2026-01-20
Some Random Thoughts on Vibing
My Claude subscription for the 140$ plan just ended and I'm not sure if I want to renew.
Claude definitely helped and built me some very useful applications. The most useful is the Wired ssh manager that I'm using currenty. I think that a browser like UI is a great way to manage all my connections. It was an iterative process, designing and having claude make it. However it feels weird that I can't say I made this. I'm using something that someone else made and that makes me feel strange.
This would be the kind of tool that would give me a certain amount of pleasure just by using it. For example using my editor makes me feel good because I know I wrote every single line. The same is true for shell environment. There is a fun to building and writing something and then using it. I don't get that the wired application even though it wouldn't exist if I didn't ask for it.
It almost makes me want to re-write it but I don't have the interest for it. I think it would be quick as the design and layout is now done and I just need to copy what Claude already did. But then what's the real point.
I've been reading posts about how you should focus on getting things done rather than writing code but writing code was who I am. I can feel some sort of existential dread and figuring who am I if I'm not making things with code. I have this innate desire to make things and to use things that I made. I'd love it for this to be all encompassing from my clothes, to my bed, to my house even.
But there are many things that need to be made and some things I don't care enough about.
I can also feel myself getting dumber and lazier. This month that I used Claude, I found that I was thinking in prompts rather than logic and code. Usually I will work ideas in my head about what to use and how the structure of the code might look like. But with Claude, I'm now getting a big picture and then figuring out what steps to break things into. It's similar but different. I feel disconnected from everything related to the project now.
I'm also realizing that even for small coding things, I'm reaching more and more for Claude. Or at least want to. That small push is now there for me to turn on Claude and have it analyze things. This is worrying me.
The biggest thing I learned though was that Claude is great at making things in small chunks where the chunks have been done many times. So it is the ultimate gluing machine. It struggles when something is novel and thats where I need to focus my energy. However I can see us being guided towards the same re-hash of things because once we lose our skills, we won't to struggle with the novel. Or at least we will be slowly guided away from it.
I will probably get another month of Claude as I have some features I want to add to Wired still and I think it alone is worth the cost. I'm not happy about it and I'm not sure what gymnastics I need to do to get happy with it.