The back and forth is more annoying now as well. Instead of trying different approaches to code to produce an outcome, I'm prompting "this is broken; can you fix it?" or "this almost works! can you do $x instead" and doing stuff in another window while Claude churns. This isn't fun or stimulating at all for me. It's like carrying a dog to a ball instead of making them run for it.
Using it also reminds me that a big part of the experience I've spent years accumulating is (or feels) no longer useful. That everyone can "write" (produce) code now is a good thing, but SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY was spent on putting writing and understanding code on a pedestal (especially on this site), and seeing that get torn down while gaslighting us into thinking that this never happened has been affecting my psyche for sure.
There's also the dirty feeling I get from abdicating more and more of my skills to a big company that is probably salivating at the idea of developers not being able to write code without Claude Code anymore.
I have a handful of projects I'd like to work on, but I'd rather leave them on the shelf until I can hand-write them than use agents to finish them and, in doing so, create a codebase that I'm less likely to be able to maintain without agents.
I guess I can turn the question back at you: how aren't you not losing your mind at becoming a glorified spec writer?
I guess it's iterating in plain English instead of iterating in code that I'm having trouble latching onto. It's a "left brain vs right brain" kind of situation for me (not sure how valid that trope is, but it best expresses what I'm feeling).
I'm pretty good at outlining what I want to accomplish and how to get there, but cracking open vim and getting into it is super duper exciting for me, and I'm pretty good at communicating what is and isn't working with the agent when I use it. Claude (or any agent, I suppose) takes that away and doesn't fill that gap.
It's also been harder for me to stay focused with Claude since I'm basically printing code and reading the results. Claude's changesets err towards being pretty large (though I have rules [^1] to try and keep that at bay). When I use it, my mind shifts from "writing code that others might (probably won't) maintain someday)" to "writing code that builds the thing". Given those heavy diffs, I'm less inclined to pore through them than I would be if I were actively writing the code. I fear that this will lead to having less understanding of what my code is doing over time, which is sweeping the bugs and tech debt under the rug (especially since Claude, atm, likes to solve bugs with adding more code). This is probably one of those things that will just take some adjustment.
Then again, maybe part of this has to do with me being a long-time a Vim user and not having used a proper IDE for everyday development in a long time...
Okay, I think I finally came up with a good anecdote for how I'm feeling. I wear Mexican huarache sandals [^0] pretty much exclusively when the weather's warm (which is almost all year round in Houston). They are so unique, and getting them to work perfectly with my feet has been a Linux-like experience (i.e. lots and lots and LOTS of experimentation).
I used to buy them from Luna, Xero and others at, like, $150/pair. However, they are INSANELY EASY to make at home for a fraction of the price. I made four pairs at home. They didn't fit quite right, so I'll need to make them again, but I take MASSIVE satisfaction in wearing what I made.
The journey is as exciting as the destination for me; more so, even!
(Selfishly, I took a lot of pride in being able to show others how to do damn nearly everything they do in VSCode in Vim, but that's another victim of the Era of AI.)
[^0] These bad boys: https://xeroshoes.com/pages/tarahumara-sandals
I don't think IDEs as they exist today are necessarily the right abstraction anymore anyway, to the extent they ever were. At least any more than a C++ IDE that was centered on assembly language as the main thing would be. I want data models, API contracts, and data flows. I don't know what the right answer is, but I think there's something coming.
Without AI I would probably never get to them because realistically, I do not have dozens, or hundreds of personal hours to devote to fun, but unnecessary projects.
What's more, I can already explore five ideas at once. There is no backlog formed by incapability, lol.
I don't understand the eagerness for "productivity as a service", celebrating quotas, and lot of other conjecture I could get twisted up with... but I'll skip it this time. Rarely pays off :)