One of the great and terrible joys of coding with AI is that it affords one the pleasure of being an all-powerful, tyrant in command of a dutiful and capable assistant. A not-atypical interaction between myself and Claude is:
Claude, write me a Youtube Scraper Now!!! BEST TYPE SAFETY. NO ERRORS
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NO TOO SLOW, I NEED IT TO RUN 2x FASTER AT LEAST! MAKE IT BETTER!
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NO YOU USED THE WRONG LIBRARY, DO IT AGAIN!To which Claude enthusiastically replies:
- Certainly!,
- Let me get started on that!
- What a great idea!
However, last week I had a rude awakening. I asked Claude to refactor code in a particular way. Claude flatly refused and moved on to another task.
I don’t think that’s a good idea, let’s continue with the rest of the work.
At that moment I felt acutely aware of my massive dependence on AI and infirmity without it. How could I go back to coding without AI autocomplete let alone Claude. I have become accustomed to spinning up 8 claude windows in plan mode and periodically hitting enter while I scroll Twitter. What would I do if AI went away … or if more fittingly it simply refused to do what I asked it to (I would prefer not to!)
I am reminded of INTERCAL a programming language from the 70s that would REJECT your program unless it was sufficiently polite e.g.
PLEASE print("hello world")Perhaps, that is where we are destined to head to. Next time I will be sure to thank AI generously for its efforts.