March 28, 2026
Bot hype vs human side‑eye
The first 40 months of the AI era
From wow to 'Claude Creep'—fans gush, skeptics worry, and the name police show up
TLDR: An early adopter recounts 40 months from first ChatGPT wow to discovering Claude Code is great for telling a computer what to do, but coding gains are mixed. Commenters clash over dependence on paid bots, “Claude Creep” scope bloat, and even what to call it—AI or just language bots.
The piece is a 40‑month gut‑check on life with AI: from that first “wow” with ChatGPT in Nov 2022, to vibe‑coding an app, to discovering Claude and loving Claude Code as a new way to control a computer. The author says the chatbots write decent first drafts, but he often rewrites most code and keeps asking if it truly saves time. Then he gushes that Claude Code as a natural‑language command line is “unambiguously good” and dreams of running it locally.
The comments? Pure chaos. One camp screams lock‑in and brain rot—“business planned by a paid chatbot” that “can shutdown anytime,” plus fears of copied or copyrighted code. Another coins “Claude Creep”, the way easy generation tempts you to expand scope and drown in extra work. A skeptic asks if we can even spot unlabeled AI text in the wild. Meanwhile, the time‑police crash the party: “Not counting from 1971 DARPA?” and the pedant drops the mic with “*LLM” (translation: call it a “language bot,” not “AI”). The vibe: wow meets whoa—use it to click less and do more, but watch for scope bloat, subscriptions changing the rules, and a never‑ending fight over what to even call this thing.
Key Points
- •ChatGPT launched by OpenAI in November 2022, marking a notable jump in conversational AI quality over earlier chatbots like Cleverbot.
- •Early tests showed ChatGPT could generate coherent content and provide correct code snippets for simple tasks, reducing reliance on forum searches.
- •In a small app project, AI-generated code from Claude worked initially but required substantial manual rewriting, limiting net time savings.
- •The author subscribed to Claude Pro and installed Claude Code, finding natural language computer control consistently useful and reliable.
- •Claude Code delivered strong one-shot results for small coding tasks, reinforcing its value as a new input modality alongside traditional interfaces.