I'm No Longer Using Coding Assistants on Personal Projects

Some people see the need for writing code as an impediment to getting good use out of a computer. In fact, some of the most avid fans of generative AI believe that the act of actually doing the work is a punishment. They see work as unnecesary friction that must be optimized away. Truth is, the friction inherent in doing any kind of work—writing, programming, making music, painting, or any other creative activity generative AI purpots to replace—is the whole point.

The artifacts you produce as the result of your hard work are not important. They are incidental. The work itself is the point. When you do the work, you change and grow and become more yourself. Work—especially creative work—is an act of self-love if you choose to see it that way.

Besides, when you rely on generative AI to do the work, you miss out on the pleasurable sensations of being in flow state. Your skills atrophy (no, writing good prompts is not a skill, any idiot can do it). Your brain gets saturated with dopamine in the same way when you gamble, doomscroll, or play a gatcha game. Using Claude Code as your main method of producing code is like scrolling TikTok eight hours a day, every day, for work.

The code you produce using LLMs is pure cognitive debt. You have no idea what it’s doing, only that it seems to be doing what you want it to do. You don’t have a mental model for how it works, and you can’t fix it if it breaks in production. Such a codebase is not an asset but a liability. I predict that in 1-3 years we’re going see organizations rewrite their LLM-generated software using actual human programmers.