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by harles 153 days ago
~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like.

I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.
4 comments
awfulneutral 153 days ago
It feels like this to me too, whenever I give it a try. It's like a button you can push to spend 20 minutes and have a 50/50 chance of either solving the problem with effortless magic, or painfully wasting your time and learning nothing. But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.
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harles 153 days ago
> But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.

I feel this exactly. I’ve been one of the biggest champions of the tech in my org in spite of the frequent pain I feel from it.

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somekyle2 153 days ago
If it doesn't work, it's an annoyance and you have to argue with it. If it does work, it's one more case where maybe with the right MCP plumbing and/or a slightly better model you might not be needed as part of this process. Feels a bit lose-lose.
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rileymichael 153 days ago
> I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like.

just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist

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harles 153 days ago
It’s become a core expectation at work now (Meta). If I’m not actively using it, then I’ll be significantly dinged in performance reviews. Honestly, it’s forced me to consider going to work elsewhere.

It does _feel_ like the value and happiness will come some versions down the road when I can actually focus on orchestration, and not just bang my head on the table. That’s the main thing that keeps me from just removing it all in personal projects.

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vorticalbox 153 days ago
You could use ai in read only mode and use it as a rubber duck.

I do this a lot and it’s super helpful.

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rileymichael 153 days ago
sorry to hear. perhaps you could goodhart's law it and setup some background cron that simulates usage
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aspenmartin 153 days ago
Is this coming from the hypothesis / prior that coding agents are a net negative and those who use them really are akin to gambling addicts that are just fooling themselves?

The OP is right and I feel this a lot: when Claude pulls me into a rabbit hole, convinces me it knows where to go, and then just constantly falls flat on its face and we waste like several hours together, with a lot of all caps prompts from me towards the end. These sessions last in a way that he mentions: "maybe its just a prompt away from working"

But I would never delete CC because there are plenty of other instances where it works excellent and accelerates things quite a lot. And additionally, I know we see a lot of "coding agents are getting worse!" and "METR study proves all you AI sycophants are deluding yourselves!" and I again understand where these come from, agree with some of the points they raise, but honestly: my own personal perception (which I argue is pretty well backed up by benchmarks and by Claude's own product data which we don't see -- I doubt they would roll out a launch without at least one or more A/B tests) is that coding agents are getting much better, and that as a verifiable domain these "we're running out of data!" problems just aren't relevant here. The same way alphago gets superhuman, so will these coding agents, it's just a matter of when, and I use them today because they are already useful to me.

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rileymichael 153 days ago
no, this is coming from the fact OP states they are miserable. that is unsustainable. at the end of the day the more productive setup is the one that keeps you happy and in your chair long term, as you'll produce nothing if you are burnt out.
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aspenmartin 153 days ago
Oh sure of course, I missed that part!
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falloutx 153 days ago
This is definitely the feeling i get. Sometimes it works amazingly well that I think "Oh may be the hype was right all along, have I become the old guy yelling at claude?" but the other times it fails spectacularly, adds a really nasty bug which everyone misses for a month or cant even find the file I find by searching.

I am also now experimenting with my own version of opencode and I change models a lot, and it helps me learn how each model fails at different tasks, and it also helps me figure out the most cost effective model for each task. I may have spent too much time on this.

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gamerdonkey 153 days ago
The gambling analogy has been brought up before.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gam...

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