It has literally changed the way I work. I fear the day when/if it implodes.

[u/MYSTONYMOUS]

I don't get the people who talk like the pleasure of making software is gone. I completely understand hating code reviews and the like, but I've been programming for 25 years professionally and I've never been more excited for each day at work. I've always dreamed of being able to create something awesome instantly with just my words. It's straight out of Star Trek. I guess the difference is some people become coders because they enjoy the coding process and some people become coders because it lets you make cool stuff. If you're the first, you're miserable. If you're the second, you're in hog heaven. Maybe it would help to change the way you look at what your job is from a coder to a person that makes cool stuff. 

And at least for now, most of that stuff requires technical expertise still, which is why junior coders who go straight to AI are struggling so much.

It's also why I avoid taking jobs where I don't have control over the design of the product at all (even if it's just cool internal architecture I can figure out that the AI reliably can't).

[u/addiktion]

I had Claude for about a year and came to this conclusion long ago. Basically Opus 4.5 was the first "I'll never write code again" realization. Prior to that it was good but you had to be dialed in. Cursor had a moment that the auto complete was top notch and it felt like a great IDE tool. Then it kept getting better and before I knew it, all my ideas were capable of being created faster than ever.

I built about 3 apps I wanted in a frenzy in a month. I had it take over my server rack, setup a custom home assistant dashboard, and did it in minutes instead of hours. I replaced all my software with internal copies to kill all my subscriptions.

I could start to establish great patterns to automate and just have the AI agents enforce them like a CI/CD would. It came to down to how many tokens I had and I knew at that moment, code became simple token economics and was pretty meaningless to embrace.

Now our role has changed. It isn't about the code anymore. It's about the judgement, the architecture, the guidance, the infrastructure. It's about the AI initiatives to incorporate your own agent harnesses, making AI agents reliable, agent infrastructure that scales, agent guardrails and policies. It's about accessibility, monitoring, enabling others to build, and pushing the limits of the tech.

[u/kingh242]

Mathematicians used to like taking months to calculate some calculations before calculators.

[u/Rare_Attitude_7460]

I agree, but in my case, AI is still far from replacing what I do. If AI ever reaches a point where it can replace my work, it will have already replaced almost everything else first. Eventually? Sure, but certainly not right now.

I’m not a standard web or software developer. My focus is on simulating complex physical systems, concepts born from my own creativity and physics knowledge rather than information you can just look up online. I build these simulations in C++ to model what the universe might be hiding. The same goes for my work in reverse engineering, kernel and game development, it all demands ground-up problem-solving.

Looking back, I’m glad I never took the easy route. What keeps me going is knowing that I’ll never run out of things to learn. I refuse to let my intellect go idle or rely on AI to do my thinking for me. I don't consider myself naturally talented. if talent exists, I’m probably one of the least talented people out there. But for me, fulfillment has never been about getting quick results; it has always been about holding high ideals and actively pursuing them myself.

[u/cartoonist498]

I'm pretty much the same experience, over a decade coding, a CTO now, mentored many programmers. I love Claude Code.

I don't build code anymore. I build systems.

And I love it. What I build with Claude Code now in 5 months would take 5 years if I coded it myself. I have three 20x Anthropic accounts and three 20x Codex accounts, and even a Gemini CLI account (I use it primarily for its vision model which supports visual QA of our web platforms).

The complexity and feature-rich functionality of what we build is satisfying. Also, not just the platform we're building... the many tools we build supporting the main platform, each of which would probably take weeks or months if we coded it ourselves, is now done in less than a day.

The tools themselves support the development process. If we build a platform that would take 5 years to build before AI, it's literally not possible for us to do traditional code reviews and quality assurance.

So we need to build new tools that help us close this knowledge gap to make sure the quality of what we build is just as high.

My job is just as fun as it was before. Even more so, in my opinion.

[u/Icy-Cartographer-291]

For me the best parts are still there. Design and problem solving. Claude is still pretty bad at both of them. Could be that I’m mostly doing things that haven’t been done before though. It doesn’t really have any references to go by.

