the worst way to code

Claude Code is destroying your developer career, and you know it. 

Because the more you use it.

The less you use your brain. And the worse you become as a developer. 

Last weekend I was visiting one of my sisters. 

She is studying Robotics, and her task was simple. Program an industrial robotic arm to pick boxes from a belt. 

Depending on the size of the box, the robot had to put them back in different places. 

Here’s what it looks like:

Okay, so I woke up Sunday morning, and she was desperate for help. She’s been up since 6 am. Prompting and re-prompting Claude.

Her assignment was due end of day. Nothing was working.

The code looked okay. 

But the robot was constantly picking the wrong box. And putting it on the wrong table.

And the worst part? 

She didn’t understand a line of code from that script. Not even bits and pieces.

I was like… “Wtf, I never programmed a robot”.

My tech stack is web development. Mostly TypeScript and React. I can't even program my freaking vacuum cleaner to properly wipe my living room. 

And this was a totally different programming language, like RAPID. 

(turns out the fundamentals of RAPID are a lot like the fundamentals of JavaScript, except for browser specific stuff)

But she made puppy eyes and begged me to help her. 

Of course, I am no purist. 

The first thing I did was to ask Claude Code to explain me the code. 

What a catastrophic failure. 

For every 1 line of code, I got 3 pages of text back. Reading through that stuff only got me more confused. 

So after a short while of messing with Claude, I tell my sister, “Screw it, let’s go line by line and understand everything first. It’s gonna to take us a while, but after that, we will be able to fix this easy faster”. 

We went line by line. 

Documenting every piece of it as we understood it. Debugging what didn't work. 

The hardest part of programming robots is helping them understand where they are. And where to go next. Once you do that, the code is straightforward. 

(Isn’t it the same with any Software Engineering field? The hard part is understanding the problem. After that, the code is straightforward. More on that later.) 

It took us about 1.5 hours to fully understand the code. 

10 minutes to fix it.

5 minutes to add new functionality. 

After that, the whole assignment was finished. Without using Claude at all. 

Once she sees how well everything is working, my sister looks at me and says, “You don’t really use AI. You just think about the problem instead. And then you just code a bit.”

Hahah… I almost had tears in my eyes. 

She learned the most important lesson of being a programmer. One that took me years of "professional experience" to learn. 

Think before you code. Or before you ask AI to code for you. 

Besides making me look like some godlike programmer to my little sister, this experience taught me something all software engineers should be aware of right now.  

As developers, we get paid to solve valuable problems. 

To solve valuable problems, you need to actually think. To use your brain. 

Coding comes after. 

Asking AI comes last.

Your ability to think is also like a muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. But also the opposite. The more you think, the better you get at thinking. 

If most of your time at work is spent asking AI to solve problems for you… You might be in trouble. 

One day you might wake up like my sister did.

Looking at a bunch of code you don’t understand. Struggling to fix even the simplest bugs. 

The problem if you get to that point is… You are not a university student. You are a professional. Your ability to solve problems is what pays your rent. The food you eat, the clothes you wear. Nice trips overseas. 

All those things are paid for by the problems you can solve. Your ability to think. And to turn those thoughts into working code. Ideally clean code. 

So think like your life depends on it. 

Because it actually does. 

If you want Bogdan and me to help you think better, get to Senior and master AI-coding, than Software Mastery might be for you. We’ve got only a few spots left in May. 

As for my sister, she passed the assignment :) 

Till' the next one, 

Dragos

P.S. Here’s something else that this little robot assignment taught me. Once your fundamentals are strong… You can program web applications, robots, and even airplanes. At that point, you will never worry about your future. If TypeScript gets out of use tomorrow, you will quickly learn whatever they throw at you. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank. What matters is how many and how big problems you can solve! 

P.S. We did use Claude at the end, one more time, to help us scan the problem requirements and find some data we missed. LLMs are great for that. Ciaooo