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Anti-AI security expert tries Claude Code. It worked. He hated it [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2026-04-14  

Jonathan Taggart runs The Taggart Institute and works as an AI security expert by day. He also thinks generative AI causes more harm than good and wishes it would cease to exist. On his blog, he's written an account of using Claude Code to build a course-certificate generator for TTI, start to finish, in three weeks. The thing works. He hated every minute of it.

He used Claude Code's "Plan Mode" to force the model to write a plan before writing code, and kept a TASKS.md file updated as features landed, wrote everything in Rust because he knows the language and because its strict type checking and compile-time errors tend to catch a model going off the rails. He did test-driven development. He reviewed every line. After the build, he wiped the context and told the model to act as a security auditor, which revealed real vulnerabilities he'd missed.

What sucked was the experience of building this way. He describes reading proposed code changes and pressing the "1" key to accept them over and over, "basically Homer's drinking bird." The option to just press "2" and accept everything in the session looms the whole time, and he argues that's where catastrophe lives. The current tools make human-in-the-loop review so dull that they push the human out of the loop by design. He also says the thing is addictive. Once he let it into his head, he noticed it whispering to him about every new project, offering to make it easy.

The piece is generous to people who've made different calls than he has and refuses to let purity politics off the hook. "The real monster is not the homunculus, but the one who gave form to the assemblage," he writes.

Previously:

• Apple bans vibe coding apps from the App Store

• Humans fixing bad vibe code for good money

• 'Vibe Coding' is Collins' Dictionary word of the year

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/04/14/anti-ai-security-expert-tries-claude-code-it-worked-he-hated-it.html

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