It’s hard to describe how soul-sucking the process of handing over development to an LLM is, at least for some of us. Even if I have the luxury of reading the slop and wrestling with it, there’s something mind crushing in the process. I don’t understand exactly myself why I hate it so damn much. There’s something psychological going on. I’ve worked with no purpose before, coding stuff because management says so even if I knew it was going to tank hard or it was clearly wrong. This hits different. It’s worst than boring. It’s worst than loss of purpose.
For me it’s the constant pressure to deliver more and with shorter deadlines while still being held accountable when things inevitably go wrong.
There are 2 major types of devs in terms of their motivations:
- People who were drawn to the profession due to passion of translating/architecting solutions to abstract issues (frequently with as much optimization & elegance as possible).
- Business majors/hussle culture Bros that were drawn in by the profitability & relative esoteric supremacy.
The former are the people who report this feeling. The latter are the people perpetuating the grift & doing mental gymnastics to calm the cognitive dissonance that what they’re churning out isn’t ultimately slop.
There’s another type, which is like me, who develop as a means to have a tool I need.
I wanted a better way to manage my cross-device libraries (desktop, laptop, NAS), and the multi-pane file managers didn’t work great for me, so instead I used Claude to build one that has native per-pane ssh support, streamed video and music preview clips, etc etc.
Capitalism is always gonna Capitalism, doesn’t matter what type of tools are at play.
He could have configured it to auto approve.
