I’ve been going down extensive rabbit holes with claude code lately. Part of me wants to say “it’s just so good!”, but I know that the projects are all promise and no punch. I’m just in another “boom” cycle before it all comes crashing down when I realize I haven’t shipped anything in two weeks, and I don’t understand how anything I’ve vibe coded even works.

But the claude experience has evolved over time… like, we used to get into loops spending $10 just trying to apply a diff to a file. Glad that’s behind us.

Then there was the phase of the sycophantic salesperson gaslighting me with stubs in cryptographic code…

function validateCWT(token: string) {
    // the token verification should go here
    return true
}

Then one day claude produced hours of great work… before deleting it all with git reset --hard.

Then they solved cost anxiety with the max plan.

Now I have the opposite problem! Every sleeping moment is another token wasted. If I’m spending $100 a month on a tech subscription it better be on par with FSD – endangering the lives of everyone both inside and outside my car.

And I know there are other models out there, but I’d rather stay trapped in this abusive relationship because I know it, and also because of the switching cost.

Nowadays it feels like I’ve developed a shamanic ritual with “architecture change requests” and “context cleansing” to increase the chances of a “good run”. The other thing I do is start multiple projects in parallel so I don’t have to wait.

I’m like a guy in a wizard costume manifesting Chance in front of my set of slot machines (back off! these are mine!). With a little more creativity or more efficient incantations I might even be able to get another few in the mix.

It isn’t that the results aren’t useful, its just that they’re like shitty abandoned github projects – you better be ready to read that whole codebase.

And now that I have all this code sitting around, I need a better process for actually understanding it and trusting it. It isn’t really code review (i’m already running it in production lol) – it seems more like how my wife reads scientific papers. I’m trying to stay up to date. Maybe I need to print out the code and just read it like a book in the evenings with a glass of the good stuff.

An incomplete list of things I’ve vibe-coded this year: https://cwt.cam – jwt.io alternative for CBOR Web Tokens
https://jsonpp.com – json_pp formatter on the web
https://github.com/dtkav/histo – Terminal user interface for exploring json or tab delimited streams of data (like structured logs)