Claude Code is a slot machine

I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more.

Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or the power went out :) We only got the cassette loading thing years later.

I've seen a lot in this field, but honestly nothing even compares to this one. This one feels like it's the real deal. The progress in the last 2.5 years has been bananas, and by every account the old "AI is the worse it's ever gonna be" seems to be holding. Can't wait to see what comes next.

I've been coding for 35 years and I've grown to hate it. Most of the work is boring. The things I absolutely loved doing, they require focus, and focus is something I just don't get to have at this point in my life (young kids) and career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities).

I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've made of agents I can see the potential but also the dangers in wrong + eager hands.

I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it.

Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days.

I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.

Just for background, I will say I'm not a programmer—I used to work at a web design agency where I did coding as part of my job, and now I'm an elementary school teacher of all things. I never wanted to be a software engineer explicitly because I don't like writing code!

But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!

I think you might have to get more granular than:

  > people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)

But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something.

I enjoy making things.

I don't know if there's a correlation between the groups as you say, but I will add some contradictory anecdata.

I started learning to program at about the same age I learned to read, so since the late 80s. While I was finishing secondary school, I figured out from first principles (and then wrote) a crude 3D wireframe engine in Acorn BASIC, and then a simple ray caster in REALbasic, while also learning C on classic Mac OS. At university I learned Java, and when I graduated I later taught myself ObjC and swift. One of my jobs, picked up a bit of C++ while there; another, Python. I have too many side projects to keep track of.

Even though I recognise the flaws and errors of LLM generated code, I still find the code from the better models a lot better[0] than a significant fraction of the humans I've worked with. Also don't miss having a coworker who is annoyingly self-righteous or opinionated about what "good" looks like[1].

[0] The worse models are barely on the level of autocomplete — autocomplete is fine, but the worst models I've tried aren't even that.

[1] I appreciate that nobody on the outside can tell if me confidently disagreeing with someone else puts me in the same category as I'm describing. To give a random example to illustrate: one of the people I'm thinking of thought they were a good C++ programmer but hadn't heard of any part of the STL or C++ exceptions and wasn't curious to learn when I brought them up, did a lot of copy-pasting to avoid subclassing, asserted some process couldn't possibly be improved a few hours before I turned it from O(n^2) to O(n), and there were no unit tests. They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it.

I fall into the 25 year of experience category. Probably a few more. For me, this agentic coding couldn’t have come at a better time. I still love thinking about solutions to problems and creating those solutions. I’m becoming less and less interested in the implementation details of those solutions.

I tend to use Claude Code in 2 scenarios. YOLO where I don’t care what it looks like. One shot stuff I’ll never maintain.

Or a replacement for my real hands on coding. And in many cases I can’t tell the difference after a few days if I wrote it or AI did. Of course I have well established patterns and years of creating requirements for junior devs.

I'm a bit different in your list, imo. I'm ~25years camp, did it long before it was my career and it's been my obsession for most of it.

I use Claude Code for two primary reasons:

1. Because whether i like it or not, i think it's going to become a very important tool in our craft. I figure i better learn how to use this shovel and find the value in it (if any), or else others will and leave me behind.

2. Because my motivation outweighs my physical ability to type, especially as i age. I don't have the endurance i once did and so being able to spend more time thinking and less time laboring is an interesting idea.

Claude Code certainly isn't there yet for my desires, but i'm still working on finding the value in it - thinking of workflows to accelerate general dev time, etc. It's not required yet, but my fear is soon enough it will be required for all but fun hobby work. It has potential to become a power tool for a wood workers shop.

Exactly this for me as well. And I'm really good at writing code! It's so weird to realize I never liked it, that I just liked making things.

Now I don't write code unless Claude does it, I just review.

If you enjoy being a custodian no one is going to chastise you for that. As you have stated there are many nightmares to clean up and all teams need a person who wants to do the clean up.

This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.

Just food for thought.

Even if you're working on a large complex system like that, I believe coding agents are still useful at at least taking highly specific prompts/instructions you write and doing the writing for you. Then doing other tedious tangential work like generating unit tests over a pure function, adding comments, generating documentation, etc that all increase the quality of the codebase without requiring toil on your part.

With especially novel or complex projects, you'd probably not expect to use the agent to do much of the scaffolding or architecting, and more of the tedium.

I agree and do experience that. Perhaps to clarify, I mean that it (unlike humans), is always down to code alongside you. It will never complain, get sick, have a life event. etc.

I'd rather work with a human. Even with our flaws, it's still better than constantly being lied to by a tin can. If a junior kept delivering broken results as much as the "AI" does, they wouldn't be on my team that long.

A helpful, and snarky, critique of the majestic rhetoric around “cloud computing” was to mentally replace “cloud” with “someone else’s computer”.

When thinking through a claim of what AI can do, you can do the same. “AI” -> “just some guy”. If that doesn’t feel fair, try “AI” -> “some well-read, eager-to-please intern”.

I think we're starting to have a conversation about what healthy social media usage looks like and its place in life. Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation and a shift back towards being genuine. I fully understand the irony here btw.

Hopefully it doesn't take 2 decades of AI usage to have that conversation tho.

I let it write boilerplate, or other low impact stuff like html/css. It worked nicely converting Svelte components from Svelte 4 to 5 for example. And AI autocomplete has been a genuine productivity win although not without the occasional subtle bug. But I can't imagine trusting it for an entire codebase. If you're letting the AI write your code you're not thinking about it deeply enough to critique it imo. Which is fine for CSS or whatever but not most code.

It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.

> "producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level"

Absolutely agreed, but I think the idea is that coding tools (or languages, or libraries, or frameworks) frees us to do the actually hard, skill-intensive bits of this, because the thing that's intellectually demanding isn't marshaling and unmarshaling JSON.

If you made all this work go away with a new functional programming language, like if finally someone contrived the perfect type system where you could just declaratively lay out all the rote bits and evaluate them to the imperative steps you wanted taken, everyone would be thrilled. There would be people going around dunking on all the developers who didn't use that language.

Instead, it's the opposite.

Holy shit, I completely forget he was in that. What a get.

If before I did a thing in 60 minutes and now Claude Code does it in 5 minutes I will not spend 55 minutes reviewing that code.

I will maybe spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and refining the code with the help of Claude Code and then the rest of the time I will go for another feature/bugfix.

I spend a fraction of the time verifying LLM production of rote code --- which I do in fact do, I'm not a vibe coder --- than I would writing it. I don't understand why people always expect this to be a mic drop rebuttal.

But then I may as well have the AI say no, I don't know how to do that, here are some useful resources. Instead of misleading me and making me waste my time figuring out why the code doesn't work

Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools. Slapping something into ChatGPT is one way, though maybe not the most efficient way of getting value out of these tools.