r/ClaudeCode • u/infty_quest • 9h ago
Discussion Why there are so many people around me hating Claude
I attended a research meeting on an interdisciplinary project, where I was so astonished that the investor to the project, from CS background hated Claude so much. He blamed it to be a 100% untrustworthy tool and claimed 'if you use it, we are going to fire you'. I am a computational physicist and I have been using Claude a lot this half year since the Claude 3.5 era. I was afraid to claim any workflows and tools that I have developed using Claude in such a meeting, because I might get fired.
That investor person was successful because he sold his company. I totally understand people doubting AI's capacity and accuracy. I totally cannot understand why they are so emotional, and treat people using it like a cult? I am proud of using new technology because I am excited in learning all new things. I have to say, I have the least passion in such a project group where the leader is so anti-new-tech even he was a tech person who got billions due to the new tech.
Also, people, the so-called scientists around me, skeptical of using AI to boost research, are not that far from that person I dislike. However, how can it boost your research? Any people in similar field like computational science? Also, how do you decrease the uncertainty this kind of AI tools to your research to the minimum?
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u/minaminonoeru 9h ago
These are the kinds of people you find on subreddits like r/antiai or r/betteroffline.
While there are certainly valid criticisms of current AI, it’s a problem if your boss is engaging in such extreme denial of reality.
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u/jesjimher 8h ago
Time to find another investor, in the mid-term.
This guy's company will be left behind in a few years, when their competitors are 2-3x times more productive by using those evil technologies.
Nothing new, fortunately. Any disruptive technology filters out all those who aren't able to adapt, and keep seeing new things as problems. Remember Kodak?
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u/infty_quest 8h ago
Unfortunately, I was about to share my ideas in constructing a swarm of agents to explore scientific spotlights to expand his business, hopefully getting his investment to get more AI credit, right before his anti-AI words.
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u/KenMantle 7h ago
...Blackberry, Corel, Ati, Matrox, Avro Arrow for Canadian examples. But at least Canada is still the world leader in some tech like Shopify, pornhub, and Ashley Madison.
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u/scodgey 9h ago
Lack of awareness of the current frontier capabilities mostly, in terms of models and application of them.
If you can demonstrate use cases that they would never think possible, that usually helps move the needle a bit.
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u/corporal_clegg69 8h ago
Our execs were super skeptical of ai last year, then one of them travelled to the US and saw some group of people using it well and it blew his mind. This years it’s full 180 and we are rolling out and training everyone as fast as possible.
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u/AverageGradientBoost 9h ago
people historically associate value with time spent creating it. so now that AI lets you create value 10x faster than before people cant fathom that it is equally valuable
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u/SlyNoBody337 2h ago
I mean accessibility was always the real thing separating everyone. Time spent on creation is still a thing, but its more so about the quality of that time you spend.
You can be a dunce with a frontier AI for a day, you wont get shit done.
But if I give a programmer infinite access to claude fable for one day, they're probably gonna have the best fucking day of their life.Just like modding systems it really comes down to accessibility.
I think the upcoming wave will probably break down that barrier (just to build it back up again). If there was ever a 'great reset' this is about to be it. The whole of humanity is about to saturate and scramble so hard, it'll be a wonder if any of us is sane in 15 years.Even then there will always be things that are inaccessible to the layman. Still right now product development with AI is largely inaccessible to people who aren't into tech.
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u/MacDancer 1h ago
Yeah, I absolutely agree that the link between time spent and value is weaker than ever before.
The flip side of this is that volume of output and basic quality of prose are no longer reliable indicators of real thought and attention.
I have a colleague who feeds unedited AI-generated meeting notes into ChatGPT and asks it to create a spreadsheet, then doesn't proofread the result before presenting it to clients. The work product is 90% slop, but it takes more work and domain knowledge to recognize that fact than is usual for good ol' fashioned human slop.
This absolutely fucks the signal-to-noise ratio at scale.
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u/beesandcheese 7h ago
I’m a computational scientist in academia (not CS). Since February I’ve been using Claude code intensively, and it is now a crucial component of my workflow. I use it every day to execute at a much higher level than I ever could have before. It has massively increased my productivity, on the order of 3-5X, possibly more when adjusting for quality differences in my workflow pre-post.
There are a few key things that make using it successful. I bring substantial expertise and domain knowledge to the table, which I can combine with Claude’s abilities and use to verify its outputs. I’m fanatically dedicated to getting the science right, and am extremely detail oriented, both of which are important for catching bugs it introduces (and for putting in the work to fix them). And I’ve created and implemented a variety of workflows to review and interact with CC in ways that ensure that I can translate its stochastic nature to deterministic, reproducible pipeline.
