Comment by mablopoule

Not OP, but the issue for me is that for the longest time doing software development meant translating potentially nebulous requirement into strict computer logic.

The process of creation is often a back-and forth between that fuzzy concept in your head (or an natural-language spec that is often ambiguous), and the (usually reduced) physical object / drawing / computer program you've created to materialize this idea. That imperfect projection of your initial idea then helps you refine what this idea implies, and what are the different tradeoff you could take [0].

That back-and-forth has to be made when writing the computer code, even if it's going to be compiled after, because code needs to be detailed enough to force you into expressing the desired behavior with clarity. Prompting Claude on the other hand usually means that you let the LLM resolve this ambiguity for you.

In some case the details don't matter, and it's a productivity gain, and in other case the devils are in the details, and you've let Claude make important technical decision for you, even though Claude doesn't know how much those decision match the needs of the project.

Personally I think of my role as a software developer as someone who know technical possibility (and technical limitations), and weight the different tradeoff it implies to propose code that solves a business problem. And that's the crux of the issue with only creating code by prompting Claude Code: it gradually robs me of my ability to understand the technical possibility and limitation of the system.

[0] This idea has largely been taken from the very good book "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design", about the processus of ideation / sketching.