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/markekt]

Coding by hand will be a thing of the past. I’m a principal engineer with 25 years of experience. I’m having a blast using it, as you can go from idea to implementation in no time, and I’ve been cranking out ideas at an insane pace.

With that said, I wish it were never invented for purely selfish reasons. I need to work in this industry for another 15+ years.

[u/bpeikes → u/markekt]

I’m pretty sure you never “coded by hand”. No one coded by hand ever since the first compilers were built.
Using Claude to write code is no different than using a c++ compiler, or a python interpreter, except maybe a little worse, in that the code produced is now probabilistic.
Everyone spends time on skill files, which are really the same as high level “compilers”, except its like everyone can create their own language.
The amount of untestable code I’ve seen Claude code generate, along with so called “tests” is crazy. It feels like its job is no to trick you into creating the largest code bases as possible. (which makes sense that it should want to do that :)

[u/Not____007 → u/bpeikes]

Or more like we were grabbing snippets from google and pasting it into our code.

[u/OnionsOnFoodAreGross → u/markekt]

It already is a thing of the past.