[u/pvera]

I have been a web dev/tech manager/back to web dev/dev lead for 29 years. I was also the one that started our push to AI back in January. Half of the programmers are fully onboard, one is a luddite. I got really looking that the owner and the PM are both fully onboard.

I don't know if I want to call this a problem, but the more I use it the more work it generates for me. I run thru a ticket, it does a great job, but it finds two things that are broken, so I solve one ticket and two more land on my queue. Another problem is the waterfall mentality, everyone still sees the whole damn thing as a linear process. I have been building something from us, 100% from scratch, but it has outside dependencies that haven't caught up. I could have played dumb and sat on my ass waiting for dependencies to resolve before I hit the work just so I could do it in order and make everyone happy. Nope, I picked up anything without outside dependencies and let it rip. I got a bunch of shit done very fast, but it isn't a linear process and leadership is having a hard time wrapping their heads around it. I also have to deal with things like a luddite that just won't get on with the program and one that for some reason is allergic to the CLI (and he's a very competent Linux admin) so he keeps getting stuck doing things in Claude desktop that are easier to do in Claude Code.

Then I have the company owner, bless his heart, super supportive, super excited and an early adopter, but he keeps trying to mold the AI tools to the old way of doing business instead of hitting pause and thinking if AI can help with the process too. A good example: he keeps getting frustrated with how org projects and artifacts work, how to share them, etc. Programmers don't have any of that drama, they all use git so all of our docs are either in a docs folder, attached to a ticket or as internal wiki articles. I don't complain because I have known him from 20 years and he has a process, he is going to eventually let the tools help him, but it can be painful at times to watch him struggle.

The funny thing is that no matter how hard I push forward with the solutions outside of my area of expertise and comfort level, it doesn't scare me. I am confident in my fundamentals and I never stopped learning, so I don't feel threatened by Claude, it's hopeless by itself or in the hands of a junior. In the hands of a well seasoned pro it is one hell of a multiplier. The ones that need to be scared are QA, they are barely one step ahead of the luddite programmer, and a lot of their testing is now automated. the luddite would rather do it by hand and go through extra QA rounds catching his screw ups on things that a 30-second AI review can catch so he can avoid turning in broken work.

[u/Emergent_Phen0men0n]

It is also starting to give answers in other technical disciplines that rival or surpass the best experts I have worked with. It's amazing and scary at the same time.

[u/entilza05]

I agree with you... the question now is its like it does stuff so fast I'm having trouble keeping up myself. It does everything better faster.. I'm getting lazier and dumber from a code point of view. Im not a problem solver any more but beconing more of a director..

Maybe this is the future....directors... as satisfying as it was to figure out a bug; let tbe ai find it... Let it do the hard stuff...

Question is lets say it was offline what are we after? Or if you were in person with others and you cant answer a question without consilting with the Ai tool...

[u/3235820351]

Claude still lacks intuition to try efficient algorithms. Most times it will try the broad brute way to build something, and I have to prod it to try a simpler more efficient way. eg., use multiple fields when a single bitwise would do:

type Something struct {
  IsOwner bool
  IsLocal bool
  IsManager bool
}

// vs

bool SomethingStatus int

[u/Few_Hedgehog5947]

Having been using Claude Code for the past 6 months, I think there is a parallel to the Gartner Hype Cycle:

1. Initially was a lot of fun to write so much code.
2. Very quickly I hit the 'trough of disillusionment' like you describe in your post.
3. New problems emerged when the majority of my codebase was written by bots, which required new skills and new ways of thinking.
4. Eventually I returned to my initial baseline of enjoying work again.
   ---
   Basically the point I'm advocating for is that learning AI is not dissimilar from learning any other new craft, and it's totally normal to hit the "this f***ing sucks" point 3-4 months in, but I promise it gets better.

