I'm convinced Claude Code and Codex are not the future. The cap seems to be a 3-500 line file so I just use ChatGPT and/or my own front end to APIs on OpenAI and others including local. Much beyond that it will not do what I want. Too many expert details to get right.

When it was just ChatGPT, I actually really enjoyed it. I still had to do a lot of the work, but I could use ChatGPT to explain arcane logs and help me diagnose errors. It didn't feel like babysitting interns, it felt more like "smarter google".

Codex and Claude have been a bit soul sucking. I feel like I'm doing less of the planning and the like. I acknowledge that most code that makes it into production doesn't have to be amazing, but I would still take some level of pride when I would figure out an interesting optimization, even for a simple CRUD app, and now I am somewhat deprived of that kind of stuff.