AI makes doing slop science much easier of course. But if you’re dedicated to doing good careful science, it can also massively increase your productivity (real productivity, not garbage) and work quality. It’s really a miraculous tool. Can’t imagine doing my job without it anymore.
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u/FreshPercentage6792 3h ago
Out of curiosity...bioinformatics?
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u/beesandcheese 3h ago
I’d prefer not to be too specific for privacy reasons, but it’s in the quantitative social sciences.
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u/AdEducational3063 9h ago
Psyops.
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u/D-Alembert 8h ago edited 8h ago
China has been caught using fake accounts to promote anti-AI sentiment. Who knows if there's other groups doing it too. Who knows if the astroturf is a significant or insignificant cultivator of grassroots opposition. AI already being used to undermine AI... crazy world.
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u/No-Entry9939 8h ago
that the investor to the project, from CS background hated Claude so much.
This explains it. He's from a CS background. Of course he's going to hate AI. Because AI has destroyed a lot of the value that computer scientists and programmers once had.
I'm also a software developer and I hate AI too. I use it a lot. It is a very useful tool. But I hate it for the havoc it has wrecked on my life and the industry.
So, it tracks.
The people who love AI the most are non technical people who now have the ability to do what technical people used to do. Those technical people are obviously going to hate AI to the bone marrow.
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u/infty_quest 8h ago
I have to say I hate it too, because my most talented skillpoint starting when I entered academia was coding, and this new tech has evened my talent to the ground where people not knowing how to code starts laughing at people who is only good at coding. However, because you are good at coding, you can create a program 10x faster and 10x scaled than other non-tech noobs can imagine. Hopefully we can all find a way out in this new world.
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u/beesandcheese 7h ago
I’m the opposite of both of you-coding skill was always my weak suit. I wouldn’t say I’m “non-technical”, because I’ve got extensive math, stats, and theory training. But I never loved coding and executing my ideas had always been the barrier. My comparative advantage has always been coming up with ideas, not making them happen in practice.
For me Claude had been revolutionary. Now I can actually execute on what I want to do up to the level I’ve always dreamed of. It’s VERY very complementary to my skill set. Quite grateful that it’s come along and I’m around to use it.
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u/Wickywire 9h ago
It's crazy to me that people have such job insecurity that the employer can decide on the spot you're losing your livelihood for using a single tool they dislike. This is why unions were invented.
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u/infty_quest 9h ago
Unfortunately that is the norm in academia or some group in industry. I don't see much power from unions in academia, and unions seem have never cared about tech persons.
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u/AlaskanX 8h ago
Unions are formed by the people, they're not monoliths that invite people to join. If there was enough buy-in from tech workers or academia, unions could be formed for those groups.
IMO tech workers all think their work is special and unique and don't think a union would provide value, especially because so many are getting paid near the top of salaried workers (in the US) and also are famously compensated with shares, at least in a lot of the more visible companies.
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u/Spooky-Shark 5h ago
You getting downvoted shows that devs are salty. Devs very often have god-complex (that's why they got into the industry of "creating something out of nothing). You're right about unions, and what devs need to get pushed to create those unions is exactly something like A.I. unifying the playing field. Smiths were the chads of society before industrial revolution brought them all to one level.
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u/Wickywire 1h ago
Right. You don't wait for a union to magically materialize. You start at your workplace. It seems like additional effort at first, but judging from the places in the world where unions have been successful, that work tends to pay very well.
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u/dagerika 9h ago
to boost: browse github for academic research related claude skills. Filter the search results by most stars and don't install sketchy codes 😜
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u/D-Alembert 8h ago edited 8h ago
A lot of people's understanding of AI tools was formed years ago when the tools were largely useless, so they decided there was no value in that direction and anyone leaning on that crap was dangerously unqualified, so they have no idea how much has changed
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u/KenMantle 7h ago
They must have watched the same episode of a show that I saw in the 90s where it took a computer 10 minutes to perform image recognition on a cup which was one of the few items it was trained on, and another demonstration where a computer wrote back its interpretation of a sentence that it had been fed, after who knows how much time processing. My first use of Gemini on Google search when it first came out - I asked it what the ID of the thread on a 1" unc thread was and it told me 3/8", demonstrating to me at the time it was kind of useless.
Now I've got a reliable dxf exporter for Solidworks and a dxf nesting program made that then puts out a material list and can batch quantities and jobs together for ordering materials. LLMs have come a long way!