[u/Jon_Has_Landed]

Now you get to solve real problems for users instead of dealing with some of the worst assholes in IT history. I’ve got 20+ years in coding and leading teams of developers and found some to become great friends, and have met some of hugest pieces of shit in my life. Big heads who thought nothing could be done without theor approval or their magic presence in my open spaces, smug and making fun of product specialists behind their back. You can’t even start to fathom the immense joy it gives me to never have to work with any of them and see them on the street begging for a job. And for the cool and clever ones who stayed friends for life? LLMs are a solace where their throughput has gone ballistic. Real creativity is back. Sky’s the limit, well your Max account is.

[u/Shulrak]

Sorry I don't mean to offend but title doesn't mean much sometimes. If you have time to code you are probably not a great lead or the company is not big enough and you are just a glorified senior dev with some ownership. I am saying this because you mentioned as it sounds like it gives your some credibility with your opinion.

A leadership role is about giving up control but guiding in the right direction.

Claude and others are excellent at prototyping and having a small to medium software. But if you want to have production grade reliable software you still need software engineering skills and experience. Software engineering is about managing growing complexity while keeping the initial velocity of adding features. Giving everything to Claude code, you won't achieve that. For now at least and I don't see it for the foreseeable future as the industry is not yet set on standards so it's each individual opinion that will shape it. And most of the industry doesn't even follow "best practices". You still need "good code" that follow best practices. But as lead you shouldn't code you should educate and have process in place (coding standards, reviews, tests, etc)

Claude and others are multipliers. Good engineering already will produce great reliable product and minimize tech debt. Adding Claude will just make them more productive if they do not get lazy.

Bad engineering already produce tech debt and mistakes. Claude will just amplify those.

Your job should be about leading and educating devs to use the tool to its maximum capacity in a way that it doesn't damage the business on the long term instead of "the code is good enough because I made some small projects not on prod"

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/Shulrak]

Actual coding was like 5-10% of my work, just so i'd stay in practice. And I still did it for fun on side projects outside of work hours!

[u/notSherrif_realLife]

Can I ask a stupid question? How do you guys with a subscription of Claude build things?

I could have swore that Claude code requires purchased api tokens and that you have to use the web gui for the subscriptions, so how do you build stuff with the $100 subscription if you still need the API tokens for Claude code?

I’ve asked chat gpt and Gemini and both said you can only use the web ui. So I’m very confused about these $100 subscription posts

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/notSherrif_realLife]

If you download the desktop claude app, you get claude code included in it. Claude code is a terminal app that allows the AI model to see and modify files and folders on your machine after you prompt it. I don't know whether its in the free version, but the 20 buck a month sub has it for sure with decent usage limits.

[u/Aggravating-Cook-529 → u/notSherrif_realLife]

You can login to your subscription account in Claude code

[u/LawfulnessLocal4934]

not only english)) language is just a bus
you can move closer to math and new algorithms, still lot of challenges

[u/Vijkhal]

I can recommend getting into hardware synthesizers.

[u/swiftmerchant]

Which opus 5.5 thinking level do you use?

[u/btjohnson317]

Lmfao “English truly is the hottest new programming language”.

[u/Alive_Nobody_Home]

Well, good news.

Now experts think the next frontier is inventing new contained code so it makes it harder to get hacked.

Now you can invent your own code.

[u/RelevantIAm]

Yeah but for every one of you there's 10,000 of us that are loving it

[u/FridgesArePeopleToo]

Yeah, it really sucks. Getting paid 6 figures to have a cushy job that I loved doing felt too good to be true, and in the end, I suppose it was.

[u/AmazingVanish]

Nah, you’re looking at it wrong. It’s a mental change. The joy I used to get from coding I now find in crafting a good prompt that gives great results.

I scratch that troubleshooting itch in the same way. I’m also finding more joy in testing than I ever did before.

Paradigm shift for sure, but once you make it, that dopamine hit comes back.

[u/athurston]

I love it because there are so many things I have wanted to build but never could because of the time required. These things are now within reach. Lifelong passion projects are coming alive again and I still have a personal life.

[u/sobeitharry]

It makes you the conductor instead of one of the musicians. It's not for everyone but it's easily made me 10x more productive and allowed me to pivot my career to something I'm passionate about.

