I've been going down extensive rabbit holes with claude code lately. Part of me wants to say "it's just so good!", but I know that the projects are all promise and no punch. I'm just in another "boom" cycle before it all comes crashing down when I realize I haven't shipped anything in two weeks, and I don't understand how anything I've vibe coded even works. But the claude experience has evolved over time... like, we used to get into loops spending $10 just trying to apply a diff to a file. Glad that's behind us. Then there was the phase of the sycophantic salesperson gaslighting me with stubs in cryptographic code... ```ts function validateCWT(token: string) { // the token verification should go here return true } ``` Then one day claude produced hours of great work... before deleting it all with `git reset --hard`. Then they solved cost anxiety with the max plan. Now I have the opposite problem! Every sleeping moment is another token wasted. If I'm spending $100 a month on a tech subscription it better be on par with FSD -- endangering the lives of everyone both inside and outside my car. And I know there are other models out there, but I'd rather stay trapped in this abusive relationship because I know it, and also because of the switching cost. Nowadays it feels like I've developed a shamanic ritual with "architecture change requests" and "context cleansing" to increase the chances of a "good run". The other thing I do is start multiple projects in parallel so I don't have to wait. I'm like a guy in a wizard costume manifesting Chance in front of my set of slot machines (back off! these are mine!). With a little more creativity or more efficient incantations I might even be able to get another few in the mix. It isn't that the results aren't useful, its just that they're like shitty abandoned github projects -- you better be ready to read that whole codebase. And now that I have all this code sitting around, I need a better process for actually understanding it and trusting it. It isn't really code review (i'm already running it in production lol) -- it seems more like how my wife reads scientific papers. I'm trying to stay up to date. Maybe I need to print out the code and just read it like a book in the evenings with a glass of the good stuff. --- An incomplete list of things I've vibe-coded this year: [https://cwt.cam](https://cwt.cam) -- [jwt.io](http://jwt.io) alternative for CBOR Web Tokens [https://jsonpp.com](https://jsonpp.com) -- json_pp formatter on the web [https://github.com/dtkav/histo](https://github.com/dtkav/histo) -- Terminal user interface for exploring json or tab delimited streams of data (like structured logs)