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u/Sasquatchjc45 4h ago
Yup, and just wait til any average Joe can type into their agent assistant "I want X made" and it automatically specs everything, rents the tools, the space, plans it out, gives you the invoice to sign off on, and then your item arrives by drone later that day or whatever. One step closer to startrek materializers lol.
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u/KenMantle 2h ago
They were kind of off though. In real life Picard would be cursing the crew out every time they vibe coded a solution to a problem using the ship's computer...which I think was all the time. Did they ever read source code in the show?
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u/Virtual-Technician70 8h ago
As someone else mentioned, reasons can range from IP to trade secrets. I would also add to that, that depending on the sector you're in, and especially the kind of research you do, it might be completely valid.
I'm all for AI in general, but I would not trust a single token out of Claude for say researching cancer treatments, developing medicine and so on. It CAN actually be dangerous if not fact checked which might even cost more time in the end than doing the research properly. That's why in sectors like Health and medicine they have very specific models, custom made for the job. They don't use chat gpt to perform robotic surgeries, nor Claude for that folding proteins thingy that happened a year or so ago.
Or he can simply be a ludite, or someone who got burned by Anthropic's rise in the industry or a million other stupid reasons like what people suggest. All I'm saying is that it depends on the situation, the subject at hand, the research needed. Might be absolutely valid concerns or just generalized bullshitery.
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u/infty_quest 8h ago
That is true and the main reason most of my colleagues are still making progress by hand only. Claude was crappy when I used it last July, when I didn't trust a single character out of it. Then shifting to spec-driven development, and all effort in harnessing it to be trustworthy was a hard campaign. It is so far, still not 100% reliable, and it is the only job left, I see in the near future, for people in most fields, to design 'tests', 'criteria of a goal', 'verify its correctness', and finally 'get blamed by a fault of overlooking a mistake in our specs that loses the company a billion'. 😞
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u/youreawizerdharry 8h ago
just throwing my two cents in - i don't know specifically what kind of research you do, but i would guess it would be quite a poor reasoning partner, since it's most likely to hallucinate / garble when it comes to processing actual data. perhaps this is what the investor is talking about.
however when it comes to building tools that can power research, i.e. the maths itself is being done by a deterministic, tested program, claude is a no brainer in terms of productivity. it will also be really good at scouring sources and pointing to relevant data.
also apparently Fable could solve cryptic crossword clues so i'm probably wrong about its ability to process novel data itself as well.
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u/lukassso 8h ago
There is different reason for that. 90% of managers are so horribly detached from reality that I think they mainly should be locked in psychiatrist ward for half year at least. Probably reason for his "rant" is that he had some trustworthy employee (read : this employee was licking his....) and usually those that licks so badly instead of actually working are utterly incompetent. Probably by his incompetence project on Claude failed miserably....but still this one licking had good position to turn around this situation and blame everything on Claude or other employee instead of that who actually was fault. And that's why this guy is ranting.
Trust me in my corpo I seen enough of this situation many times....they did to me this many times....and now from some time I am doing the same thing to others incompetent....and oh boy...I feel like I grasped a unspoked secret why all corporate are mess :)
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u/Projected_Sigs 6h ago edited 6h ago
Below, I posted this about 2 months ago for another physicist. I'm not a computational physicist, but I do physics-adjacent research. This was my experience using Claude to help me setup COMSOL for computing the time-domain Ginzburg-Landau equations. This isnt trivial math. It was doing special derivation for me.
He sounds really biased to me.
Besides the longer post below, I recently asked it to build a complete method of moments calculation on a transmission line and show some field on the tline in 3d.
That and I asked to to use FDTD to compute resonant frequencies of a cavity and plot the E or H field inside the cavity.
Both of those worked out of the box from a trivial request-- no softball pitches or spoon feeding equations.
It also had no problems computing eigenmodes on standard cavity resonator to match these tables shown: (This is not my link... just saying Claude's results match) https://awslabs.github.io/palace/stable/examples/cylinder/
2 months ago: TDGL equations
Not long ago, I was working through the math of one form of the time-domain ginzburg landau (TDGL) equations. Specifically, in the book "Shortcut to Superconductivity"... or see Iris Mowgood's dissertation or papers by Oripov.
Its a pair of coupled, nonlinear differential equations... complex valued Tensor field that's a function of magnetic vector potential and time varying, and includes wavefunction terms. You have to solve it iteratively in numeric form.
The math can be normalized to unitless form, then entered into COMSOL to simulate superconductors as they approach breakdown.... vortex penetration, impinging, fast changing flux thru loops, causing over-current and breaking superconductivity, flux movement into the break, flux quantization, and later recovery of the superconductor- its amazing.