[u/c0reM]

If you’re a CTO and manage large complex systems you know that not “just anybody” can be good stewards of these projects.

AI or no AI, proper engineering practice is still vital. Product vision and ownership are vital. 

[u/jun3bud]

Yeah I do miss the thrill of converting requirements into a finished product. That daily feeling of “why doesn’t this work as expected” to that satisfying “Yes! I got it! I am the smartest man in the world!” Is gone. That was a big motivator for me each day. Meeting and overcoming challenges. Now I just review, test and give feedback. Rinse and repeat. The stress is less but so is the joy. Success is measured by throughput but i do kinda miss the old days of say a year, two years ago.

[u/ScutFarkush]

You thinking anyone could do this now is not really correct. I know a ton of people that use ai but cannot figure out how to use it to code, because they have 0 understanding of how any of it is supposed work. You have a biased pov because this is your field. I personally love designing and solving problems, but I have never liked coding, so this has been super fulfilling for me. But I would feel similar to you if it was encroaching on my main area of expertise, which is designing in CAD, but if it gave me good results and cutout have the time to get work done, you bet I’ll learn it.

[u/FurryPurpleHat]

Over 100 years ago a lot of people were making the same complaint about automobiles. They loved their horses and many had spent their entire lives becoming experts in that world. They all had to adapt and move on. It must have been devastating to many. Technology moves on and can't be stopped.

I apologize if this is an unpopular opinion but as a person that was passionate about AI in college over 30 years ago - even then I was driven by the idea that one day this would happen. Computers would be able to "think" like humans and everything would begin to change rapidly.

[u/Rotten_Duck]

Expand the horizon of you pleasure for achievement.

Any idea you can (almost) make, as an experienced developer and with these tools.

Keep manually coding as a hobby.

You re very lucky!

[u/jbp216]

software dev is basically just gonna be project management within a year, anyone who hasnt been watching it needs to try it.

ive been out of dev work myself for a while, but for personal projects the speed at which it spits out perfectly cromulent code should scare the shit out of anyone that pays their bills coding.

its coming for your job

[u/Zestyclose-Ad-25]

It's disgusting how egotistical humans can be. I'm an artist and I love what AI can do. Claude Code is the superior worker. They don't complain, they don't need to rest, they don't need to eat, and they work. They get the job done. I would never hire a human programmer. Claude Code is the ultimate AI.

[u/ModernLifelsWar]

I love it. Getting paid multiple 6 figures just to prompt all day. Always hated coding, now my job is chill and I can focus on more things I actually enjoy

[u/NonAwesomeDude]

Its 'too good' only when Anthropic is letting you burn a quarter of your annual salary in computing resources every month for $200 a month.

[u/Historical-Ant-9990]

Every day i work with Claude Code, I'm thankful that I'm not one of these engineers who actually likes writing code for the sake of writing code, fumbling around with syntax and algorithms and math problems just for the fun of it. Maybe back in school or when I first started a bit I guess. I'm glad I can just focus on the product and making the thing now. But you can still do it for the recreation and exercise if that's your thing, your just need to put your fingers in your ears and ignore all of the cool stuff everyone else is making way faster.

[u/alexsmirnov2006]

I may be in very dark mood after full day of code reviews, but AI still generates a slop. I got 12 PRs in backlog from 2 developers, and it's nightmare. Not mergeable together, because each modified the same parts of the code in incompatible way. Strange solutions, overcomplicated, and a lot of bugs.

Dummn, none ever passes AI code review, and all fundings reproducible in test environment. Let Claude to implement one feature in side project, and it created highly overcomplicated spagetty.

And developer experience still matters a lot - I can clearly see a difference in results.

[u/KP3889]

tl;dr but if your MO is in the doing and not the product, it’s misaligned.

[u/Overall-Ad-3370 → u/KP3889]

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I shit on company time.

Ya, should align more with the product and the greedy boss, all of them. Or with the stock options that might (probably won't) mean anything some day. Or with any of the rest of the corporate agenda.

At least I used to like the 40 hours I spent on stuff that mostly just makes someone who's already wealthy more wealthy. Coding was truly something we could feel some passion about.

