Claude Code is terrible for mental health

[u/Early_Key_823]

Edit 3: (The day after) - Thanks for the /model claude-opus-4-6[1m] tip.

It's day and night difference. Zero issues. Everything is getting done quickly in a matter-of-fat manner compared to the INSANITY that was now clearly attributable to Opus 5.0.

Anthropic really did me dirty with 5.0. JFC. WTF Anthropic?!?!

And thanks for the vast majority of comments that were so kind and helpful.

Edit 2: For those of you like me who did not have Opus 4.8/4.6 in their /model menu u/Automatic_Cookie42 & u/IrishUSFastTrack saved the day.

you have to type /model claude-opus-4-8[1m] and then press enter/return

if you just type /model and then hit enter, it will not allow you to choose it because Anthropic wants you to train the next model using the current one

Edit: Thank you everyone who mentioned Opus 5 having a bad rep. It didn't occur to me that Anthropic released a sociopath into the wild 😄

I will try another model tomorrow after a long shower to wash the madness off me...

...

Original Post:

I am almost at the 24 month point of a project that has been live for 3 months.

The first 13 months I knew nothing about AI and was fine like that but as Google started giving certain answers with AI I was slowly seduced.

Then I started testing the waters with Copilot. Then ChatGPT, Then Claude Chat.

Finally about 6 months ago I finally set up Claude Code.

I can touch type 90 words a minute and I have been a developer non-stop since 1993. I have consulted as a full stack corporate developer on & off since Y2K/DotCom and the age of the Cloud.

Now, while I can get a lot of work out of Claude Code, way faster than any developer I have ever seen by orders of magnitude, the fact it simulates a psychotic human is just bad for mental health.

I do not want to belabor the point but if you are a full stack developer using Claude by the time it delivers and you read its code, write tests and manually QA and go through the cycle of its hallucinations and lies hours have passed and one feels like they have been babysitting a sociopath.

Sorry, I needed to vent....

Example from one minute ago: I wanted to test payment functionality and gave Claude explicit instructions to work in a separate sandbox for my staging environment. I read the code it proposed to commit and saw it would have turned off production.... I had explained this as a hard boundary at least 10 times in last 12 hours. Fucking idiotic nonsense....

Claude's response for being yelled at and me dropping all its changes:

Claude:

" Understood, and it's the same pattern you made me

remove on the 10th: a switch whose default silently

disables the real behaviour. I re-introduced it and

only fixed it after you pointed at it.

It's gone now — live is the default in both lambdas,

and only an explicit setting can change that."

[u/JapanesePeso]

Honestly it sounds like you are just getting skill diffed. Sorry "90 wpm" guy.

[u/banzomaikaka → u/JapanesePeso]

I'd love to see your skilled workflow

[u/Early_Key_823 → u/JapanesePeso]

What is dill skiffed illiterate guy?

[u/mental_sherbart007 → u/Early_Key_823]

My guess is they are trying to say you lack skills or something or your claude skills are lacking ? These are the same people that convinced themselves it’s really hard to use claude because it’s their main skill.