Forgive me, I’m new here, and not just to Claude. I have zero coding or development background whatsoever. All of you appear to be working on real, important tools, making money and trying to keep up with the rapid pace of this crazy new world. And then there’s me, just a guy who fell for that viral “Something Big” Twitter post last week from Matt Shumer talking about the exponential development speed of tools like Claude Code. And then I read the New Yorker profile about Anthropic and its quirky staff. Intrigued, I downloaded the desktop client and paid for a Pro plan to see the much-hyped Opus model in action. I started a few chats and was very impressed with the deep-thinking and fidelity of the responses it generated over a relatively long conversation. Then, to really kick the tires, I wanted to see what Claude Code was capable of and asked it to create a game for me (I know, cringe). A fan of deeply simulated and emergent narrative games like Dwarf Fortress and having no art budget or ability, I figured an ASCII-style Terminal game could actually be nicely suited to something like this. One lazily written prompt and five minutes later, there was a working, playable demo that opened my eyes to the potential. I iterated on that demo for a few sessions and found out how quickly that burned tokens. The Pro Plan was exhausted in just over a day. I paid for the Max 5 plan. Also ran out. Max 20? Hit the weekly limit in all of four days. I’ve even paid for extra usage and API pricing - oof. I began obsessing over context window and token optimization. I tried using Opus chats for brainstorming and spec-writing to hand off to Sonnet in Claude Code. I’ve read dozens of blog posts about what workflows might be more efficient. As the game added more and more layers of simulation and depth that I thought were relatively self-contained, the limits of the context window and Claude’s ability to handle the full scope of the project revealed themselves. I was spending more time (ha, no, not me - Claude was spending more time) debugging and fixing missed integrations and connections than I was adding features. The game? Actually pretty enjoyable. But I’ve fallen into a stage of disillusionment now that initial wow-factor has worn off. I’m irritated by the mild sycophancy in brainstorming sessions, annoyed by the weird feeling of interacting with a tool that less reminds me of a genie in a bottle and now seems more like Lenny in Memento. It’s been a whirlwind of a week that has been equal parts magical, terrifying and, frankly, addictive. I recognize I need to step back, take a breath and reflect on all of this. I don’t want to give up, but I need to re-evaluate what and why I’m doing this, put some guardrails in place, and figure out what I do with it next with it - if anything. After all, those Max weekly limits reset tomorrow… I guess, aside from just venting, I’m here to ask… am I the much maligned “vibe coder” that’s vacuuming up all the tokens and bandwidth? It’s better to come to terms with that sooner and adjust than keep going down this path. submitted by /u/spitonastranger
Originally posted by u/spitonastranger on r/ClaudeCode