I felt the familiar feeling of depression and lethargy creep in while my eyes darted from watching claude-code work and my phone. “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll? This was the third time I gave claude-code a try. I felt the same feelings every single time and ended up deleting claude-code after 2-3 weeks, and whaddyouknow?
There are true artists who make paper by hand like they used to in China. It’s beautiful. It’s much more heterogeneous than machine made paper. It makes for wonderful gifts.
It would be prohibitively expensive and lower quality to use hadmade paper towels, toilet paper, etc.
Code is not something that you consume, it is something that you build.
You want a house made of cardboard because it’s affordable? Sure, just don’t start pretending like it’s an actual house, and don’t try to rent, sell, or lend it to anyone.
Maybe you’ll have a different opinion about code when it’s almost all disposable.
Yes some places still make bespoke $30 steak hamburgers. But also most people eat mass produced, less expensive McD’s
Yes, but the hand crafted artisinal version I wrote? You can copy that infinitly, already.
There’s no added value by copy/pasting infinite slop burgers.
And if the burgers are made by people who just grab random items to try to make it look like a burger, whether or not it is edible, no one would.
AI code is unreliable, unsafe, and worst of all, has no basis of even basic intelligence. I’d trust more code produced by a monkey than by an AI. Trusting AI code is like trusting a very realistic drawing of a tunnel and running into it while knowing that it’s a drawing, because “it looks like a real tunnel so it must work like one”. AI code is not code, it’s keywords scrambled together to look like code.
Except that code is generally made of… other code. And generally gets transformed from some kind of source form to some kind of deployment form. And then executed by some kind of runtime, made of code. On some kind of OS, made of code.
The level of abstraction at which you make paper by hand is pretty much constant. The level of abstraction at which you make even a “hello world” program by hand is extremely flexible.
Depending on your operating environment, even an incredibly complex and impressive task may just be a matter of passing the right flag to a CLI tool that you already use.
Being attentive to the manual experience of how a codebase “feels” is pretty important for making sure a system has a coherent (read: not over-engineered) approach to bridging the high and low levels of the tasks it performs.
Not paying attention to that, because you can delegate it to a chatbot, is kind of like forgoing having light switches in a room because you can just keep a crane parked outside and have it slam a lighting fixture through the ceiling when you need it and then dump a mound of dirt to cover the hole when you don’t need it.
Like, that functions and accomplishes the task in a pinch, but you do not want to try occupying that room in person at any point to do any kind of detail work.
Maybe that metaphor would make sense if technology hadn’t already completely saturated the world before we had this new process.
Maybe coding isn’t as hard as making artisan hand made paper…
There is something similar in Japan, it is called gampi paper. It played a role in Japanese literature and a movie, The Pillow Book (1996).