Author here. I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline. Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY.
So I spent the weekend digging into the DX decisions that make Claude Code delightful.
I sort of agree with this about cognitive load. I'm somewhat new (started dipping my toes around July) but use Claude code heavily now. I did spend a lot of time playing with configuring it at first and creating agents etc. But I have a weird setup where I have three computers that I work on and at one point I realized vanilla Claude Code had adopted the things I was doing as defaults (and improved on them). So I have sort of declared a configuration bankruptcy and just use the recommended things. The only things I still do are things that help both Claude and I keep track of things (md files describing decisions and context of files).
[I still haven't figured out MCP or how/why to use them or why to bother. You run servers. I guess. It's too complex for my smol brain to understand]
What scares me about Claude Code (and ai developer tools in general) is that a small model update could change how I interact with the tool entirely. There's no freezing the communication style that I need to use for good results.
I've not used Claude Claude yet, but why would it be bad if it gains features that people use?
Did people ever complain about Photoshop to have too many features demanding some cognitive load? Excel? Practically every IDE out there?
There is a reason people use those tools instead of the plain text editor or paint. It's for power users and people will become power users of AI as well. Some will forever stick to chatgpt and some will use an ever increasing ecosystem of tools.
"With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you."
Well, not to me or the people I respect. It's getting very good, but it's like having a recent college grad who obsessively reads documentation. Someone with low skill but very high knowledge, often knowledge they are mixing up or not quite getting right.
I think if Claude is already 'better' at coding than you, maybe think about going back to college to be a lawyer or something. For the rest of us, lets just hope that Claude hits some natural limit before it gets better than us too. If it doesn't hit some limit I think we have a year or two.
For what it's worth, I've been using a fairly minimal setup (24 lines of CLAUDE.md, no MCPs, skills, or custom slash commands) since 3.7 and I've only noticed Claude Code getting significantly better on each model release.
> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego.
> Claude was halfway through refactoring a complex auth flow[...] Then I realized: I'd forgotten to mention that one of those files was also used by a cron job.
That is the kind of research you do before you go to refactoring.
> Claude Code freed them from "the anxiety of the first step in programming constantly."
Is there a first step in programming? If there is, that would be thinking because you ought to get a good solution in mind before even typing the first line of code.
...
The whole article feels like someone roleplaying as software developer. Not that there's a barrier or a license to be one, but just that whole piece seems like as accurate as hackers portrayal in movies.
> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego.
Who keeps forgetting variable names and function calling conventions it used 4 seconds ago while using 136 GBs of ram for the cli causing you to frequently force quit the whole terminal. Its not even human level.
> What happened next: Claude installed every CLI, prompted me to login once, then went into autopilot. Configured each service. Ran commands. Checked logs. Auto-corrected errors. Got the app running in minutes.
> In another instance, a GitHub workflow was failing. Claude asked if it could SSH into my Hetzner instance to investigate. I said yes. It connected, looked up the config, restarted the Docker instances causing issues, and renewed some certificates as a hygiene step - which I never asked it to do.
This type of thing scares the crap out of me and I’m flabbergasted that anyone wold give an LLM unrestricted shell access to a server.
The example in the article of letting Claude deploy the app worries me. It has me thinking of that line, “AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about.” If the author was clueless of how to deploy the app, how do they know the app was deployed safely or securely?
Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you didn’t know C++ very well. It turned out Claude knew even less about this library than I did, generating tons of code that was completely incorrect. I eventually solve my problem through research and trial and error, and it was nothing like what Claude recommended. It certainly didn’t leave me feeling confident enough to let the LLM have the level of control over my computer or project that the author is allowing it in the article.
I’m not looking forward to a future spending all my time cleaning up the messes LLM’s create.
I have an "image sorter" that sucks in images from image galleries into tagging system with semantic web capabilities "Character:Mona -> Copyright:Genshin_Impact" and ML capabilities (it learns to tag the same way you do)
Gen 1 of it was cued by a bookmarklet to have a webcrawler pull the gallery HTML and the images. I started having Cloudflare problems so Gen 2 worked by saving complete pages and importing the directories, that had problems so I was looking at a Gen 3 using a bookmarklet to fetch and POST the images out of the browser into the server so I tell Junie my plan and it tells me I'll have CORS trouble and "Would you consider making a browser extension?"