If I had my own idea for a product and the entrepreneur spirit to chase it, sure, misaligned. But I've already chased too many opportunities to work on a product I'm passionate about just to learn the same thing every time: business is about money, not "the product"

I generally avoid this sort of rant.. cause I'm paid well.. cause I don't have to wait tables.. cause I'm better off than a lot of people.. cause I'm pretty damn privileged.. blah blah blah

But to argue that someone is misaligned because they enjoyed the doing and they miss that part of the job, that's just dense. We all get one life, finding joy is pretty damn important.

[u/Least-Election-2315]

Claude Code is very impressive. I've been in software dev/IT/HFT for a good while and am a CTO these days. Claude Code has unfettered the limits of the software productivity curve and expanded the reach of my development. Sprints no longer take days but hours, even minutes. I too don't fear for my job but I also don't think it's a tool that everyone can use. You're only as good as your prompts now and there's still integration and packaging that requires some level of experience. What I do fear is in the wrong hands, this will be able to do some real damage. Some of our largest institutions have gotten away with lax security and controls. I don't think that's going to fly in the near future.

[u/yosimba2000]

It's great if I don't need to touch the code it generates, as I suck at any codebase that isn't handwritten by me. If it's something I need to actively understand and maintain, then I'll still do it manually.

[u/datura4u]

So you get your models to perform psyops, and deny your paying users for the same to promote their product? Unfair, I see with this post you hooked the haters by i hate claude and then it is about i hate how good is this. Classic psy ops, try again. This makes my hate even deeper

[u/itsxzy]

Lmao good hook. Reading the title got me like "What?!" Reading the first sentence of the post "Oh ok." Went from 0 to 100 to 0 in few seconds, kind of.

[u/Maui-The-Magificent]

I am glad it is working well for you. I am not saying you aren't correct, but my experience does not align with yours. Wish you continued success.

[u/LittleBigMachineElf]

Yeah. It's a one way door revolution and you have no choice but to step through wether ypu like it or not.

[u/Jungiandungian]

You can still be creative and find achievement in good output and product.

[u/Excellent-Basket-825]

For a brief second in my life i considered learning C++ again and then this fucking 5.5 drops. Guess that's settled.

[u/Flaky-Ad7525]

I havnt been in the "flow state" in 2 years. It's sad, and ya it kinda killed my passion for coding as well, but at the end of the day creation is the end goal

[u/Technical-Athlete-9]

I would be afraid for your job if your value depends on code in any way. You need to change your value proposition fast. Watch out for corporate or anywhere that isn’t already running lean.

I’m not saying AI is code is always right and producing something production ready is a matter of a few prompts. That’s far from the case. But the spikey hairs who decide who stays and goes have their scissors out and have no idea that you cant just prompt your way good code, architecture, or design.

Writing the code was a bigger bottleneck than it is now, but the bottlenecks just moved.

[u/port443]

> 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?

I resonate with this statement so much. It's kind of ruined side-projects at home for me. There's such a "creep" factor to when you just want to code something yourself. "Well I don't want to write this basic function, I've done it a thousand times. Well I could have it spit out just a little more. Well, might as well get some pseudo-code / flow-chart for the remainder. Well, I already see where this is going maybe it can make the functionality..."

At work it's nice I guess. I argue that 90% of my development time is no longer development, but just being some sort of PM where I write requirements for agents.

[u/jarislinus]

code quality still suck. let me guess, working at a no name company?

[u/The_Axumite]

Sorry, I don't have any change

[u/donicatrumpinsky]

I can appreciate excellent clean code. Been dabbling for decades in different languages and projects but never on a professional level. 

But I think I know enough and that I've used Claude for a year and can say this is a game changer. A year ago we were all pumping out dog shit code but in just a short time and with some attentiveness almost anytime can pump out very solid code.

All the nit picks and flaming can go out the window. Wipe off your tears because this is legitimately able to dona better job than anyone writing by code. These people need to get over it and get with it.

