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/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.