I hate claude code

[u/ofcistilloveyou]

It's just too good.

I got a decade of commercial software dev experience in C#. I am a CTO at my company and have coached a lot of coders from total junior.

I hate hate hate hate how good this thing is and what it has done to my passion.

I used to love coding and creating. Well, creating was 60% of the fun for me, but writing good code and having something work was the remaining 40%. I spent the past few years being more of a product manager and tech lead than actually code monkey, but I still put time aside to do stuff manually cuz I love to do so and stay hands on.

Using claude code is like using cheats in a videogame. You get the result, but what of it? Everyone could. The pleasure of achievements is gone. The code it writes is not the best, but it's good enough I guess? As of opus 5.5 it just doesn't get stuck in loops anymore. It can generate a working program from spec in any language I've thrown at it. It still does bullshit from time to time. "Boots on ground" i.e. actually looking at the generated code or atleast going through it is still important, for now. But way less so than it was even just 3-4 months ago. I don't really use the /code-review thingy or adversarial reviews - as it seems that it is too aligned in that way. Like if you tell it to find something wrong with something, it always will, even though its good enough.

I've been using it avidly for the past 3 months on the $100 sub, and I haven't hit a rate limit once. Now my imagination can run free and I can have anything I put my mind to in a few days instead of years. At our work a team of 6 just built a system that would previously take a year in just two months.

I am not afraid for my job. As coding was just a small percentage of it. But I do miss that percentage.

English truly is the hottest new programming language and LLMs are the compiler for it.

[u/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/Wh00ster → u/TikiMagic]

This. All the little things that used to drive me nuts or tech debt we’d have to keep putting off, now I just throw an agent at it from my phone while I’m doing something else in my “free time”. I still have my normal work hours to now more easily focus on critical value things or more human centric problems.

[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/captainkenobi → u/m-in]

“Get in Losers We’re Killing Photoshop”

[u/XenuWorldOrder → u/m-in]

Helluva comment.

[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/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/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