What now?

2026-06-07

It turns out that Claude Code is good. Anthropic bailed me out of the mess I made out of the Litechat codebase by half-assing Codex. I had Claude start two greenfield Rails projects, one for Litechat + Venturebot and another for Simgen, and in less than four days (and less than 30% of my weekly usage!), it completely retrieved the project. This is the situation I'd feared for the past two years. Litechat is now a hostage of Anthropic's and I barely understand anything about its guts. (I'm not a Ruby dev). And yet I feel better now than I'd felt in a long time. Why? Maybe I just tricked myself into believing I was a software developer. It wasn't my major. I never had a job doing it. It was ever just adjacent to me, though I did get paid for doing it on occasion. And I did enjoy it, and for a while I thought I was good at it, and for a moment I thought that sinking my teeth into it would be an investment, a defense, a way to compete in a world that demands it, but other than those trivialities I never had a reason to make it my identity, and it was just my poor decision to do so anyway, because now I am so thoroughly mogged, as some new friends of mine would say, by Claude, on my own field that I'd sown and watered, just ground into dust and shown that it can do what I do, just better, that the fight I'd fought for the past year was pointless, that nothing that I can do will ever outclass it ever again.

Maybe I should be depressed. And I don't disagree. But that's not where I am right now. Claude is so brutal that there are really only two choices. Move forward, or don't.