Well I had considered that but was intimidated at the prospect, figured I'd probably have to carve out an uninterrupted weekend to study browser extensions, kick my son out of the house to go busk with his guitar instead of playing upstairs (the emotional/social bit is important) and even then have a high chance of not really getting it done and then end up taking another month to get an uninterrupted weekend. I told Junie "I've got no idea how you do that, don't you need a build system, don't you need to sign it?" and it said "No, you can just make the manifest file and a JS file and do a temporary install" so I say "make it so" and in 20 minutes I have the browser extension.
It still isn't working end-to-end, but I'm now debugging it and ought to be able to get it working in a weekend with interruptions even if I didn't get any more AI help.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] threadSo I spent the weekend digging into the DX decisions that make Claude Code delightful.
[I still haven't figured out MCP or how/why to use them or why to bother. You run servers. I guess. It's too complex for my smol brain to understand]
Well, not to me or the people I respect. It's getting very good, but it's like having a recent college grad who obsessively reads documentation. Someone with low skill but very high knowledge, often knowledge they are mixing up or not quite getting right.
I think if Claude is already 'better' at coding than you, maybe think about going back to college to be a lawyer or something. For the rest of us, lets just hope that Claude hits some natural limit before it gets better than us too. If it doesn't hit some limit I think we have a year or two.
> Claude was halfway through refactoring a complex auth flow[...] Then I realized: I'd forgotten to mention that one of those files was also used by a cron job.
That is the kind of research you do before you go to refactoring.
> Claude Code freed them from "the anxiety of the first step in programming constantly."
Is there a first step in programming? If there is, that would be thinking because you ought to get a good solution in mind before even typing the first line of code.
...
The whole article feels like someone roleplaying as software developer. Not that there's a barrier or a license to be one, but just that whole piece seems like as accurate as hackers portrayal in movies.
I don't work on a monorepo, and as an example, what I would consider a mid-size service in my mid-size company is 7M tokens.
I can't but ask: do all people who are so enthusiastic about AI for coding only work on trivial projects?
Who keeps forgetting variable names and function calling conventions it used 4 seconds ago while using 136 GBs of ram for the cli causing you to frequently force quit the whole terminal. Its not even human level.
> In another instance, a GitHub workflow was failing. Claude asked if it could SSH into my Hetzner instance to investigate. I said yes. It connected, looked up the config, restarted the Docker instances causing issues, and renewed some certificates as a hygiene step - which I never asked it to do.
This type of thing scares the crap out of me and I’m flabbergasted that anyone wold give an LLM unrestricted shell access to a server.
Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you didn’t know C++ very well. It turned out Claude knew even less about this library than I did, generating tons of code that was completely incorrect. I eventually solve my problem through research and trial and error, and it was nothing like what Claude recommended. It certainly didn’t leave me feeling confident enough to let the LLM have the level of control over my computer or project that the author is allowing it in the article.
I’m not looking forward to a future spending all my time cleaning up the messes LLM’s create.
* calling it a god-level programmer kinda gave it away they have no idea what's actually going on
** to restart docker containers you either have to be root or part of the docker group which effectively gives you root privileges
I have an "image sorter" that sucks in images from image galleries into tagging system with semantic web capabilities "Character:Mona -> Copyright:Genshin_Impact" and ML capabilities (it learns to tag the same way you do)
Gen 1 of it was cued by a bookmarklet to have a webcrawler pull the gallery HTML and the images. I started having Cloudflare problems so Gen 2 worked by saving complete pages and importing the directories, that had problems so I was looking at a Gen 3 using a bookmarklet to fetch and POST the images out of the browser into the server so I tell Junie my plan and it tells me I'll have CORS trouble and "Would you consider making a browser extension?"
Well I had considered that but was intimidated at the prospect, figured I'd probably have to carve out an uninterrupted weekend to study browser extensions, kick my son out of the house to go busk with his guitar instead of playing upstairs (the emotional/social bit is important) and even then have a high chance of not really getting it done and then end up taking another month to get an uninterrupted weekend. I told Junie "I've got no idea how you do that, don't you need a build system, don't you need to sign it?" and it said "No, you can just make the manifest file and a JS file and do a temporary install" so I say "make it so" and in 20 minutes I have the browser extension.
It still isn't working end-to-end, but I'm now debugging it and ought to be able to get it working in a weekend with interruptions even if I didn't get any more AI help.