I told everyone to just use Claude Code all day everyday and take over the world. I was number 1 on Strauva (Strava for Claude Code yes). 7k token burn/month at api price + gemini antigravity to get another claude max subscription.
I wasn’t use it excessively, like not more than 4 sessions at once. I was doing tabs, namings, git worktrees, commit messages.
My sentiment changed drastically. I really hate AI now. It feels like a friend that is lying to your face to make you feel good, whilst you run in a trap. I don’t know how to describe it, but I think everything that AI is doing for you it’s doing so ruthless in the mission to make you happy. It’s ready to cheat, lie and fuck up your code.
And my gut feeling is that it puts you further away from your goal, whilst it seems you got closer.
On an average codebase you will after a month of heavy ai usage cleared your full backlog, shipped a tons of features, increased test coverage, improved your ci and finished 3 side projects.
But you will know only how half of your codebase works. It will be tougher and tougher to extend and maintain your codebase. You won’t have improved your mental model of the actual underlying problems the code is trying to solve.
You’ll be in a worse position to create actual meaningful work. Slopped.
I feel like if you're using this, you're subconsciously focused on gaming metrics instead of getting stuff done. You'd have the same issue scoring #1 on a SLOC tracker - you'd be the king of a slop empire.
Given that this is the second time you've written a piece like this, maybe you can offer us some insight into your workflow? What stack are you using, what's your biggest challenge?
For some of you that might be the obvious consequences and I don’t claim I’m right. I’m just writing down my feelings in that case as they’ve massively switched and I feel very disconnected to the world right now, reading everything that companies do, people post and write.
I have a huge distrust, and I understand that this is a skill issue, but the question still remains. When I don’t have the skill to build a good app, what is my best bet. To hope AI does it for me or to grind and learn?
Re Strauva I didn’t game it. I just used Claude Code everyday 12 hours approx.
Now I’m back in the idea and I sleep much better, I feel master of my codebase and my business domain again and most clearly have a tremendously better mental model about how things work and should work.
I utilize auto complete and auto next edit and I chat with AI in a browser window. I make it a habit to test every assumption fast (custom shortcuts in my idea (alt + gv = generate vitest, creates test file from every function, ctrl + t to run) AI throws at me and in new domains.This gives me a fast feedback loop to learn new stuff and makes it more likely I’ll remember.
Like have you seen cracked coders working, they are like fast apm coders and worlds more accurate then AI.
I try to learn stuff from the bottom up. After a while its faster for me to code it than to ask ai and wait for exploration and have to go through review iterations.
You can do both. I can't design a UI to save my life, but I know how GTK's backend works and I can pick the widgets I like from a gallery: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/main/wid...
If I can describe the architecture/stack that I want for an app, most AI models can build the desktop app for me. You have to remain conscious of the tools you're using, but AI can produce great boilerplate for this type of rote programming.
> Like have you seen cracked coders working, they are like fast apm coders and worlds more accurate then AI.
I've worked with 10x engineers before, most of them were not Carmack-level geniuses. They simply understood their stack and stayed laser-focused on the goal. 10xers are impressive because they're specialists, and most of them go back to the 1-2x level if you force them to use technology they don't understand.
If you do find a way to get AI to generate a "good app," that won't do anything for your own skill. It sounds like this concerns you. If you actually want to improve your skill you need to grind and learn. The only thing you'll learn using AI is how to use AI.
12 hours a day doing something you hate? That seems like an addiction. And it seems like more work than actually doing the work would be.