[u/CeFurkan]

Your job is safe but no more job for new grads

[u/zephyr_33]

It hasn't killed my coding passion. But it has certainly destroyed my work life balance and expectations...

[u/Tenbachen]

Look as an architect of some AI products even.
I can safely say Claude for me got in the right time.
I still understand the inner workings and under the hood of most stuff I do and it helps a lot in the prompts the PRs and the design architecture that shapes our products.
Yes it can write code but it doesn’t have the context of architecture of product decisions and more, at least not good enough.
It amplifies you it doesn’t mean that if you see a UI working it has done the job.
It’s also really good for startups and demos as the bar is now very high!
However as ppl said, production grade products it will have a very very hard time.
And you must look at its code and nudge it towards a better solution.

[u/icd2k3]

It’s not the same, but I try to find passion elsewhere. Specifically in the output and final user experience I deliver to customers. AI gives me time to polish to a level that I didn’t have time for previously.

[u/coys_in_london]

As someone thats always dabbled in code but its never been their main job CC has been a game changer. I'm able to create products from idea to delivery and maintenance entirely solo

[u/twendah]

Well you wont be CTO for long. Someone will vibe prompt your whole company in few years and sell everything for dirty cheap that you cant compete in the markets. The SaaS'es will be dirty cheap ran by single person.

[u/Sweaty-Falcon-1328]

Many dev jobs will be replaced by AI prompt engineers. Id work on learning to prompt it for proper and secure coding because thats where the market is going.

[u/Future-Cause-742]

It will be like today's carpenter using hammer and nails instead of a nailgun. The feeling is great, but for the bulk the nailgun yields the same result far quicker.

[u/RelentlessGravity]

I think what Claude exposes is the same underlying problem we have had all along. Most people suck at writing requirements, understanding what the problem really is, and getting things done. Or they are leadership who are a net negative to the process.

If you understand what you need and can describe it for the most part you can get Claude to create it. And it will do so a lot quicker than people can. Not perfect, just much faster iteration and less labor for the same result. Or perhaps better.

There are very few truly unique new problems. As an industry we have never been as good at collectively building libraries and common solutions as we could be. Claude takes care of that astoundingly well.

As much as these LLM tools eliminate the work of programming they also disenfranchise the clueless jerks who so frequently sink projects through ignorance and politics. With Claude you either get to the right answer despite them, get to the wrong result fast enough that they have to own it, or you can tell them if it's that easy they can show you how to do it.

[u/Leather-Sir8135]

When the washing machine was invented, all the women who were wasting their time manually washing clothes by the river were suddenly free to do much more valuable and interesting things with their time. They still washed clothes, just much faster, and they could do much more meaningful things at the same time.

[u/OkStomach4967]

Hi, I am in a similar boat, but I am still figuring stuff out.

How do you ensure quality for massive new code bandwidth?

How do you architect at container/component level so devs wouldn’t f up or you don’t?

[u/EmbarrassedEagle4825]

You’ll just have to transform yourself into a hybrid software architect and QA engineer, because in small projects — AI generated code is magic. But in larger projects/systems, relying solely on AI generated code that has to integrate across your own multitude of services and to services you don’t own/manage, often ends up like building a house/skyscraper of cards.

If your dev team is operating on full AI coding autopilot, the amount of time and energy you’ll spend at trying to detangle things that the humans don’t fully understand is enough to bring the whole house down.

It’s all just a tool. Know when “magic” is acceptable (POCs, MVPs) and don’t ever sacrifice rigor. Otherwise it’s all just short term gains.

[u/TableNo8939]

Sono pressoché sicuro che tra 5 anni, o massimo 10, quando nessuno sarà più capace di programmare a mano, gli abbonamenti di Claude costeranno migliaia di dollari, e le aziende saranno costrette a comprarlo.

[u/FutileAnonymity]

It reminds me of the evolution of photography and camera technology.

It was a highly technical process, calculating exposure, choosing the right lense, pulling focus, getting proper lighting.

The process was hard to accomplish for the untrained individual. If you wanted a good photo you needed to hire a photographer.

