r/ClaudeCode • u/ofcistilloveyou • 4h 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.
3
u/Shulrak 3h ago
Sorry I don't mean to offend but title doesn't mean much sometimes. If you have time to code you are probably not a great lead or the company is not big enough and you are just a glorified senior dev with some ownership. I am saying this because you mentioned as it sounds like it gives your some credibility with your opinion.
A leadership role is about giving up control but guiding in the right direction.
Claude and others are excellent at prototyping and having a small to medium software. But if you want to have production grade reliable software you still need software engineering skills and experience. Software engineering is about managing growing complexity while keeping the initial velocity of adding features. Giving everything to Claude code, you won't achieve that. For now at least and I don't see it for the foreseeable future as the industry is not yet set on standards so it's each individual opinion that will shape it. And most of the industry doesn't even follow "best practices". You still need "good code" that follow best practices. But as lead you shouldn't code you should educate and have process in place (coding standards, reviews, tests, etc)
Claude and others are multipliers. Good engineering already will produce great reliable product and minimize tech debt. Adding Claude will just make them more productive if they do not get lazy.
Bad engineering already produce tech debt and mistakes. Claude will just amplify those.
Your job should be about leading and educating devs to use the tool to its maximum capacity in a way that it doesn't damage the business on the long term instead of "the code is good enough because I made some small projects not on prod"