I first found out about Claude Code at the AWS Summit here in NYC at the Anthropic booth but resisted using it until very recently. The entire AWS conference had been suffused with euphoria at the miracle that was going to be Agentic AI, culminating in a triumphant demo by AWS itself of their agentic tool suite, including an Agentic Coding Tool, presented by one of their own devs, who had the halting, trepidatious delivery of a man with a gun trained on him somewhere off-screen, describing how this miraculous tool had made his workflow infinitely more efficient.

My skepticism was not helped by attempting to debug and clean up the code generated by friends who’d ‘vibe-coded’ apps using mostly Claude Code. AI, particularly in the hands of people who don’t know how to code, generates a very particular type of code, different from human-generated code. Verboseness is one of the adjectives that comes to mind: files nearly a thousand lines long. Impenetrable is another, with no recognizable human logic at play.

Besides, I didn’t see the point. Using first Chat GPT, then Gemeni, then Claude.ai took focus enough, where I (mostly) looked over the generated code before copy/pasting into VS Code. I likened using the LLMs to write code to riding a horse: you have to stay focused and make sure you know where the horse is going, otherwise the horse will throw you off its back and go in whatever direction it wants (this happened to me in my very short spell riding horses growing up in rural Alberta) or, in the case of LLMs, spewing gibberish while going down an AI wormhole. Claude Code (or any agentic coding tool) seemed like it would be riding a whole team of horses. I read about devs running 15 agents at once, or running agents for so long, so desperate to fulfill as many PRs as possible, they’d walk around with their laptops half-open to keep their agents running. All this seemed crazed, and more work than it was worth. I was relying on AI too much as it was.

But then I started meeting devs who WERE using it. A dev shop I wanted to work with who used Claude Code for their prototypiing, and in the kind of dev-peer to dev-peer interview that, once common, are all too rare now, explained how they came over their own skepticism and outlined how they’d managed the team of horses that is Claude Code under control. So, when I had some free time a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give Agentic AI a shot.

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