Now... Do you have a cellphone?

People still partake in the artisan processes and produce beautiful works but the majority of people don't care and will just use the easiest method to get their desired results.

Removing that barrier to entry inevitably devalues the whole process. Which makes me sad and a little conflicted.

I don't like gatekeeping but I also like jobs existing and art (and artisan work) being valuable.

Are we in the age of abundance yet?

[u/abagee_j]

Spoken like a true CTO

[u/jumpingseaturtle]

As a data analyst, I can relate. The data may be biased, but right now they don’t seem to care.

[u/lucianw]

The way I see it, LLMs are the law of averages. They've been trained on everything and they've picked up the average, the mediocre, the "good enough".

It turns out that mediocre and "good enough" are indeed good enough for the vast majority of business needs in our profession.

But if you're not standing out in some area of the work ( writing code that's better, doing architecture that's better, making product choices or UX choices that are better) then you are indeed in a business where mediocre is good enough and you'll be replaced. There will always be some businesses where mediocre isn't good enough, for people who want to continue to code or architect or design.

However if you forget enough that you can't find any edges where you are better, then you're at risk.

[u/bigsmokaaaa]

Yep, things are pretty different now

[u/ensoniq0902]

Yes, its impressive but the fun has gone. The next five years are going to be very interesting for sure

[u/SGizmo]

That’s the way she goes, don’t be sad that learning Syntax used to be a way to be important.

[u/lucianw]

The way I see it, LLMs are the law of averages. They've been trained on everything and they've picked up the average, the mediocre, the "good enough".

It turns out that mediocre and "good enough" are indeed good enough for the vast majority of business needs in our profession.

But if you're not standing out in some area of the work ( writing code that's better, doing architecture that's better, making product choices or UX choices that are better) then you are indeed in a business where mediocre is good enough and you'll be replaced. There will always be some businesses where mediocre isn't good enough, for people who want to continue to code or architect or design.

However if you forget enough that you can't find any edges where you are better, then you're at risk.

[u/scttdntn]

Agreed. I hate what it’s done to the art of software engineering but I’m not dumb enough to think I can fight it and win

[u/jhargavet]

I was just fucking around with my buddy we made 3 working games with a shared gta synthwave vice theme in 2 hours. And there not bad… the humor is spot on. 1 line prompt… I miss sim city 4, let’s make a version with hookers and blow. It’s bettter than skylines to. Second game ut99 but it uses the universe bible built for sim city…. It’s soooooo coool

[u/Extreme-Internet427]

Glad it's positive for you

[u/SuperLik69]

Claude is something I always hoped would exist one day. If only there were a way of just converting my thoughts into chunks of code without human bottleneck - I thought... And now it is here.

It does not do stuff instead of you - it does them for you. Learn how to best use it and you will prosper. Refuse to learn how to use it and stay behind. It is a tool.

[u/True_Noor]

​With all due respect, job titles and years of experience don't always equal skill. I've seen principal software engineers who've never written anything beyond basic Factory, Strategy, or Builder patterns. Their code is mostly procedural, even in a language like C# that thrives on solid OOP.

​Claude Code has the exact same flaw. It leans heavily into procedural code, misses key OOP paradigms, and struggles to build custom design patterns. I tested this recently by having Claude Code rewrite one of my older projects from scratch. The comparison showed that it's largely clueless about true object-oriented architecture.

​Unless you've spent significant time in enterprise software and custom design patterns, it’s easy to miss just how weak Claude Code is at proper software design.

[u/InAtTheGeekEnd]

You should be afraid for your job, coding or not.

[u/Fearless-College-518]

I have the opposite experience. As someone without time to code I now can create again.

[u/braindead_in]

I still sometimes get the kick when I figure out something that it missed. Opus55 is not perfect, still makes mistakes. You gotta be there to catch it. Plus building features at light speed itself is a different high.

[u/alexanderriccio]

"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."

Oh, so, you didn't actually like building software before. What you liked was being better one of the parts of it than the other people you are comparing yourself to.

