Indeed. You are discovering what many of us discover as well: you can find a way to work with Claude so it does good and serious work with high quality. It’s not automatic. It requires a skilled operator applying their own spices and bling.
Some argue that they would prefer spending the time to keep honing their coding skills. That’s their prerogative and I accept their choice with zero snark and zero sense of superiority, or generally – with no rejection of their way in any form.
That being said, we all swing in certain directions. I am very glad to spend my time becoming a better architect, data modeler and generally a better strategist, compared to forever grinding tactical skills 95% of which I have perfected 5-6 years ago (if not 10).
To me high-quality models like Claude Opus have been liberating. They liberated me from the tyranny of caring about “must private functions always be at the end of the file?” or “does require go before alias or vice versa?” and freed my mental bandwidth to ask questions like “but how and why is our interest calculation pipeline structured this way?” and “we need to add more product types soon, so let’s rearchitect the code to allow extension and configurability and pluggability”.
In a way, models like Claude ended a bunch of pointless bickering the same way code formatters ended most code formatting debates. But on a much bigger scale.
I don’t miss being a soldier in the trenches. Or I miss it 1-2 hours a month now.
(Of course there’s a lot that can be said about why did I allow myself, a guy soon entering his middle age and having 24 years of career of fairly successful programming endeavors, be treated like a front soldier. A topic for another, more appropriate, forum thread. In the Future™.)
