Comment by nunez

Same same. Writing the actual code is always a huge motivator behind my side projects. Yes, producing the outcome is important, but the journey taken to get there is a lot of fun for me.

I used Claude Code to implement a OpenAI 4o-vision powered receipt scanning feature in an expense tracking tool I wrote by hand four years ago. It did it in two or three shots while taking my codebase into account.

It was very neat, and it works great [^0], but I can't latch onto the idea of writing code this way. Powering through bugs while implementing a new library or learning how to optimize my test suite in a new language is thrilling.

Unfortunately (for me), it's not hard at all to see how the "builders" that see code as a means to an end would LOVE this, and businesses want builders, not crafters.

In effect, knowing the fundamentals is getting devalued at a rate I've never seen before.

[^0] Before I used Claude to implement this feature, my workflow for processing receipts looked like this: Tap iOS Shortcut, enter the amount, snap a pic of the receipt, type up the merchant, amount and description for the expense, then have the shortcut POST that to my expenses tracking toolkit which, then, POSTs that into a Google Sheet. This feature amounted the need for me to enter the merchant and amount. Unfortunately, it often took more time to confirm that the merchant, amount and date details OpenAI provided were correct (and correct it when details were wrong, which was most of the the time) than it did to type out those details manually, so I just went back to my manual workflow. However, the temptation to just glance at the details and tap "This looks correct" was extremely high, even if the info it generated was completely wrong! It's the perfect analogue to what I've been witnessing throughout the rise of the LLMs.