> For almost all software I write, I do care about the process. I’m typically designing software as part of research, and me doing the design and implementation work creates knowledge that I will then share.

Similar here. For a lot of software I write, I don't really know what the essential "abstraction" I need is until I'm actively writing it. The answers, when I get them right, look obvious in retrospect. Sometimes, starting with Claude Code, I can get there, but my mindset is that I'm using this tool to generate software that helps me immerse myself in the problem space. It's a different pace to the process - sometimes it speeds me up, sometimes I end up taking bad concepts a lot further than I normally would before getting to the better path

I agree it's a different process. Personally, I do not enjoy it. If I get code wrong or the solution I came up with is clunky, I am okay to start over. At least I learned something valuable. With Claude, I get irritated, frustrated, and frankly just really tired. I feel like I've been burning hour after hour of my precious time trying to explain something to a machine, which just doesn't understand, cannot understand, and what comes out as output from that process is just disappointing. I feel that I don't trust the code it produces and I don't have it in me to even read that code. I never felt that way about code written by me or another person.

I will admit, that Claude has been helpful as an assistant (especially helping me with syntax I am not familiar with), but as a programmer that does things for me, it's been awful. YMMV.

Btw. a week of doing that (treating Claude as a programmer who does things for me) did help me in a way. I now have an intuitive understanding of what it means these things are not intelligence. I am now certain, that an LLM doesn't understand anything. It seems to be able to map text to some representations and then see if these representations match or compose. I know this might sound like intelligence, but in practice it's just not enough. Pattern recognition, sure. Not intelligence. Not even close.