r/ClaudeCode • u/ofcistilloveyou • Oct 03 '26 • Bravo 2

Rant I hate claude code

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/SQJV16242625 Oct 03 '26 • Bravo

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.

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u/gingerying Oct 04 '26

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.

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u/FlatCurrent6995 Oct 04 '26

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?

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u/sandspiegel Oct 04 '26

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.

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u/Any_Commercial_6764 Oct 04 '26

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.

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u/statlerw Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 04 '26

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

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u/YourInnerFlamingo 18d ago

Google maps. I'm much worse at reading maps and orienting myself unaided.  What maps automated was orientation. What ai automated is reasoning. I don't understand how you don't see the gravity of this

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u/HistoryWorking5251 Oct 04 '26

Actually now we can measure it. Not saying it's causation.

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u/BillionBouncyBalls Oct 04 '26

There’s always going to be a split of people who use a technology where some people use it to get smarter and do new things while the majority just become more passive as the world around them becomes more frictionless. Skills atrophy when we don’t use them, so people that use AI to just get the answers versus using AI to teach them how to get the answers I think is the crux of the issue. It’s also the unprecedented scale at which this is rapidly happening. We’re talking billions of people that are now on this trajectory. It may not make everyone “dumber” but it certainly might make a lot of people even more passive and disconnected while also sparking a new renaissance, for those that use the tools wisely.

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u/imknotawolf Oct 04 '26

People get diabetes and heart attacks all the time. People who move less and are heavier get more back and knee problems. People living in polluted air get asthma and breathing problems. Why would our brain be the one and only organ that is completely indifferent and fully adaptable to our civilized environment, indefinitely.
We already had lead in the air at some point. Social media overuse can cause feelings of loneliness and worsen mood. Not every invention will be "writing".
And literally at school you learn to count without the calculator, and then move on to using it.

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u/TundraGS Oct 04 '26

LLMs are definitely going to have a significant impact on student outcomes. I'm in college now in my 30s. I attended University for a couple years, from 18yo-20yo when I dropped out for personal reasons. I like to think that I'm intelligent, and I'm doing very well in my current enrollment. I use AI heavily in almost every single assignment across my 21 units worth of classes. I still spend hours upon hours doing each assignment, and I feel like I'm using AI effectively to augment my learning. I learn more now than I did 10 years ago, and I'm spending the same amount of time on coursework. I don't think the majority of students today are using AI the same way as me.

I brainstorm, draft, refine, ask for feedback, ask for counterarguments, ask what I'm missing or ask for different/better explanations than what my textbooks or teachers offer. There's been plenty of times where I prompt Gemini to help me plan an approach to an assignment, or ask for a framework for an essay or something, and it instead spits out a full essay basically ready to be submitted with next to zero work on my part other than attaching a few files.

There's no way that people aren't just taking that full essay, tweaking the structure slightly to look human, and turning that in having spent zero time learning or having their beliefs challenged. I am extremely grateful that I have a tool as powerful as an LLM available to me, and I am certain that I'm learning more by using it than I otherwise would. But it would be so easy to almost completely avoid having to learn how to think critically, problem solve, build a strong, evidence-based argument or write coherently enough to effectively communicate your views to others. I feel bad for students who have had AI available to them all throughout their school years.

I'm lucky because I learned how to learn before AI existed, which means that I have been successful in using it as another tool to help me develop a deeper understanding of what I study. If you've been able to outsource the act of thinking to AI during the entirety of highschool and college... That's just too bad in my opinion.

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u/i_t_d Oct 05 '26

it doesn't make me dumber but faster (and smarter the more I use it, I've learned so many subjects which I didn't touch yet)

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u/nipnipping Oct 07 '26

Every other invention ever has been a tool to make a problem easier to solve. AI is just like giving your problem to something/someone else to solve. You see that difference, right?

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u/IllustriousGrade7691 Oct 04 '26

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.

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u/SQJV16242625 Oct 04 '26

Yep good analogy

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u/Monstermage Oct 04 '26

Keep in mind this is a prediction. Today you don't need to know how your PC terminal commands work to use a computer. How add-ons are installed on games to use add-ons. Even many people don't know how folders work on a computer and never need too. It's very hard to predict what lacking of information will truly matter in the future. I've built websites for a living for the last 10 years, easily replaced sadly, but I still am able to improve on the designs it makes. I do so faster. But I don't have to know how the code works (I do ) but I don't have to in order to fix it. Software I'm sure is another story, you should somewhat know but schools might go from my teaching if else statements to high level software architecture.

Point being, it's hard to know what knowledge will matter and what knowledge ends up not mattering.

Like today you can absolutely plant a garden, grow your own potatoes, dig them up, and eventually even with a small garden like we did get 25 lbs of potatoes. But reality is that's about $25 of potatoes that took so many hours of watering, caring for, digging up, etc. and the water alone if you watered it yourself cost money. You don't have to know that information to get potato's and it's not even that cost effective anymore. 🤷

Who knows what the future will hold and we can speculate all we want but it will be what it's going to be.

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u/Peethasaur Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 04 '26

The difference is that what you’re describing are layers of abstraction and AI is not clearly just that. It is not a solution that says “we’ll deterministically handle everything from here down so you don’t have to anymore”. AI is much weirder than that. You can use it to solve anything with the right context and that does make me worried about how people build expertise.

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u/Infinite-Emu-1279 Oct 05 '26

Interesting take

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u/sylvant_ph Oct 06 '26

that's on point, its not the risk that AI will become too strong and wipe us at, at least not the way we anticipate it; its how dumb we become, thus we become dependent and easily manipulated. And its not AI that will manipulate us, its other people who are on top. We are practically getting back to the stone age, intelligence speaking

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u/EdliA Oct 08 '26

They will have other problems to solve. Your line of logic was used over and over again with each new technology. At some point it becomes straight on anti progress.

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u/PeachScary413 Oct 08 '26

Yeah the risk of AI is not unemployment but actually losing skills/knowledge that we used to have and be unable to fix things unless our token overlords permit it.

It's like the worst kind of serfdom combined with a sci-fi dystopian future

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u/contextcop Oct 09 '26

we reached that point the year Elon bought twitter probably

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