Claudecaine · Baptiste Fontaine’s Blog

Claudecaine

25 Jun 2026

ai

I’ve never taken cocaine or any other similar drug, but I imagine it as something that makes you a lot more productive<br>at the cost of destroying your body and making it impossible to stop. I sometimes wonder if Claude Code works a bit the<br>same.

I’ve been actively using LLMs at work for ~6 months. We didn’t want to stay stuck with one model provider, so we tried<br>various ones: one month with Claude Code, then one month with Codex, then another month with a third one I don’t remember,<br>then back to Codex, then this past June back to Claude — initially to test Fable, but they cut it out (yes, I use em<br>dashes, but I’m still a human).

Both GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 are pretty good, but I find Opus 4.8 easier to work with: it’s slower, but more accurate. In<br>my experience, GPT is a yes man that almost never pushes back, and is always eager to add “a small helper” here and<br>there to patch symptoms rather than spend time thinking about the right architectural solution. Also, I very rarely have<br>to correct Opus: it does the thing right, with less code and useful comments, where GPT would add a ton of useless<br>code with random comments stating the obvious.

The main question with this is: is this thing destroying me? Am I becoming dumb? Sure, I review all the code it produces,<br>but nowadays I rarely code by hand; only when I know I’ll be faster. Could I work without it? “Of course!” I think, but<br>in practice the last time it went down I was lost. Not that I don’t know how to code, how to think about architecture,<br>patterns, deployments, pipelines and so on, but I’m getting used to the pace of development with Claude and I don’t want<br>to come back to my normal pace.

I’ve felt this in the past when I switched from vim to IntelliJ as my main code editor. It was 10 years ago; I still use<br>vim for little things, but in any project larger than a few files I prefer to fire up IntelliJ. However, this only<br>changed the tool I use to write code; it didn’t replace me. I’m at a point where I’m a bit afraid of how it’ll<br>change me and at the same time I don’t want to stop using it.

There is no conclusion to this post; it’s still open: how will it affect me? Let’s see.