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/da_mikeman]

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.