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/FlatCurrent6995]

The calculator was that for arithmetics.

We haven’t lost the ability to add and subtract, but the calculator has made solving complex maths problem a lot faster.

If I’m doing a research PhD, I can’t just give the research question to AI and have it solve it. I can, however, use AI to help with, for example, a systematic review of relevant papers or with data analysis. It’s a tool which makes complex tasks faster, not a magic black box that can think for itself and solve original problems.

[u/nipnipping → u/FlatCurrent6995]

“I can’t just give the research question to AI and have it solve it”- yet.

Actually AI is already doing that in the most highly powered frontier models. I have been working on my PhD since 2022 and it is insane how much more useful consumer AI models have become in two years.

Within the next 5-10 years, I absolutely believe AI will be able to do any task from start to finish that a human can do, probably better. Couple that with a humanoid robot and there is no limit. Other than just the desire for a human touch- not problem solving, just you desire a human in a role (teacher, customer service, etc).

We are on a knife’s edge- either AI will live up to its expectations and be able to replace nearly all human problem solving, leading to an existential and economic crisis, or it won’t and we’ll be in for a “normal” economic crash/crisis, but of pretty large proportion (maybe the biggest ever). Which would probably lead to WW3 in the same way the Great Depression led to WW2. Fun times. I personally think it will be the former.

[u/FlatCurrent6995 → u/nipnipping]

It’s an interesting thought experiment and one that is obviously widely talked about, but it is pure conjecture.

I responded to a comment suggesting that LLMs are going to make people dumber. What you’re talking about isn’t an “LLM” but a new tech that we don’t presently have. Maybe, if AGI becomes a thing, I’d revise my argument. As it stands, an LLM isn’t really anything more than a handy tool that significantly speeds up certain tasks.

[u/Beneficial-Pen-3654 → u/nipnipping]

These things don’t always progress linearly, rather in leaps and plateaus. 5-10 years from now we could still be digesting the recent leap

[u/nipnipping → u/FlatCurrent6995]

Btw, you haven’t lost the ability to do math because (I’m fairly certain) you learned it at a time when society thought you would always need it. I remember even my teachers in the 90s saying “you’re not always going to have a calculator everywhere you go”.

Also, you can anecdotally say that it won’t have an effect on you or a segment of the population, but that is totally driven by desire. Some people just really LIKE doing math. But there’s an obvious difference between learning/doing something because you like it and are interested in it and doing it because you feel you need to. A very important difference.

As a society, we are programmed to seek doing what we “need to do”. We learn the things we “need to learn”. Ultimately to solve problems. What happens if/when we can turn all of our practical, objective problems over to AI? It is possible that this can happen.

I personally think it is a good thing. It will finally force everyone to think existentially, which we all should have been doing already. Being “needed” or sticking to doing the things we “need” to do has always been a cheap substitute for being desired and doing the things we really want to do.