I started programming about a year or two before AI was any good at programming autonomously. At the time, solving problems provided so much satisfaction, and I could genuinely feel myself becoming more and more skilled as I continued on my journey. I knew exactly how my codebase worked down to the function, and I was proud of how thoughtful and efficient the codebase was. I was deeply involved in my work and it allowed me to set things up in a way that I could change the way things worked in my applications easily. When AI started being more and more capable, I cautiously started introducing it into my workflow. It made me more efficient, but as demand from work increased and time for completion decreased, the reliance on AI to bridge the gaps increased. This started my codebase down the path to slop. Nowadays, I don’t read any of the code written to my codebase (a monorepo which I am the sole maintainer of). I try my best to adapt to this new agentic style of programming in a responsible way, but it feels like wasted effort most of the time. It’s very difficult to measure what positively influences the output of agentic code and I cannot find any resources that are actually tried and true strategies for acquiring maintainable code with agentic approaches. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a plethora of people out there who claim to have it all figured out, but it all feels like (and mostly is) bullshit. I frequently find myself starting new applications strong and as features and business rules are added to them, they become harder and harder to maintain and change. Shareholders want results NOW and they want the results to be accurate. If I could write it manually it would be at a higher level of accuracy and changes would be easier to make. But the “NOW” aspect of the work would be impossible. I’m also definitely atrophied by my reliance and my codebase is already at the level of slop to where I cannot understand what is going on. Ultimately this is my own fault, but a fault that was probably unavoidable given my circumstances. I really miss the days where I was deeply involved in my codebase and aware of every node in the logic of my applications. Nowadays I’m just operating on higher levels of scope, feeding plans to CC, and spinning the slot machine. I will say this path has given me the opportunity to learn a lot more about the macro decisions, especially as it pertains to UX (i started as backend primarily, now completely fullstack). But god damn does it not feel good being so disconnected from my codebase and watching it become more and more slopped. It feels like the debt is piling endlessly and it will all come crashing down on me eventually. TL;DR: Same old shit everybody else is complaining about. submitted by /u/zz-koji
Originally posted by u/zz-koji on r/ClaudeCode
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