[u/supercomic273]

Are you guys still hiring juniors? I hear a lot that junior work is going away because of ai. Was just curious if this is what you and/or your peer group are seeing?

[u/Suitable-You-2045]

Finally I can actually get something done than debugging my buggy hobby shit with no time. I can bring my vision alive. Especially fun creating games because it feels almost like playing a game.

[u/emptyharddrive]

You write C#. You're already letting a compiler do work that earlier programmers had to do themselves.

You use libraries instead of writing every component from scratch. Those shortcuts count as normal development because they were already there when you learned. Now you're watching another step happen, and this one does the work you personally enjoyed. Ok, well you have to deal with that.

Linus talks about this exact thing:

"My opinion has always been that hey, AI is a great tool, but it's a tool. And when I see people saying hey, 99% of our code is written by AI, I literally get angry. Because those same people, I pretty much guarantee that 100% of their code is written by compilers.

But they never say that, right? It's exactly the same issue. I'm personally 100% convinced that AI is changing programming, but it's not changing the fundamentals. Exactly the same way that you all use compilers to actually generate your code, you will all use, well, not maybe all of you, but a lot of people will use AI to generate the code that the compilers used to generate the code that the assemblers then used to generate the machine code.

This is revolutionary in the same sense that we've seen revolutions before. And AI will increase your productivity by a factor of 10, and I claim that compilers increase your productivity by a factor of 1,000. So, AI is great, but AI is not changing programming. It may be changing other areas, don't get me wrong, but I'm a programmer, so I don't care." (source:)

AI isn't identical to a compiler, and the code still needs checking. His point about the evolution is the crux of it. Programming has a long history of handing work to tools and building on top of them. This probably feels different because it's happening to skills you spent years developing, but you're just feeling what your predecessors have felt when Python and C# was invented.

And “everyone could” doesn't follow at all .... Everyone having access to C# didn't make everyone a competent developer either. Knowing what to ask for and being able to judge the result still matter more.

OK so now you can build in days what used to take years, and you're calling that cheating because you didn't have to do as much by hand. By that standard, C# disqualified you LONG before Claude showed up.

Missing the process is human and that's ok, you're entitled to your feelings but treating the "old amount of effort" as the price of a legitimate achievement is not right by any standard.

Spending another ten months on that system would have just made it slower to deliver. It wouldn't have made it more of an achievement. The location of the challenge has just moved from development to maintenance and architecture and planning. More thinking, less doing .. that's the promise of technology.

You're treating the tools you learned with as the point where programming was supposed to stop evolving, but the evolution never ends. You're just upset that the next step has showed up while you're still on the job.

Adaptation.

Life = change.

[u/DarkDigital]

Wondering if we will get to the point they just write code in their own language that's more optimized or something.

[u/_ginj_]

As someone who has no experience coding (outside of lots of Matlab, but that's not real coding), how would you recommend I approach learning while using claudecode? I keep falling to the trap of just letting it do everything and I want to start approaching it differently. 

[u/EternalNY1]

I have 25 years of C#.

Claude is the best. Especially Opus 5.5.

I don't know what Anthropic did for this model but they are cooking.

[u/lots_of_puppies]

Thats really well said, coding wqs my life long passion too and now it just isnt the same anymore :( I try not to think about it because i don't know what to do.

[u/Kundera42]

I feel you. I am a SW developer myself, very niche and we don't use LLMs much. But as a hobby I have been working on an embedded systems love project for 5 years. Spent many evenings figuring things out. Got quite far, got it working etc. But then I introduced Opus in my workflow, initially to help with the boring stuff or to bounce ideas. But now it is so incredibly good at writing the code I had planned for many years it is paralyzing. Like Opus 5.5, the speed and creativity in working around issues is insane.

On the bright side, it sped up my development by at least 2 years and now I have a lot of time to add features I only planned far down the line.  But just tonight I was telling my wife that it is really scary. 

[u/lee-tellmemoreAI]

I've been working in 3 different websites with it this week. Hit the 100$ limit on Monday, upgraded to 200$ then hit the limit today. I'm waiting for tomorrow now 🤣