Claude Code has left a little hole in my soul

I can build so much more now, and it doesn’t even seem like work. But I will miss coding. I built a complete, working application in a day this past weekend. Well, less than a day if you don’t count the time I spent waiting on Claude Code to do the work. The idea was germinated by my sister having a difficult time tracking a personal growth project that she had undertaken. It worked out for her, but me being me, I thought “I can build an app for that!” So I did. The time between my sister telling me about her personal project and me having a working, usable app running on Cloudflare Workers was literally 48 hours. The total time I spent describing, designing, and building the project using GStack was maybe four hours. And three of those hours were actually me working on my blog reading list while Claude Code ground away at the project. It didn’t even seem like work. My code reviews consisted of little more than noticing what Claude was writing as the code flowed by and maybe asking a question or two about the direction Claude was taking. I didn’t once stop to examine the makeup of the code in the project. I couldn’t make a website look pretty to save my life (does anyone really understand CSS?) but the end result was beautiful. The database was properly designed in the blink of an eye. It was up and running in not much more time than it took for me to get through my morning email. It was glorious. Stunning. But it left a little hole in my soul. In the past, many of us have tinkered on these kinds of side projects. We got an idea, we fleshed it out in our minds, and we started building. We had to know and build every detail. Maybe we picked a new language or framework so that it became a learning project. It would take awhile, but eventually we’d get something up and running. We’d spend hours tinkering with the database design, carefully craft the UI, and build the data structures for representing the entities. We’d carefully craft the object hierarchy, reworking things to make sure that it was just right. If we were lucky, we’d find that hours had passed in an instant, that we’d achieved the coveted “flow state” we love so much. We might wile away a whole Saturday afternoon at the keyboard, producing something very satisfying and fulfilling. It might take a few months of those weekends before we had something that actually worked. And, all too often, that was the point where another shiny idea would come along and we’d switch over to that new project, abandoning the first idea at around 70% of the way through. Occasionally something would get finished and we’d actually ship it for the world to see. But I’m guessing that the abandoned efforts of multiple projects, where “the last 20% takes 80% of the time,” many of us have littered across our hard drives Sadly, those days are going forever, because now you can finish and ship your project in a day. The struggle is gone. The flow state we enjoy so much doesn’t seem to be a part of this process. Shoot, with the right tooling and setup, you can work on three of these side projects, moving from one to another as each executes their latest instructions. Don’t get me wrong. It is stunning to me what you can do on a Saturday with Claude Code, and I find it thrilling. But I’m also going to miss the struggle and the work. Coding is fun—a lot of fun—but I can’t justify spending all the time it takes to build something by hand anymore. Ten years from now, a bunch of us old graybeards will be waxing nostalgic about the good old days when we actually had to use a code editor. “Kids these days have no idea!” I’ll be right there with them, but all the while I’ll be cranking out applications with Claude Code.