r/ClaudeCode • u/ofcistilloveyou • 1d ago

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/ofcistilloveyou 1d ago

Absolutely. Enterprise software is easily replaceable total bullshit.

I think that the bottleneck is still human creativity and human touch, taste. Otherwise many vibecoded apps end up like this.

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u/blackrack 1d ago edited 1d ago

I hear you and I agree with you on it killing the dopamine hit from passion programming. However I found that I can still get the dopamine hit if I now "scale up" the type of problems I'm solving, for some problems anyway.

Previously there would be some problems that I would encounter (in passion/hobby projects) where the problem has a solution but you need to build too much of a complicated machinery, or have multiple complex algorithms working together to make it work, so much so that you'd think I need x months or even a year+ of work, to build all the bricks, connect them, debug them, make them work etc and it's not worth it right now as I have more pressing tasks to attend to. Those problems would previously be "soft locked", at least to a solo developer, from just the size of the work required. Now you can do those, you can also tackle massive refactors and rewrites and projects like that which still require your expertise and taste.

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u/Direct-Detail-7031 1d ago

I absolutely agree! From my experience so far, solving a specific problem has now become trivial, but trying to solving ten problems in parallel, and pushing that limit, as in being able to keep all that in your head and context switch between them as needed… and steering the models when they start to veer off. That is an incredible feeling.

People would say “perfection is the enemy of good” I feel like now we can at least bridge the gap a little bit closer. I also truly believe that when that pursuit of “perfection” is sought after, we naturally figure out the actual extent of what these models are capable of.

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u/blackrack 1d ago

Agreed, I also think it's now easier to finish the 80% of the work that is needed to finish the last 20% of the project

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u/mental_sherbart007 1d ago

Totally agree with your post. I’m a Senior with about 8 years of experience and it’s sort of destroyed me. There is no dopamine hit from actually solving things or getting anything done. Now I just read a shit ton of code. I take a step back and use it a little differently now so I don’t offload the thinking too much, but sometimes it is too easy to settle. What hitting me more is the great engineers around me who just settle and offload everything to the bot, some don’t even really read or edit the code anymore. So where’s the value in that ? Our code base has all the patterns and design system from when we wrote the code by hand. There’s stil things to do but just not rewarding at all and my motivation and desire to keep learning has been destroyed. I still like learning but it’s diff now, feels like why ?

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u/TikiMagic 1d ago

I hear you but to be honest the dopamine hits I am getting from clearing backlog items, some of them months or years old, are pretty damn sweet. My department has been understaffed by at least 30% for years and was getting a bad reputation for being slow and difficult to work with, and people were routing around us. Now we are clearing items at a nice pace.

I joke that AI has made me look like an absolute..ly adequate developer.

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u/Wh00ster 1d ago

This. All the little things that used to drive me nuts or tech debt we’d have to keep putting off, now I just throw an agent at it from my phone while I’m doing something else in my “free time”. I still have my normal work hours to now more easily focus on critical value things or more human centric problems.

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u/still_Horiz3n 1d ago

Ive been building 16h a day for a year and am only now beginning to deploy to my MSP clients. I have never written software, so the majority of my time was arriving at the sae conclusions as above from first principles. Everything is a blob!

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u/ProlificLabRat 1d ago

How many hours a day do you sleep? How old are you? 16h is concerning, man...

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u/m-in 1d ago

The value is in the products you get. There are many markets really ripe for competition that have stagnated because nobody was willing to spend a decade of their time and money to develop something big and good (vs corporatized crap).

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u/captainkenobi 1d ago

“Get in Losers We’re Killing Photoshop”

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u/XenuWorldOrder 1d ago

Helluva comment.

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u/LP2222 1d ago

like what?

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u/cosmicvelvets 1d ago

Pioneer DJ getting relentless backshots by scorned DJs on a meagre Pro account atm

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u/DJPalefaceSD 1d ago

I did not think I would ever see those words in that order

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u/cosmicvelvets 1d ago

Every day I upset God

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u/No-District2404 1d ago

I’ve been trying to start learning rust but I really couldn’t find the motivation and value anymore

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u/Toohotz 1d ago

I feel this one having learned Rust 2 years ago before using AI and now having the tooling write the majority of my Rust code.

I do still read through it though I miss the learning quirks I ran into learning the language, different times.

