I Was A Meat Proxy For A Day
The timeline for a task I needed to do changed from three days to this afternoon. The only reason for this was so that some sales people could show off the feature during a management meeting.
When I tried to complain, my co-workers just told me to give Claude code my initial plan and have it generate the code. After feeding it the required documents and information, Claude got to work. It took about five minutes to generate the code, in which I spent the time skimming over the text it was generating in my terminal. Once it was done, I tested it, and everything worked. I barely read through the code since it was a bit too much to look over and understand every bit in the short time I had. So like every modern programmer, I hoped the LLM got everything right on the first try. In hindsight, I should have added 'make no mistakes' in my prompt.
I felt very demotivated and could not muster any interest to read through everything generated. The code was working as intended, and I did not understand any of it. I neither felt any sense of pride nor ownership from doing any of this. I now wonder if this is what y'all feel when you use these tools to make projects. Using Claude just leaves me with an empty feeling and I can't even imagine how one goes back home says they accomplished something meaningful.
I see DHH up on stage at the Rails World 2026 convention talking about how excited he is about AI, and I'm out here getting depressed over using it for my job. How does anyone feel fulfilled by using these tools? My biggest fear is being forced to use Claude again to maintain and add new features to it.
I can understand using these coding agents to build a part of the project that is dull and uninteresting. I use them all the time to generate a bunch of UI elements and HTML. If being a meat proxy becomes my life then it will only leave me feeling numb and bored.
Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh; this is just a job at the end of the day. I could never imagine this being my miserable day-to-day. I would hate my life if all I did was accept code changes from Claude code. Why would anyone ever want to be a meat proxy.