Obviously it’s an addiction. Watching Claude write his code. The silly vocabulary of random words to give you the illusion something is happening… yet behind the curtain something is actually happening.
Ideating… Scheming… Smooshing…
Claude Code is the Skinner Box of productivity.
I tell him Claude what I want in just plain text, sometimes not even skillfully explained, just a rough baseline. He goes on a journey reading and editing files however he sees fit, updating me along the way, stopping to “think”… to marinate and boop as he calls it, while I actually do fuck all.
After roughly 10 minutes of planning and maybe 15 minutes of editing, Claude has completed the task… which gives me a fake sense of accomplishment. That satisfactory feeling of having done something, even though I haven’t actually done anything. Sure, I’ll complain when something doesn’t work, tell Claude to recheck, feed him with screenshots to compare, maybe peek in Chrome DevTools to nudge him. But do I look at the code? Not really. The outcome is all I care about. That’s the dopamine kick. Seeing something being made. Something I didn’t make myself.
Addiction Cycle
There isn’t much punishment for not pulling the Claude lever, just the lack of dopamine. But the fake feeling of “creating” is still there. That fake feeling, the fake dopamine hit. Oh, I pretend I’m being productive (“Look what I got someone else to make!”), while I’m really just chasing the dragon, hunting for the next fix. At this point I might as well play ARK Survival Evolved…
Is Claude Code as bad as porn? Hard to tell. But I can already see how the brain wants more. More output, more motion, more fake creativity. Eventually the hit won’t be enough. The need to create turns into the need to simulate creating. Sooner or later it won’t give me the satisfaction I want, like a nifty sex toy that was abused so much all sensory feelings were lost in the process.
Discombobulating… Marinating…
Actually Works Insanely Well
Anywho! I am absolutely flabbergastedly amazeballs over how well Claude Opus 4.6 writes code, and that’s just simple HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, etc. Structure is better than what I did 10-12 years ago. Better commenting, naming, organizing. He reads my ancient code, instantly updates it to 2026 standards, and strips out the dead weight.
Fixing a 13-year-old PHP website with 150–200 pages? Done in maybe 4 hours. The baseline to get it running took only 30 minutes. I spent another 30 minutes thinking about what to tell him, then a couple of hours refining errors and tweaking visuals. And by “fixing” I mean we ditched PHP entirely and rebuilt the whole thing in Eleventy so the output is clean static HTML.
I’m fully hooked. Claude is my dealer, I’m the willing junkie, and I don’t even want rehab. Productivity without producing. The ultimate cheat code.
If I had done this myself, by hand, reading every file… it would’ve taken me a week. Maybe longer, because the gap between starting and actually seeing something is too long for my brain to release any dopamine.
See videos of Claude planning, discombobulating, and executing below.