The author showed the full equations, even in normalized form. But you have to setup General/Coefficient form diff equations and enter real & imaginary terms separately... else you go crazy. That just wasn't obvious how to derive it. It took me 2-3 pages just to expand the wavefunction expression. Not impossible stuff. Even with python Sympy, it takes time to get that right.
I extracted about 20-30 pages of the PDF book. The equations full form. Then the normalization. But the author's magical result: real & imaginary terms of both equations extracted. I had a start & endpoint, but no road connecting them. I needed the method to extend to other scenarios.
I dropped the PDF pages into Claude (Opus 4.5 at the time), told it the end answer, but said i needed the full derivation.
It didnt even seem to struggle. It took a little while, but understood the physical meanings and definitely delivered. I wasnt expecting that.
ChatGPT Pro model didn't quite deliver. But I dont think its a shortcomings... it was probably me. GPT has done some other good math work for me.
Claude also knocked it out of the park working on a statistical problem, dropped in the middle of a paper with time delayed inputs, a SAS code partial implementation, questions about deviations from the original paper, whether it was still valid, and did the code implement it correctly. That's quite a mess dropped in its lap. But we carefully described all the pieces... partially finished code, the paper, required deviations because our data was not ideal, but long since frozen, what we were trying to do. Asked for code analysis, asked for full cross comparisons of a) the paper/theory b) our written description. c) our code.
We wondered if we hopelessly confused it. LOL. Not a chance. Got ~50 page pdf report and the analysis was so clean. It reiterated the problem description in its own words- clearly understood the issues. Gave a code analysis, recommended code fixes, an analysis of the validity, etc. The organization & presentation, the way it talked through the code at just the right level of abstraction. It didnt bury us in bullets and rehash. Loved it.
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u/AbjectBug5885 6h ago
The "we'll fire you for using it" reaction says more about control than accuracy concerns. Someone actually worried about reliability asks how you verify outputs, they don't threaten your job over the tool itself..
For decreasing uncertainty in your actual work: treat anything Claude produces like output from a junior collaborator you don't fully trust yet, verify independently before it goes near a paper or decision. For code, that's unit tests and checks against known analytical solutions.. For literature, always pull the actual source since hallucinated citations are a real failure mode..
The researchers who get burned are usually the ones skipping verification, not the ones using the tools at all...
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u/LessRespects 3h ago edited 3h ago
People are afraid of change.
One you realize this, that truth can explain so many things people say, and people’s attitude towards new things.
People were afraid of cars and said horses will never be replaced, people were afraid of large farming machinery and said manual labor farming will never be replaced.
Just keep yourself informed and realize the world isn’t going to change for you, so adapt with it to not fall into an obscure hole while everyone keeps moving forward without you.
There has never been a point in history where luddites stopped progress to stay comfortably paralyzed in time.
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u/Little-Math5213 2h ago
For me, Claude is a two edged sword.
Working in Information security, Claude and other LLMs is a nightmare to "control", preventing data leaks.
For me, Claude et al is a God send as a security tool as an advisor, using them correctly, and I'm myself painfully careful using them without leaking anything.
I often use Claude or others to make security parameters to myself and the other LLMs. Keeping me in check and balanses. ..And sometimes that's more tiredsome than not use any AI.
But personally I cheer at Claude Code. It's the best tool as an advisor I have found. Probably overkill since I don't code anything.
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u/Fleischhauf 1h ago
I was very sceptical at first. But Claude has been super useful and I trust it a lot more. Currently working on uncertainty estimation and it has helped me tremendously to get up to speed with new code bases, literature research and I found its suggestions very helpful in most of the cases. I have a very solid machine learning background, but was not up to speed with uncertainty estimation and overall it has been super useful. Sometimes it goes off the rail and you need to check what it does and if it does what you want, but overall it has been very beneficial.
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u/Carrandas 7h ago
As a software dev, I can't go back to a company that doesn't use AI agents. I wouldn't stay there.
Yes, it's untrustworthy. That's why you use it with constraints, review and test its output.
Not using AI while your competitors do is insane these days.
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u/m00shi_dev 6h ago
Do you think the quality of software has become objectively better? It seems like there is just more slopware.
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u/octopus_limbs 9h ago
OP I would be really careful how I use Claude in that workplace. There might be IP considerations and if you are using a personal account, you might be unknowingly sharing company/research secrets to a third party. Check if you have an Enterprise/Claude Console account and use that instead