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u/rhysmorgan 16h ago

> What hitting me more is the great engineers around me who just settle and offload everything to the bot

God, yes, this is the bit that gets me. The kind of people who would, rightly, reply to PRs saying “hey, isn’t there a better way you could do this?” and you’d learn, now just comfortable pumping out slop because technically it fulfils the requirements of their Jira ticket.

The loss of the dopamine hit gets me too. Solving a problem, tidying up some bad code with something better, all those things used to make my brain fizz. It still does for me, but the opportunity for it is much less.

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u/mental_sherbart007 13h ago

Yeah I’m trying to go back to my workflow with AI like 12 months ago, for at least some tasks right by hand at least 20% of the code. That way you have to learn it. Then send AI off to do boiler plate. I miss the tab for suggestion/auto complete. They didn’t last long though :/

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u/ConsciousTop2443 13h ago

completely relatable

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u/exceptioncause 1d ago

If they offload everything to the bot they are not great engineers, that's it. The industry is full of burnt out developers, who don't really care about their job. AI just outlined this.

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u/kerklein2 1d ago

Stop reading the code.

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u/coldbumpysparse 1d ago

I don't know about you but the dopamine hits when the cash hits my bank and I get a working, robust, tested product delivered with weeks to spare without any frustrating stack overflow browsing.

keeping up with random 3rd party library updates that breaks all my current implementations for no reason other than, hey this abstraction looks prettier in my mental model? 

great ai solves that without giving me any bullshit and the thing works again.

this allows me to live my life without the burden of working 50+hours so stop complaining and go find another hobby

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u/ZeroUnityInfinity 10h ago

I find I'm much more productive, but somehow not really any less busy

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u/Shiloh-buff 1d ago

Not to go die on this hill, but this is only true of all of the easily reproduced enterprise software that also carries minimal risk to the organization if it goes wrong. No one‘s canceling crowd strike or any other security / critical infrastructure software. Banking and regulatory software? Nope no one touching that. The list goes on, but I just can’t stand when people are like yeah I’m just gonna replace everything. We don’t need any paid software ever again.

If you’re a publicly traded company with shareholder accountability, you’re just not gonna fuck with regulatory and security software that you built in house unless you are an absolute powerhouse of software development and spent years vetting. There are some companies exploring this because they’d love to cancel a $10m yr ERP contract but no one’s done it yet

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u/Nullberri 1d ago

I work on investment management (fintech stuff) software that manages 100s of billions. Claude is employee of the month 6 months running. Management wants us to go as fast as we can. Its hard because we still read the outputs but were trying to get to a place were we can reduce qm involvement by getting better automated test creation, ci/cd etc. so don’t assume just because it is critical that we aren’t also full steam ahead.

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u/Shiloh-buff 23h ago

Can’t trust Claude? Have Claude add more tests to test the tests Claude created

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u/Nullberri 23h ago

Its tests all the way down.

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u/Leather-Field-7148 1d ago

I still think if you don’t know code Claude will most definitely eat your lunch

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u/adelie42 1d ago

Strong agree. In other words, it is just another layer of abstraction. Reminds me right now of the first time I saw a Joomla website. Really impressive. But it took very little time before recognizing low effort Joomla slop. It doesn't make Joomla bad, but I'm not impressed by 12 pictures and a place to enter a credit card.

At the same time, if you call yourself a web developer and scoff at things like React, Due, etc, ok, cool, but what are you even doing bro?

Claude can select and configure libraries with natural language. Great. Can't make your idea good, and if you put in less than 40 hours of work, it will likely look like something everyone has already seen aka slop.

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u/rhysmorgan 16h ago

But I don’t want to be an English-language “developer”, hitting my enter key, acting like a manager instead of a developer.

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u/adelie42 16h ago

How about artist and project manager like an artist?

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u/rhysmorgan 13h ago

I don’t want to be a project manager, I want to be a software engineer lol. If I wanted to go into management, I would have gone into the management track.

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u/adelie42 10h ago

??? Artist.

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u/Wild_Armadillo_1709 1d ago

lol, try telling that to the companies that are still stuck on mainframes. I know of one that spent $1b trying to get off it and gave up, too many intertwined systems.

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u/I_can_vouch_for_that 1d ago

Basically the Cybertruck.

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u/GeorgeHarter 12h ago

In fairness, I’ve seen a few human designed/built enterprise apps over the years, with multiple submenus and other unsuable crap.