My relationship with code has changed a lot over the past 30 years. The process of putting an idea on a computer screen has always thrilled me, ever since the time of staying up late writing MadLibs programs in QBasic with my friends. I've been writing code professionally for nearly two decades and, for much of that, coding was my happy place. Working across a variety of industries and focusing on start-ups has put a lot of interesting problems on my plate.
When it started to become less fun, I found myself at a loss. I'd still find pockets of joy here and there, but burnout set in pretty hard. Writing code felt like a slog. Keeping up with the latest tools was a constant challenge. Customer requirements shift, forcing you to drop hours of effort into the bin. It took me longer than it should have to realize that, at this stage in my career, the thing that excites me isn't the code anymore - it's the solution. I couldn't effectively engage with a project when I was working with components I was familiar with and there wasn't a new thing to learn. Writing code felt like busy work that was in the way of my getting to a solution that I could already envision.
Now I feel like a new man. Claude Code has reinvigorated me by drastically reducing the amount of time I spend in that "busy work" layer. For the uninitiated, Claude Code is an AI programming assistant that essentially embeds itself within a coding project. It learns the codebase, examines the documentation, and builds itself a context that helps to maximize its utility. It lets you interact with your code in natural language. Some people may bristle at that idea since more abstraction means less understanding of what's happening under the hood. That's a fair argument, and AI tools can certainly be used naively and unsafely, but in the hands of an experienced engineer that understands LLM context and can understand the output, Claude Code is a complete game-changer.
I've seen a lot of amazing technology over the course of my lifetime and have been in awe before, but never like this. The experience of using Claude Code makes me feel like we've finally arrived in the future. ChatGPT's voice mode got me most of the way there. It was an experience I had been wanting for a long time - like talking to the computer on the deck of the Enterprise. Claude Code provides the missing piece by letting you easily construct context using files on your computer. And I can talk to it, too.
I've used Claude Code to help redesign my site, provide suggestions on some coding projects, and even bootstrap a game project. It even works well with my NES game written in 6502 Assembly language, which surprised me more than it should have. It isn't just a coding tool - it's an idea engine. Software engineering is about solving problems, and accelerating the time to a solution is a Good Thing. The rapid iteration that Claude Code provides lets me focus on my enormous backlog of ideas and fail fast (because a lot of those ideas are bad.)