I keep talking to people who say stuff like “Claude wrote it all for me in a day”, but when I look at the code (or try it myself) it’s just so much useless code.

I recently asked for Python code to parse some data into a Pandas dataframe and got 1k lines plus tests. Whatever—I’m just importing it, so let’s YOLO and see what happens. Worked like a charm in my local environment. But I wanted to share this in a Jupyter notebook and for semi-complicated reasons I couldn’t import any project-local modules in the target environment. So I asked a much more targeted question like “give me a pandas one-liner to…” and it spit out 3 lines of code that produced the same end result.

The rest of that 1k lines was decomposing the problem into a bunch of auxiliary/utility functions to handle every imaginable edge case and adding comments to almost every line. It seems the current default settings for these tools is approximately the “enterprise-grade fizzbuzz” repo.

Sure, I’ll get better at prompting and whatever else to reduce this problem over time, but this is not viable when the costs are being pushed onto other people in the process today.