An Ode to Claude Code

I was once a passable software engineer, but have been out of the day-to-day for so long that it has been really unpleasant to get back into it without a coach or someone to rescue me from dumb problems. There are now a million packages and frameworks, JavaScript patterns, and services that are foreign to me.

Getting started today is a lot more than picking a simple database and framework. Even Rails is harder to deploy than it was 10 years ago in the early days of Heroku.

Which brings me to Claude Code.

Claude Code has brought the challenge and delight of software engineering back into my life. It feels like it was made for me.

Claude Code requires an understanding of the basics of web development and, almost more importantly, an interest in product management and design.

I understand conceptually how software is working under the hood and I can break down a big project to cut 80% of the unnecessary stuff.

I’m not capable of evaluating libraries or approaches. I struggle to know where to start writing code.

But with Claude Code, I built an app - a fully demo-able and useful MVP - in a couple of days.

The speed with which it can build and iterate is just amazing.

When it tackles something big and gets it mostly right on the first try, it’s astounding. When you realize it isn’t using best practices, and is just copying and pasting code on the page, it’s annoying, but understandable. And when you’re using a new library that came out after its knowledge cutoff, it’s mind-blowingly incapable.

And it’s like an addictive video game for me. I sit here at my desk saying “just one more thing before I stop for lunch” every 2-3 minutes until an hour or two goes by.