The Best Feeling in Software Engineering is Going Away

In my last blog post (claude_code.md), I was in the honeymoon phase of working with LLMs for development. The tools were finally in place to make using the technology practical and seeing real gains in productivity. I still stand by that post today, but my relationship to the tools has certainly shifted.

Today, I still use Claude Code at work reluctantly. The agentic coding tools are still unquestionably (in my opinion) able to give a positive boost in productivity - and as an employee, there’s an implicit contract with the employer that one maximizes productivity within the bounds of working hours. I also do love using coding agents for small personal software when I don’t care about learning the underlying tech.

So, why reluctantly?

A Recent Anecdote

I recently got access to the Jai compiler and have been having fun learning the language. Prior to that, I started working on my first video game in Odin and decided I wanted to rewrite it in Jai.

Last week when I was driving home from NAB Show, I stopped at a charging station to charge my car. I was sitting in my car and decided to pull out my personal laptop to do some programming. Since I was programming on my laptop without WiFi, I was relying solely on Jai module source code and the knowledge I gained from doing this once in Odin before to make progress.

I was working on some MacOS platform layer code and ran into a SIGSEGV. I was struggling to debug it and after a short troubleshooting session, I gave in and used Claude on my cellphone to attempt to get a quick solution. Claude proceeded to confidently point out imaginary issues, lead me down pointless rabbit holes, and suggest that rebuilding Metal bindings was a “smart” idea. I could rant more about Claude here, but that would be besides the point. When I realized the conversation with Claude was not getting me anywhere, I went back to old methods. I used lldb to step through and examine memory leading up to the fault. Sure enough, there was an attempt to dereference a null pointer and I was able to deduce enough to know that the null pointer in question was a selector being sent to objc_msgSend. From here, it was obvious that I missed an initialization function. When I finally got the code to run and my MacOS window popped up instead of a Segmentation fault I got a rush of dopamine and made a verbal “fuck yeah.”

Overcoming this point of friction on my own after the bot had failed to hand me the answer was the best feeling I’ve had programming in months. The reality is that Claude Code could probably have gotten to the same solution probably a bit faster than I did with some nudging, but I wouldn’t have experienced an ounce of accomplishment.

It turns out solving problems instead of having the solution handed to you on a silver platter is rewarding (duh).

How I’m Moving Forward

Even before this event, I was distancing myself from LLM coding agents for my personal project work. My goal is to learn how to make games from scratch, not to watch a bot make one after all. I was still using Claude with a CLAUDE.md which prompted it to act as a tutor and progress tracker - and I would ask it to quiz me on what I had learned as I progressed through the early stages of bootstrapping a simple game engine. But even with this approach, I’ve found that I would fall back to asking the LLM for answers when I got stuck instead of pushing through on my own. Sure, I would have Claude quiz me to help solidify the knowledge - so I was definitely learning things - but it still wasn’t satisfying.

I’ve gotten a hit of the dopamine that comes from pushing through friction. The knowledge I gained is now burned into my head and I’ll be able to spot similar issues quickly in the future. I became just a little bit better as a programmer in the process. I want that experience again - so my plan is to shrug off the urge to ask for answers. My fingers will type lldb instead of claude as I push my way through.

The unfortunate thing is, I can’t make the commitment to do this at work. I’ll still get to experience the best feeling in programming in my personal projects when I get time to work on them. But this blog post is titled “the best feeling in Software Engineering is going away” because the workplace demands bypassing friction instead of pushing through it. I think this lack of feeling of accomplishment when using coding agents was bringing me pretty close to burnout (or at least contributing a bit).

I wonder how many others have lost some joy in their work in the name of productivity?