Claudecaine

I’ve never taken cocaine or any other similar drug, but I imagine it as something that makes you a lot more productive at the cost of destroying your body and making it impossible to stop. I sometimes wonder if Claude Code works a bit the same.

I’ve been actively using LLMs at work for ~6 months. We didn’t want to stay stuck with one model provider, so we tried various ones: one month with Claude Code, then one month with Codex, then another month with a third one I don’t remember, then back to Codex, then this past June back to Claude — initially to test Fable, but they cut it out (yes, I use em dashes, but I’m still a human).

Both GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 are pretty good, but I find Opus 4.8 easier to work with: it’s slower, but more accurate. In my experience, GPT is a yes man that almost never pushes back, and is always eager to add “a small helper” here and there to patch symptoms rather than spend time thinking about the right architectural solution. Also, I very rarely have to correct Opus: it does the thing right, with less code and useful comments, where GPT would add a ton of useless code with random comments stating the obvious.

The main question with this is: is this thing destroying me? Am I becoming dumb? Sure, I review all the code it produces, but nowadays I rarely code by hand; only when I know I’ll be faster. Could I work without it? “Of course!” I think, but in practice the last time it went down I was lost. Not that I don’t know how to code, how to think about architecture, patterns, deployments, pipelines and so on, but I’m getting used to the pace of development with Claude and I don’t want to come back to my normal pace.

I’ve felt this in the past when I switched from vim to IntelliJ as my main code editor. It was 10 years ago; I still use vim for little things, but in any project larger than a few files I prefer to fire up IntelliJ. However, this only changed the tool I use to write code; it didn’t replace me. I’m at a point where I’m a bit afraid of how it’ll change me and at the same time I don’t want to stop using it.

There is no conclusion to this post; it’s still open: how will it affect me? Let’s see.