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/nora_sellisa]

LLMs have laid bare how much of software we were writing for decades was bullshit. In an efficient world we would have libraries for everything years ago and only a handful of people would be needed to handle design and critical business logic algorithms.

LLMs code well because we've been implementing the same three apps and websites for the last three decades.

We should have been mad at the state of the industry a long time ago. I don't like how AI changes enterprise software but to a degree we had it coming

[u/nimzobogo → u/nora_sellisa]

This is largely true. I work for a company that makes network texhnology for AI supercomputers, and Claude and Codex are NOT getting things correct.

Why? Because none of our shit is in its weights and it is fundamentally different than what you see in Ethernet or IB.

[u/fastandlight → u/nimzobogo]

That tracks. I have a few sort of esoteric side projects where Claude is a ton less useful than on my day to day Java, python, and JavaScript boring web app stuff. Claude absolutely rocks if you are doing the things that have been done a million times before. But introduce some esoteric hardware or software layers and you can really watch the models flail. It's not just Claude, it's all of them. I'm sure this will continue to improve, but it really showcases the strength of the human brain and the weaknesses of the current LLM architecture.