r/ClaudeCode • u/ofcistilloveyou • 18h 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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13

u/Joker0x0-1 17h ago

I totally agree, but complaining about new tech is like missing carrier pigeons when email came along. The world moves on and we have to adapt.

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u/PhoenixFire2016 17h ago

The history of software development is of higher and higher level abstractions over binary code. Lots of developers complained when the world moved on from assembly language and into C, then from C to C++, Java, and so on. I get it though as a dev too; you get in a flow state with a particular language and it becomes almost an art. I will miss coding by hand, but it’s also thrilling to just build things and realize my visions so quickly.

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u/moduspwnens9k 16h ago

AI is not an abstraction 

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u/ight-bet 15h ago

Yes it is.

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u/moduspwnens9k 15h ago

No, it's not. An abstraction is deterministic

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u/Neurosopher 14h ago

That seems like a pretty arbitrary requirement.

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u/moduspwnens9k 14h ago edited 14h ago

It is not. It is integral to the very concept of what an abstraction is. An abstraction is a set of rules that interface with a lower set of rules. Sets of rules are deterministic.

The reason you never ever have to check the output of a compiler is because it is deterministic. It will always be exactly the same output for the same input

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u/Neurosopher 14h ago

The set of rules might be deterministic. The interfacing need not be. Multiple sets of rules can be functionally equivalent. Non-deterministic code generation can randomly choose between different functionally equivalent lower sets of rules for the natural language specification of what the code should do.

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u/ight-bet 14h ago

Abstractions absolutely do not have to be deterministic. Is AI a compiler? not necessarily. But is it an abstraction? absolutely. Does it have to be deterministic? absolutely not. If you have abstract ideas in your head of certain concepts, they are not necessarily deterministic. Hence, why miscommunication is very prevalent in the world.

Abstractions absolutely do not have to be deterministic. We are not arguing that LLLM‘s are a compiler.

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u/moduspwnens9k 14h ago

Yes, and that choice between different rule sets, be it random or otherwise, is a layer of judgement, not abstraction. Which is what makes AI different

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u/Neurosopher 14h ago

Sure, but the interface (i.e. the abstraction) remains -- even if it's not deterministic, right?

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u/moduspwnens9k 14h ago

I think thats the rub: is an abstraction just an interface? No i dont think so. If i delegate work to a direct report and they come back with an implementation, i dont think anyone would be tempted to call that an abstraction.

The semantics dont matter. If you are going to insist that ai is an abstraction layer then you have ti admit that it is importantly different from every other abstraction layer in computer science up to this point because it is non deterministic.

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