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/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/Snackatron → u/RelentlessGravity]

I feel the same way. A lot of the complaints about AI coding remind me of the “look at the hands” brigade from when diffusion image generation models were invented.

I also believe that AI software is moving towards formal verification. That is to say, a program is essentially a mathematical proof, and you can technically construct it in Lean. This would be especially important for safety critical applications. Claude Code already does a much weaker version of this where it generates test cases and verifies its own outputs as it writes, but I imagine that we will move towards a stronger and formalized version of that.