After 16 years of coding professionally, I can say Claude Code has made me considerably better at the things that I had to bang my head against the wall to learn. For things I need to learn that are novel to me, for productivity sake, it’s been “easy come; easy go” like any other learning experience.
My two cents are:
If your goal is learning fully, I would prioritize the slow & patient route (no matter how fast “things” are moving.)
If your goal is to learn quickly, Claude Code and other AI tooling can be helpful in that regard. I have found using “ask” modes more than “agent” modes (where available) can go a long way with that. I like to generate analogies, scenarios, and mnemonic devices to help grasp new concepts.
If you’re just interested in getting stuff done, get good at writing specs and letting the agents run with it, ensuring to add many tests along the way, of course.
I perceive there’s at least some value in all approaches, as long as we are building stuff.
Yes!
Valuable, fundamental, etc. - do it yourself, the slow path.
Boring, uninspiring, commodity - and most of all - easily reversible and not critical - to the LLM it goes!
When learning things intrinsic motivation makes one unreasonably effective. So if there is a field you like - just focus on it. This will let you proceed much faster at _valuable_ things which all in all is the best use of ones time in any case.
Software crafting when you are not at a job should be fun. If it’s not fun, just do the least effort that suits your purpose. And be super diligent only about the parts _you_ care about.
IMHO people who think everyone should do everything from first principles with the diligence of a swiss clocksmith are just being difficult. It’s _one_ way of doing it but it’s not the _only right way_.
Care about important things. If a thing is not important and not interesting just deal with it the least painfull way and focus on something value adding.
My two cents are:
If your goal is learning fully, I would prioritize the slow & patient route (no matter how fast “things” are moving.)
If your goal is to learn quickly, Claude Code and other AI tooling can be helpful in that regard. I have found using “ask” modes more than “agent” modes (where available) can go a long way with that. I like to generate analogies, scenarios, and mnemonic devices to help grasp new concepts.
If you’re just interested in getting stuff done, get good at writing specs and letting the agents run with it, ensuring to add many tests along the way, of course.
I perceive there’s at least some value in all approaches, as long as we are building stuff.